Crazy Cock

  3

  EVERY MORNING a calliope went by in a covered wagon. Its passage filled the house with salacious sounds. And every morning, driven frantic by the monotony of its plaint, Vanya leaped out of bed with an oath and fled through the rooms like a water buffalo in pursuit of a rainbow. Hildred, tossing in her sleep, would groan or mutter broken phrases as she dreamed of purple hippogriffs falling through the roof. Each morning Tony Bring bent over her and kissed her while she twitched and tossed, and always as he studied the grave, morbid beauty of her face hope came to him anew. How could it be that this enchantress who the night before had called him a god would awake to torture him afresh?

  At breakfast Vanya usually chewed the cuds of her poetry. This breakfasting was a piece of extravagance in more ways than one. Instead of the gratuitous meal which the Caravan offered they chose to sit in the candlelight at home and begin the day with a brisk intellectual discussion. While Tony Bring squeezed oranges and kept an eye on the oil stove, so that Hildred’s bacon wouldn’t get too crisp, poems were shuffled back and forth. . . . Leave me a simple thing like the moon, it is not complicated. . . . She lay on the swaying sands whispering to her brother of death. . . . The lines were interspersed with parenthetical references to the coffee, or the price of strawberries.

  Usually they left the house in an exuberant mood, as if they were setting forth on a holiday trip. But this morning, for some reason or other, Vanya showed no inclination to go. She talked about doing some real work for a change, meaning thereby a portrait of Tony Bring which she had started a few days back. Hildred, usually so eager and ready to gratify Vanya’s whims, displayed a strange indifference, a hostility, one might almost call it, to this suggestion. And when Vanya added, “Jesus, it’s stupid waiting on people all day . . . I’m not a horse,” Hildred rose abruptly and slipping on her cape said: “Very well, amuse yourself; I’ll do the dirty work.” At the door she turned around and flung out: “It’s fortunate I haven’t any creative urge to distract me from my responsibilities—else I don’t know what would become of you, the two of you.”

  “I didn’t think she would take it like that,” said Vanya, as the door slammed behind Hildred. And then impulsively: “Have you any change, Tony? I’ll have to take a taxi.”

  But when she rushed out of the house a moment later she espied Hildred walking leisurely toward the subway. “I’m so glad you waited for me,” she cried breathlessly as she caught up with her.

  “I wasn’t waiting at all,” said Hildred. “I have a pain in my side, I can’t walk any faster.”

  “Let’s take a cab,” said Vanya. It was another way of saying “Forgive me.”

  IT HAD been decided that Hildred was to give certain evenings to Vanya and certain evenings to her husband. And then another little matter had been brought to a conclusive termination, an event which made Tony Bring even more grateful to his spouse. That letter which had caused him so much perturbation—he never brought up the subject again but, as if to prove to him what an ass he had made of himself, Hildred had left pieces of the envelope lying on the floor near the toilet bowl. That was the way they communicated with each other on important affairs. Oh, all sorts of things were transacted that way; it was like having a secret code and a thousand times better than cheap words of explanation.

  These trifles were going through Tony Bring’s head as he moved about the place putting things to rights. Not so many hours ago things had looked lovely—yes, lovely. One felt the touch of a feminine hand; it brought a note of grace, of charm, into their little home. Now it was all otherwise again.

  He stepped into Vanya’s room. Her clothes were lying in a heap on the floor and under her cot was a mass of crumpled cigarette stubs. As he slid the broom under the cot a ten-dollar bill came to view. He might have been surprised if it had not happened before, but things like that happened every now and then. The strange part of it, however, was that money could be kicking around like this and nobody disturbed about it. Instead of being grateful to him for its recovery they behaved in the strangest manner—not quite, but almost as if they suspected him of filching it. But that was so silly of them, if they ever gave it a thought. Why would he be returning money to them if he had actually stolen it? And, on the other hand, short as they usually were, how was it no one ever spoke of missing a ten-dollar bill? After all, a ten-dollar bill was an item. . . .

  These were part of the mysteries that continually lurked in the air. He lingered in Vanya’s room to muse over a fresh batch of letters which came to light as he rummaged through the papers on her table. They were all from women—out on the Pacific coast. They addressed her as “David,” “lovely Jo,” “Michael darling,” and so on. One was from a convent, from some forlorn nun whose breasts, so the letter read, hung mournfully beneath a black shroud. Another, a sweet little girl whose language indicated that she could scarcely have been more than sixteen, told how she wet the pillow each night with her tears. “Michael darling,” she wrote, “don’t you care for me anymore? Is there some one else—in that horrid New York—who has taken my place?” Then there was a strong, sensible letter from a woman whose husband was frightfully jealous—“He will never forgive my David,” she confided in a parenthesis. This was a woman with understanding. She gave good counsel, filled her pages with loving advice, urging her “David” to concentrate all her efforts on her work. “I am not uneasy about you, dear,” she concluded. “I know that you will meet other women, younger women perhaps, who will claim your friendship and enrich your days. But the nights will belong to me. I know that you are thinking of me always, that you will come back to me as soon as this madness wears off.”

  Underneath the letters was an unfinished note in Vanya’s own hand. It was obviously a reply to this self-contained creature whose husband was so infernally jealous. “Irma, my lovely little Lesbian,” he read, “these words . . . maddening, exotic, intoxicating. Your voice [here Tony Bring pondered a moment, to wonder if Hildred was in on these long-distance calls, or these adorable entreaties] . . . Christ, Irma, write to me, write often . . . tell me things. All this time—do you know what I was thinking? I thought perhaps I was another one of those Count Brugas. Oh yes, but at the same time I wrote you pages and pages, and then (you know my temperamental fits!) I tore them up. I want to say a million things but I’m shaking. Wait, I will tell things in a more repressed manner. After I disappeared . . .” What followed had been mutilated and was undecipherable. On the other side it continued: “Irma, it is so wonderful to write your name. I did not succeed in committing suicide. I shall never commit suicide. [She had written “again” but crossed it out.] I love you, Irma . . . love you terribly. Have you still some of my poems? Your voice made me turn pale. I could not see you, dear, but your voice is just the same. I hear it at night when I lie in this crazy room and the walls begin to heave. Last night . . .”

  Here it broke off. Two cigar stubs lay in the saucer beside the note; there was a sticky ring on the tabletop, as if a glass of liqueur had rested there. No doubt one of the Danish sisters had dropped in for a quiet little chat. The older one had grown quite fond of Vanya lately. She was behaving like a widow who goes to the cemetery to flirt over her husband’s grave.

  The usual palpitations which he experienced in going through Vanya’s papers were strangely absent. He forgot even to shake his head in that rueful manner which was oddly characteristic of him. He read as much as his curiosity demanded—which is to say all—and put the pages aside. An almost cheerful grunt escaped him.

  THEY RETURNED rather early that evening, the two of them. Vanya was still itching to add some touches to the portrait she had begun.

  In posing it is often like sitting in the concert hall. One falls asleep, comfortably oriented, in a room in New York to wake up in an opium den in San Francisco or Shanghai. En route one murders, rapes, pulls down skyscrapers, goes skating in the tropics, feeds peanuts to yaks, or pulls a slack-wire stunt over the Brooklyn Bridge. Nor is the artist immune. Sha
ggy eyebrows develop into ferns, the pupil becomes a lake in which temples and swans float, the ears labyrinths dreaming of mythology.

  There is a mole on Tony Bring’s lower lip. Vanya has painted it a dozen times. She is obsessed by it. It is no longer a mole to her, but an arena in which there are shawls and flaming sashes, fists covered with mail, ungelded beasts. It is not a face she wants to paint—has she not painted it a thousand times in her dreams?—but this mole, this arena of her inner conflict, this froth of lust where men and beast mingle their naked passions. The mole hangs to his underlip like a verdant terrace on the brink of a precipice.

  Hildred thinks how ingenious it would be if instead of doing a portrait Vanya were to create a melancholy brown horse that would fill the room with Sehnsucht. It is but an interlude among other thoughts which she voices as she reads aloud from Songs of Adam. In the Eagle Building, only a few blocks away, the great pan-democrat who sang so beautifully his goat songs hangs by a nail under a glass frame; his bushy eyebrows are smothered under a huge sombrero, his white beard stained with tobacco juice. Every day that he hangs there his songs become more apocalyptic. The grand old patriarch of American letters, friend of Horace Traubel and of car conductors, seer and homosexual, the brother of all mankind girding up his loins. . . .

  Vanya throws down her brush in despair. “I can’t think with all this going on!” she exclaims.

  “I thought it would stimulate you,” says Hildred, shutting the book with a bang.

  By way of response Vanya took the canvas from the easel, and after scanning it ferociously, put her big cowhide boot through it. “I’m hungry!” she said, and in the next breath, turning to Tony Bring—“Was Walt really a homo?”

  Chagrined that she should have been ignored on such an important subject, Hildred walked off to inspect the pantry. She returned with a can of sardines, a huge chunk of sour bread, some cheese and grapes. Tony Bring was talking about the poet Baudelaire, whose pathological instincts, so it was said, led him to seek out the most repulsive types of women imaginable—dwarfs, Negresses, the demented, the diseased.

  “Do you want coffee or tea?” Hildred asked coldly.

  “Anything,” said Vanya, without looking up.

  They had dubbed the table at which they sat the “gut” table. Not a very refined expression, but then neither was the language which they employed when gathered here. As a matter of fact, it had been christened thus because here, at one time or another, sometimes in turn, sometimes all together, they were given to spilling their guts. They had grown attached to the word. It was direct and full of steam—like one of Dempsey’s short body blows. No kowtowing or salaaming over the gut table. No küss die Hand business, or s’il vous plaît.

  “Are you or are you not a pervert?” That’s how it commences around the gut table this evening.

  The Bruga woman, to whom the question was addressed, doesn’t always relish it in this fashion, especially with so much steam behind the punch. She attempts a little footwork, figuratively speaking—a little sidestepping and ducking. Out of luck this evening, because her assailant only closes in on her and drums a tattoo on her kidneys. And when Hildred, essaying to referee the bout, steps in between them she gets a clout for her pains.

  “You,” he says to her, “I want to ask you a question too. Supposing,” he adds rapidly and most blandly, “supposing I’m walking through Washington Square and a man approaches me . . . solicits me. What do you think I should do—invite him to a cup of coffee or haul off and sock him one in the jaw?”

  Hildred puts on a glacial stare.

  “I’ll put it to you a little differently,” says Tony Bring hurriedly. “After all, we don’t have to mince matters. I’m going to ask you what you would do if a woman—a woman like her, for instance—came up to you and propositioned you. . . .”

  Vanya tilted back in her chair and grinned.

  “Can you answer me directly and in a few words?” he shouted.

  Of course Hildred couldn’t. She had never said anything in a few words. Her jaws were working industriously amid the rubbish heaps of antiquity; she reeled off names and definitions and as she chewed and chewed the saliva began to flow and the tin cans and broken bottles rested more easily in her large digestive tract. She had already used up a thousand words without approaching the question.

  “Get down to brass tacks!”

  “But you’re absurd! You go at me like a pedantic idiot.”

  “I’m asking you a simple, straightforward question. . . .”

  “But I’ve told you a dozen times—I have no definite attitude. It would depend entirely on the circumstances, on the individual who approached me, on my mood, on. . .”

  “You mean to say then that you don’t know whether you’d be pleased or disgusted . . . is that it?”

  “Disgusted?” Hildred was hedging. “After all, they’re human beings just like us.”

  “Sure! And they’re _____ ________ too!”

  It was an ugly term. Hildred turned white, and for the moment she was tongue-tied. But then Vanya broke in. “Not all perverts go about soliciting,” she said, quite as if this were a most important detail.

  “Good,” he said, growing more excited, “good . . . I can get somewhere with you. At least you know how to talk straight.”

  He strode up and down several times and finally, planting himself square in front of Vanya, he said: “Will you give a frank answer to a frank question?”

  The words seemed to explode in Vanya’s ears. No doubt she meant, by the nod of her head, to convey her assent, but Tony Bring stood in front of her like a tormentor waiting for that word yes which she seemed incapable of formulating.

  “Will you? Will you?” he demanded, bending forward until their noses almost touched.

  Vanya’s head was twitching from side to side as if she had been suddenly stricken with chorea. Her eyes were large and fixed.

  Once again Hildred interposed. “I won’t let her answer,” she said. “You’re a fool if you think you can extract things this way. If you had any intelligence you wouldn’t need to ask any questions. Read your books—that’s the only way you learn anything.”

  “Oh, is that so?” he said. They were standing close to each other, their lips curled back in a snarl, just like two mangy curs fighting over a bone. “Perhaps I don’t know everything, but I know enough already to railroad her to jail. Laugh that off!”

  “You fool!” cried Hildred, tossing her head defiantly. “What do you mean by that?”

  “What do I mean? I mean just this—that Platonic love is one thing and calling a woman a darling little Lesbian quite another. Perhaps your good friend here understands what I’m talking about.” He paused a second. “Eh, Vanya, what have you to say for yourself? You know what I’m driving at. Why don’t you speak?”

  Vanya leaned against the wall, her hands buried in her jeans. She looked at him piercingly and with the utmost coolness and deliberation responded: “So you’re convinced now that I’m a Lesbian, are you? And your wife, what is she?”

  She paused just long enough for this to sink in. She was about to continue when Hildred broke in: “Exactly! If she’s a Lesbian, then I’m one too.” There was a rapid exchange of glances. “Crack that, you poor boob!” they seemed to say.

  Says Vanya, with perfect control: “What is your idea of a Lesbian, anyway? You say I’m a Lesbian. Why? Because you were reading my letters again? I know you, you sneak. I left the letters lying about purposely . . . yes, purposely. I want to put an end to this nonsense. I’m sick of this beating about the bush. Make up your mind one way or other. . . .”

  Hildred intervened. “I’ll settle this question myself,” she said, turning on Tony Bring, her face scarlet. “I won’t stand for this abuse any longer . . . do you hear that? If there’s anything wrong in this house I’m the one who’s responsible. Why don’t you let up on her? Why don’t you attack me, you coward? I can answer everything you want to know.”

  “All
right then, do it!” he said.

  Silence for a moment. A truck rolled by, shaking the building to its foundations.

  “Well . . . what is it you want to know?” Hildred’s foot is tapping impatiently.

  “Everything,” he answered simply.

  “Be specific. A minute ago you were making all sorts of charges. Let’s have them now, one by one . . . I’m ready for you.”

  A distressing weariness came over him. Suddenly it became too stupid for words. Like three balls on a billiard table. With the cue ball one took aim, and if the wrist worked in obedience to the laws of mechanics, ballistics, trigonometry, and whatnot, the red ball kissed the white ball and all three balls clicked. And if all three balls clicked that meant another shot. And if one could manage to keep all three balls bunched together, if one could nurse them along, as they say, one could have X over Y shots. He took a long shot and closed his eyes. He missed. It was somebody else’s turn. He stood for a few moments looking on dumbly, dividing his attention between their silly, lying talk and his own restless fears.

  Suddenly a remark of Hildred’s reached him with telling effect. “What’s that you’re saying?” he shouted fiercely. “Stop it, do you hear? Another word and I’ll crack you! By God, you people are capable of anything . . . anything. You stand there trying to tell me that you thought I might be . . . ? Listen, if you ever use that word in connection with me I’ll brain you. You tell me you were jealous . . . jealous of a friend of mine. God damn it, if I thought you were telling me the truth I’d kick the guts out of you. But I don’t believe you . . . I don’t! You’re a liar from the bottom up. You’d lie if they were putting the noose around your neck. You’re lying now because you don’t know how to crawl out of it. You’d say I was insane if you thought you could save your face. You’d say anything! You’re corrupt, you’re poisoned, you’re diseased! So you thought I was a homo once . . . or almost one. That’s rich . . . rich . . . rich. Jesus, I’m going to put on a red necktie and advertise myself. Maybe I could bring a little money in too if I were persevering. A homo to rent—by the week or month—moderate terms. A respectable homo, with a wife and family. . . .”