It smelled.
The church bells started their hourly chant again. My dog has fleas. Fleas has my dog. Has my dog fleas? Fleas has my dog. Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Seven o’bong and all’s dung. Ding dung hell, turdy’s in the well …
He closed his eyes and stopped his mind from leaking out.
If it would only rain. If it would only rain hard. In buckets. If it would only thunder down and spatter on the window sill so hard that the drops bounced onto him. At least the air would be moist even if the water didn’t reach him. It is even drier in here now with the glass of water empty, he thought. The lost moisture seemed unutterably depressing. Where is the rose? He looked down at the coat. He couldn’t see the rose. Its dark outline was lost in the dark mountain of the coat. Mountain coat and…
God, I wish it would rain so hard the house fell apart.
If it would only thunder and lightening. If it would only rain like it did when I was in the army. It always rains worst during wars, it’s a plot. If a thunder clap would only strike the house into matchwood. That would be good. If he were going to die, it may as well be fast. With a bang, with pyrotechnics. God let it rain hard and let me die fast.
His brows furrowed in worried surprise.
He was at it again. But it was there, unmistakably. He faced it squarely. He had to. For the first time. Before this he had skittered around it, side-stepped, avoided it even though he thought he had been facing it. But that was just play acting.
So he held it up and looked at it.
Was he or was he not going to die?
It seemed impossible to deliberate over, actually. It was something one rarely thought of in the twenty-fourth year of life unless he were mortally wounded or ill or just vaguely philosophizing after an evening of good beer and better conversation.
Death.
What actually, actually now, was it? How did it feel? How did one greet it? Was there a greeting? Was it a sinking sensation or a rising one? A great blackness or a great light?
Death.
He closed his eyes and thought of death.
It was the greatest mystery. Together with life, it formed the greatest set of mysteries. But death was the deepest one. It was the deepest fear. And the last enemy to be destroyed. The Bible said it, his mother said it. It must be true.
What was it?
Simple, yes, if you just added up the minor details. The stopping of the heart, the freezing of the limbs into implacable rigidity, the breakdown of cells, the cessation of blood flow. And only the hair and the nails still growing stupidly as though nothing in particular had happened.
That was simple on the face of it. Scientists and priests, husbands and lovers say it every day. Everyone knew it yet no one could describe its hidden face. It exempted no one from its class of terrible knowledge. All were parts of its territory. Death was a salesman, plying his black wares for all at normal cost.
Death. The most ugly, the most beautiful, the most comforting, the most frightening and awe-inspiring word in the language of men. To say God was to speak of dreams and vague unshaped concepts and indecipherable feelings of description. God did not show up in the life that was lived each day and hour and minute and second.
But death did.
It was always there, a scourge, a blessing, never-department aegis clinging to the world. Finding completion in each dying moment, in each cancered cell, in each corrupted tissue of the brain.
A flower was picked and death breathed its invisible breath on the flower and came back later to pick up the pieces. An insect was crushed and death was there, watching. A person breathed and lived and grew older and each moment of growing older, death was there, nodding its head, biding its eternal time. A car skidded, a razor slipped, a gas jet flowed silent and death swooped down and took away and left remains.
A war was fought and death, howling gleefully, had a heyday.
It had a million ways. It came at any time. It entered any place, through doors and windows and keyholes and cracks, right through matter; squishing in between the atoms like a snake to find its prey. Every germ and bullet and speeding car were its conveyance. Every violence its disguise.
It came in silence, treading featherlight, impossible to hear. It came with a rush and a roar, thundering down its terrible might upon living things. It took everyone, it took everything in time. And maybe gave it back grudgingly in stone or plant or black soil.
Death. What was it?
He could not imagine.
Yet it was coming for him. How clear that was when he admitted it. It had been coming for him all his life.
It hovered close by as he slid from sloshing liquors of the womb, as his first breath sputtered into a howl of life. And drove death away; not bitter, not angry. Patient. Biding its eternal time.
It was always there, active or potential, through his baby days. It looked up with interest as he swallowed a bone and almost choked to death. It watched absorbedly as he fell down the cellar steps and broke his skull and his arms.
But he lived then. And death looked back to other works, highly interesting works.
It reached out and plucked Amelia Earhart from the Pacific and swamped Richard Halliburton’s junk and burned to ashes the people in the Hindenburg and scuffed about China and India tucking swollen-bellied woman and babies into its pocket and dropping pieces of soldiers into the common bag.
And it looked in on him again when the car hit him and again when he had pneumonia. And it hung around with plenty of time to kill, patient as they come, passing the time by sitting in on another war, rubbing its hands together in a fit of pleasure, wallowing in the heady, intoxicating work in German furnaces and gas chambers and in the frosty battlefields of Russia and the still promising Far Eastern stamping grounds.
Then he was in the war and death followed his steps with renewed interest, with almost bated breath as he crossed the ocean and went into combat in Germany.
But it missed him somehow, perhaps over occupied with other duties. It took his best friend instead and left him to come back to America, shocked and bitter.
But alive, very much alive. Death did not begrudge that of him. Not at all. There was still lots to do. Lots of killing to get caught up on aided by brothers in intent, the Cosa Nostra. And a few quick trips to swallow up the leaders of the blue shirts and the black shirts, burn one, hang the other by his heels in the middle of a howling mob. Side trip to clot blood in the tired brain of a great man resting in Georgia. Another to rub out a millionaire gangster in his Florida retreat. One and all the same to him. One more candle snuffed. One more pebble on the far flung beach that led down to the black rolling stones.
And, one day, it had walked with him on Broadway, thinking that might be the day. And it wasn’t.
It had by-passed him all along, knowing that sooner or later it would have him.
And now it had him. Now it was moving about, hovering, a great invisible bird of prey, a grinning spider, a shadow.
He was helpless. Death was on the walls, hanging from the ceiling, sitting on the chairs, resting on the bed. Biding its sweet eternal time, never making a positive move.
Just hanging around, waiting for further developments.
18
The shadows and the lights were on the walls and ceiling again. The sounds of traffic were going on unabated.
He thought of Leo. It was hard to think of her. Hard to think of any person who was alive and had been part of his life because he was almost separated from life. And when he thought of Leo it seemed he had really never known such a person because it lasted so short a time. He had to think a long time before she came to life in his mind.
At first it was statistics. Leonora Peck, 26, unmarried, five foot five, dirty blonde hair, 34-25-35, size 6 shoe, and more. Just figures that could be duplicated by a hundred, a thousand other girls whose names weren’t Leonora Peck. But this was a special 26 year old, a certain five foot five, a particular 34-25-35.
It wa
s Leo.
There was no way of reducing her to these mathematical symbols. They weren’t her any more than words were objects or drops of water were the ocean. A person was more than these things. A person was everyone they knew and everything they had done. They were every memory and every word spoken and every thought converted into action or allowed to perish. And Leo was the sum of every detail in her life, tangible or not.
He wondered if he ever knew any of them.
19
It was one of those New Year’s Eve parties where no one knows who invited who and everyone is making love by midnight.
Lynn had invited him.
When Erick came, a strange girl let him in, he walked through the ranks of strange people, dropped his coat in a strange bedroom and finally found Lynn at the bar, tending.
“Erick, is it thou?”
“It is mou,” Erick said.
“Thrice welcome,” Lynn said, “No date?”
“You know women repel me,” Erick said blandly, wringing the suggestion of a smile from Lynn. Then he picked up an olive and inserted it into his mouth. He watched Lynn pouring whiskey into shot glasses. “You have a date?” he asked.
“No,” Lynn said, “I’m with Marie.”
“Ah, Marie,” Erick said.
“Thumb me a woman,” Lynn asked, looking up for a moment and then lowering his eyes immediately to the business of making drinks.
“Her name was Sally,” Erick said. Lynn didn’t look up. “That one isn’t any good,” he said.
Erick made himself a drink. He took a sip, smacked his lips. “She was a strange, beautiful slob,” he said.
Lynn extended his lower lip contemplatively, “Perhaps.”
“She wore black lipstick and had crabs,” Erick said.
Lynn’s thin lips raised in a smile. “The classic of all time,” he said, “But not fair because already used.”
Erick stuck a cheese covered cracker in his mouth. “Yeah,” he said, looking around the room.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” Lynn said, finishing up the group of drinks he was preparing.
Erick turned back.
“While working on my life story this evening which story is entitled From Rags to Rags I said to myself—Boy, you must go down to the sea again. It being a prodigious great walk to the Battery, I came here instead.”
“Grand,” Lynn said, “Simply grand.” He examined the drinks, dropped in appropriate cherries.
“On the way over I saw the three following sights,” Erick went on, taking another sip. “First, a lady disguised as a bridge lamp boarding a bus. Second, a dog with no teeth. Last, but oodles from least, three victims of good cheer lying sprawled in the gutter surrounded by mountains of vomit.”
“Tasty,” Lynn said, “Vaporous.”
“And, on the basis of these three signs, I have decided that my mission in life is to be floorwalker in a morgue.”
“Possible,” said Lynn.
“Look at them,” Erick said.
“At whom?”
“The women of the city.”
“Must I?” Lynn said, “It requires quite enough abdominal fortitude just to maintain a steady gaze on Marie.”
“Marie,” Erick said, “She who cuts her hair and her morals short.”
Lynn bowed. “You have captured her,” he said.
“No.”
Erick’s face lost all lightness and he stared at the women, his mouth curled down. “Look at them.” His voice was low. “Corrupted. Poor drinking, smoking, pseudo-sophisticates trying to be gay, gay, gay.” He raised the pitch of his voice to a semi-falsetto. “We must be gay!” he said, “We must give gay parties and get gay drunk and throw up gay vomit and have gay hangovers.”
“Quite,” Lynn said, not arguing at all.
“What’s the point?” Erick said, “They’re dead. Working in their mills of hypocrisy. Losing their personalities. Sad. Sad! God, just think of how they were once at school. With their pink cheeks and sweaters and skirts, healthy and full of bounce and … young.”
“Young,” echoed Lynn, putting the drinks on a tray.
Erick said, “Now they’re old. They wear sophisticated clothes and effect sophisticated manners and laugh about lesbians and gigantic immoralities. Old but not mature. Still with their rah rah girl’s minds, their small town college minds. And with these poor little undernourished pulps in their heads, they try to cope with the monstrous force that lives in the city, that thrives in the grottoes of stone and steel. And they can’t fight it. They lose their personalities. They all start to look the same and talk the same.”
“And think the same,” Lynn contributed.
“That’s right,” Erick said, “And think the same. Give us freedom, they cry. Run off to the city crying—I must have freedom! And here in this sprawling dungheap of a city do they find freedom?”
Lynn didn’t say anything. He stood watching Erick.
“In a pig’s eye they find freedom. They’re more slaves than they ever were. Free of parental interdict, yes. And as long as they have that freedom they consider themselves willful creatures. But they aren’t. They’re slaves to the inadequacies of their own brain. Slaves to this great sucking vampire of a city, its mores, its demands. Not free to abstain because everyone smokes and it gives at least one arm something to do instead of hang helplessly. Not free to abstain because everyone drinks and it is smart and clever to throw up your guts periodically and joke about it in the office the next day. Not free to abstain because moral laxity is the very cant and cachet of our times. One must not be thought a prude.”
“It’s easier to lose the soul.”
Erick took a deep breath and finished his drink with a gulp. “What the hell did I come here for?” he asked.
Lynn smiled, patted Erick once on the arm. “Sit down baby,” he said, “Get drunk and drift away. Daddy will bring you back.”
“Oh, shut up.” Erick said irritably and moved away quickly. He felt Lynn’s eyes follow him as he moved across the room. He saw a full drink resting on a table and, quickly, put down his empty glass and took the full one. Then he moved on, still searching for something.
The room was crowded with young men and women arranged in asymmetrical groups, some slouched, some seated on couches, some draped with effected ease on armchairs. They all chattered, brittle like. They are all gay, Erick thought, they are all reeking with gaiety.
“People,” he said and stopped for a long swallow of the drink. He screwed up his face. “Who in hell made this drink?” he asked the air, “Lucretia Borgia?”
A short plumpish girl with high pointy breasts moved past him.
“Hi, Erick honey,” she said, digging her pudgy fingers into his arm.
“Good evening madame,” he said and walked on past Marie.
“Thumb me a woman,” she giggled over her shoulder. He paid no attention. She asked him that a lot now since she started going with Lynn. It was a little game Lynn and he had evolved at college. It consisted of characterizing a woman, any woman, in one short sentence. Sometimes it worked.
“She had a breath that smelled like the spaces between toes,” he murmured to himself as he leaned against the wall listening to a recording of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” while some bushy-haired aficionado cracked knuckles in time.
Nearby, a small group was listening to a young advertising executive discoursing on the insidious and vicious aspects of the Communist plague which threatened to upset the United States government. While listening to the young man without hearing, Erick stared pointedly at the flaring bodice of a tall, red-haired young woman who seemed to have given little definite thought as to the question of whether her bust should be covered or not.
When she noticed his stare she looked over at him. With a look, Erick thought, that lady novelists called “dark.” What happened, he noted, was that her brow knitted and her mouth turned down slightly and, involuntarily, her hand sought the folds of highly unconcealing silk at her swelling breasts,
attempting to veil more adequately.
“I know the so-called liberals will keep calling your attention to the small percentage of these Communists in the country. Well I say,” said the young man, obviously quoting someone, “If one termite eats hard enough, the whole house will come down.”
“If his belly is big enough.”
They stopped talking and the red-haired girl looked at Erick with a—What the hell have we here?—look. The man gave Erick a blasé glance and then went on speaking with the unique talent opinionated people have of ignoring anything that smacks of disagreement.
Erick stood there stiffly, damned if he would move away. His brain struggled vainly to assure himself that these were just poor people struggling to be important. But it didn’t help. He suddenly felt ridiculous, out of place. He felt a rising heat of awkwardness. He wanted to run.
But his face remained the same, without a ruffle of lost composure. He gave the girl’s rising chest one more candid look and then pushed away from the wall and walked off.
Immediately he was sure they were speaking of him. He straightened his shoulders as if a parting sight of him that were more or less impressive would ease the acidity of their comments. Then his brain grew furious with him for being so obvious. He hated himself as he was growing to hate himself more and more when the gaps and rents began to appear in his cool façade. “People,” he said quietly, bitterly, thus indicating, at once, his distaste and his fear.
He kept drinking. And his body seemed to float if his mind kept sagging. It seemed he moved around the room like an apparition. And that last drink, a particularly large one, just about did away with self-criticism. It left only the small core of acid reflectiveness that never slept.
After passing Lynn a few times and peregrinating about the room a few more times, he sank down on a vacant chair and watched people. He looked at the red head more and more feeling a vicious heat course his body. The thought kept occurring—a penny for your tits—as he stared directly at her bust which more and more appeared undecided between remaining in her dress or plopping out into the smoky air for the plaudits of the assemblage.