“That’s it!” cried Hildred. “Burn them up . . . burn everything . . . tomorrow we’ll get new furniture.”
There was a crackle and roar as the flames shot up the flue. “That’s wonderful . . . wonderful,” groaned Hildred. “You’re so good, Tony. I want you to have a merry, merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas!” yelled Vanya. “Don’t you love it?”
“You poor little bums,” he said. “So they tried to poison you, did they? The idea!”
He sat on the gut table and watched the flames licking up ten years of scribbling. Where was the land of Nod? The land of Nod was in the noodle and Cain and Abel were a couple of gaudy fellows with red neckties. Comment allez-vous? Très bien, monsieur, et vous-même? Imagine it—someone trying to drug two little ladies on Christmas day! Where in Christ’s name did she get that hat? A swell casket, it was—satin-lined. Just like a man . . . so healthy. And in the depths of the forests were monstrous idols, their eyes glowing with gems . . . a wilderness through which the chicleros roamed searching for chewing gum. Slot machines for clean white teeth. Drive me to the Gare St. Lazare, I’m in a hurry. . . .
3
NEW YEAR’S Eve! America trying to stand on its hind legs. Every one wall-eyed, scrooched, crocked. Dredge fried to the hat and Hildred down with the screaming meemies. A great jamboree in which Vanya delivers herself of a jolly little poem about the virgin spittle of the gutter, the seven cathedrals that gave warm milk, and the dead rats floating in the Seine. Bob Ramsay drops in with his friend Homer Reed and Amy, Homer Reed’s mistress, the three of them followed by a slutty little bitch which insists on leaving its card here and there. Wrestling bouts between Amy and Vanya, between Vanya and Hildred, between Hildred and Amy. The referee getting down on his haunches to see that there are no foul tactics and what kind of underwear, if any, there may be. Amy fighting like a wildcat, her clothes ripped to shreds, her face puffed and gory. And then Emil Sluter pops in and a Jew named Bunchek. Anecdotes concerning a female called Iliad who has a crush on her own mother. A droll affair this—jealousy, intrigue, incest. Sluter, the polite bastard with the butter-colored gloves, listening with both ears cocked. “And who was the mother jealous of, if I’m not indiscreet?” Hildred, in her incandescent state, blurting out—“Why, of me!”
“Of you? No! Well, I’ll be go to hell. . . . Did you hear that, Tony?”
Tony Bring hears only too well. He is thinking of the oily phrases Sluter will palm off on him next time they meet. “Golly, man, I tell you, one has no idea with what a terrific force these things can sweep down on you and destroy you; and it’s all the more insidious because it finds you unprepared. Hasn’t that been your experience?” That is Sluter’s lingo: full of modifying clauses, prefatory notes, retractions, apologies, innuendoes, discreet loopholes, fire escapes. . . .
Meanwhile there’s Hildred emptying her mind like a slop pail. And Bunchek, the pimply-faced gawk, gaping goggle-eyed. Hildred, the wife, sitting with her legs parted, her stockings rolled down, her thighs showing, her legs bruised and scratched. Informing all and sundry about her strong spine and the little hollow just above the tip of the spine which everyone admires so when they dance with her. Still not enough about it—elaborating, embroidering, begging Homer Reed to put his hand there—because, as an artist, he can appreciate these accidentals, these anatomical nuances.
Then Bunchek, pianissimo at first, opening up with a tender minuet from the Kama Sutra, followed in brief order by the fully orchestrated works of Stekel, Jung, and Pavlov. Not a mind, but a cesspool. Much too much, even for Hildred’s strong stomach. Sluter, always correct, excusing himself in order to go outside and stick his finger down his throat.
And finally, Amy, spurred on by her consort, stripping down to her pantalettes and giving a slow muscle dance. Not finally, either, because immediately following this Bunchek and Ramsay commence a word-reaction contest: luck-duck, brick-pick, runt-bunt, mass-crass, ore-core, flit-sit. Sluter joins in, and then Hildred; the room is filled with the sound of words coupling and uncoupling: dingo-bingo, righto-presto, bigboy-frigeroi, Lucy-juicy, tart-cart, spiddivus-quiddibus, Apennine-turpentine, souse-louse. . . . Until station D-R-E-D-G-E announces the birth of the homunculus with Father Aquinas patching the shingles of his roof to keep the angels out. A little spiel about the gastronomic functioning of the unicellular organism and then: “The Alps and the Andes are but so much hardened ocean ash, and perhaps the whole earth is but the compact mold of dead things.” A fine coprolalic orgy watered with sexual proverbs and neologisms like dingitaries and vaginaries. Sluter remaining after the others have gone to take a stirrup cup. Avid to sponge up a few fundamental verities, as, for example—
1. “How did the world then come to be filled with life?”
2. “Just what is meant by the Symbolist Movement?”
3. “Am I right in saying that Gauguin was perhaps a little too decorative?”
Ushering in the dawn with Spiddividdibeebumbum. . . .
THE NEW Year! New resolutions, new quarrels, new ideas afoot. Paris again. And from Vanya a leitmotif: Sweden. Sweden! And why Sweden? Sweden: land of the midnight sun, of fjords and staggering hors d’oeuvres, land of liberty for the third sex, the star-spangled bananas for Lesbians and Uranians.
Intermission while Vanya and Hildred toy with the idea of finding more suitable employment. Whims. Caprices. Hallucinations.
During the intermission someone puts the bug into their heads to see Paul Jukes. Paul Jukes: the greatest painter alive! Doesn’t think much of Cézanne, and less of Matisse. As for Picasso—the only thing, according to Paul Jukes, that Picasso ever mastered is the art of drawing mechanical ducks. None of your mechanical ducks and linoleum patterns for Paul Jukes. Not on your tintype! The greatest American painter that ever lived is a stickler for muscles and green fields, for doing the right breast as religiously as the left, for putting heads on torsos and not lilac bushes or cauliflowers. If you want to draw a man, you must first have arms and legs. . . . Alors, see Paul Jukes. Perhaps Paul Jukes can use a model or two. He who can tie a brush to his behind and paint the aurora borealis, perhaps such a much can give a word or two of advice—or a ticket for Sweden. Nothing definite in mind. See Paul Jukes, that’s all. . . .
IT SO happened that the day chosen for the interview was one of those bad days. The great Paul Jukes, only released from the hospital a few days previously, was getting ready to bring suit against his physician for puncturing his bladder. He was feeble and crotchety. He didn’t even have the courtesy to invite his unknown guests inside.
They went away crestfallen. The great Paul Jukes—bah! Vanya spat on the sidewalk to void her disgust. Phew! Pfui! As for Hildred—Hildred wasn’t satisfied to merely spit on the sidewalk. She had to do something extra. She called him “a horse’s ass.”
A day or so afterward they had another idea. Hildred’s idea this time. “Models wanted for hosiery and lingerie . . . easy work . . . only a few hours a day.” Why not grab off a little easy money? Why not?
Bright and early they rose one morning. Even Tony Bring was required to lend a hand. He took a big brush, with a long, curved handle, and curried Vanya’s back. They took the knots out of her hair, laundered her bloomers, and pressed her blue cheviot suit. As a finishing touch Hildred sprinkled toilet water over Vanya’s shirtwaist. All set. Vanya gay as a sparrow straddling a telegraph wire. Wiggling her behind a little, à la Margie Pennetti. Ravishing. What has she been concealing all this time? Too utterly utter. . . .
But when they returned Hildred had a long face. Some dirty little kike with a tape measure had gotten fresh—with Vanya particularly. He had gone over them as if they were racehorses. And there was no screen. They had to undress in the presence of three dirty little kikes. The one held the tape measure, the other put the measurements down on a pad, and the third—the third, it seems, just stood by like a life buoy to see that nothing went wrong. He was working away all the while on a big Havana cigar. T
he climax came when it was discovered that Vanya had to be measured for the third time. It was all due to an error on the part of the gentleman with the pencil and pad. He didn’t have his mind on his business, apparently. Imagine, he had nothing to do but get the numbers right—but when they looked at the numbers, the numbers were phony. To aggravate matters, Vanya, it seems, had taken it all as a big joke. Even when they were fooling around her crotch she displayed the same disgusting sang-froid. She wasn’t even concerned enough to hold her hands over her bosom.
“No moral sense whatever” was Hildred’s angry comment.
“But what did I do?” Vanya cried. “Didn’t you get undressed too? Do you think you looked more respectable because you kept your damned brassiere on?”
“That isn’t it! It’s the way you stood there.”
“What did you expect me to do—stand there like September Morn? Jesus, what a prune you can be!”
THINGS WERE going swell during the intermission, except that Hildred was getting in dutch at the Caravan. They were threatening to fire her if she didn’t mend her ways.
“You’d better nurse the job,” cautioned Tony Bring. “Things’ll be going to hell around here otherwise.”
Vanya agreed. Someone had to show a sense of responsibility.
But there was another, a more important reason, why Hildred ought to carry on. Vanya had taken to fiddling around again with plaster and whatnot. She was threatening to make more Count Brugas, more masks and casts. Money was needed. Of course, once Hildred had sold a few everything would go swimmingly. And where was there a better market than the Caravan? Lausberg would probably start the ball rolling; and then there was that big, good-natured slob Earl Biggers, to say nothing of Iliad’s mother and the boys with the golden locks who just loved anything artistic.
Hildred was not the sort to nibble at a line. She gobbled it up, hook, bait, and sinker. There was genius in the idea. Naturally! A genius had conceived it. A Romanoff genius.
Now she came home from work immediately. Everyone chipped in. If a visitor arrived, he was given a hammer and saw, or else they instructed him how to tear sheets of brown wrapping paper into thin strips. The floor was a morass: plaster of Paris, sawdust, nails, varnish, glue, pieces of velvet and satin, dolls’ wigs, Mexican dyes . . . the disorder of a burlesque show backstage.
For practice they made casts of each other. Hildred refusing to put up with the ordinary, placid, deathlike composure. Always striving for the grotesque. Instead of likenesses, therefore, they turned out gargoyles, satyrs, orgiasts, maniacs. Now and then a Job or a Hamlet turned up—or maybe a Roman coin.
Tony Bring took it all with extraordinary calm. Let them spin their opium dreams. Let them talk. They couldn’t go to Paris on a shoestring. As for their becoming wealthy overnight—fiddlesticks! If only they made enough to meet the rent when it came due. If they could only keep their stomachs from growling. Hildred talked in carload lots, to be sure, but that was her way. Nothing more than thyroid effervescence.
Toward three or four in the morning Vanya would usually steal out in her overalls and snoop around for milk bottles and bags of buns which the tradesmen left at people’s doors. The few hours that remained for sleep they would spend in tossing about, in hurling recriminations, in patching things up. Thoroughly exhausted, her nerves on end, sobbing, weeping, cursing him one moment and surrendering herself the next, Hildred would at last fall asleep in his arms and lie there like a stone. Sometimes she awoke with a fright and cried out—“Oh, it’s you!” And then she would beg him to desist, tell him he was cruel, that he was killing her.
“But what were you dreaming of just now?”
“God, I don’t know . . . don’t ask me such questions. I’m dead, I tell you.”
And while he struggled to piece out her dreams, while he reviewed swiftly all the lies and intrigues that surrounded her, suddenly Vanya would be heard closing the door of her room. Her shadow passed and repassed the heavy stained-glass door. What was she doing out there, that long-maned devil? What new conspiracy was she hatching? As if to protect Hildred from some evil spirit he would seize her and smother her in his arms. And again there would come that nightmarish expression and Hildred would cry out—”O Jesus, leave me alone, will you?”
“But listen, Hildred, don’t you hear her?”
“You’ll drive me crazy if this keeps up much longer.”
“And what about me—do you think I’m getting fat on it?”
“For God’s sake, what do you want of me?”
“You know what I want . . . I want you to get rid of her.”
“If you talk that way I’ll run away . . . I swear I can’t stand it any longer.”
“But listen, Hildred . . . you say you love me . . . you say you’ll do anything for me . . .”
“Yes, but not that!”
“Why not?”
“Because I won’t.”
“You won’t because you’re mad . . . you’re a son-of-a-bitch . . . you’re crazy! I ought to beat the ____ out of you.”
“Tony . . . Tony! God, what things you say!” She falls on him and suffocates him with kisses. She smooths his brow and runs her hand through his hair. “Tony, my God, how can you talk like that? You’re ill. You need a rest. Tony, don’t you know that I love you? What would I do without you? Do you want to destroy me?”
“But I’m not mad . . . I mean it. I mean every word of it.”
“Oh, Tony, you can’t mean it. You’re ill. You’re ill.”
4
EVERYBODY ON pins and needles. Everybody out of sorts, touchy, jumpy, irritable. Supersensitive. Like a man complaining of cold feet after his legs have been amputated. Vanya, the Stoic, remarking to Tony Bring one day—“It’s good for you, this suffering . . . it’ll improve your writing.”
His writing! A pleasant way that was of twitting him about his slothfulness. The great book whose synopsis had required sheets and sheets of wrapping paper was no more. Gone up the flue, with the chairs and whatnot. One could always start another book, of course. Hadn’t Carlyle rewritten his History of the French Revolution when the manuscript was lost? But he wasn’t a Carlyle. Nevertheless, something was gathering again in his crop. There were scraps of paper and little notebooks—a sort of Sherwood Anderson nonsense, except that there was no wandering from flop to flop, no brewery jobs, no tossing things out of the second-floor window.
Or was it just another way of killing time? One could read just so much of Spengler and Proust and then there was an end to it. Joyce too gave one indigestion. In France there were clever fellows who used the needle every once in a while. A new book every six months—with illustrations too. No limits to their fecundity. But in America, somehow, a cocaine atmosphere wouldn’t produce literature. America was producing gunmen and beer barons. Literature was being left to women. Everything was left to woman, except womanhood.
What was he scribbling anyway? And why did he have to go to the Caravan to make his notes? Vanya was getting all wrought up about it. If he were thinking of writing a book about her he’d better watch his step. One could bring suit against people for—she didn’t know what exactly. Hildred too was urging him to be careful. Heavens, but they were squeamish—and he hadn’t written a line yet. Good, nevertheless. Maybe the old cow would really get panicky and bump herself off. She was getting so uneasy nowadays that she hung a knife and a hammer on her door. What was she doing that for? Was she trying to egg him on?
The drama didn’t amuse Hildred anymore. She was fagged out. Playing the hostess all day and at night carving wooden legs or dyeing wigs. As for the lord and master, he couldn’t even drive a nail in straight. All he did was scribble notes, or think up new arguments to drive them all crazy. No, it couldn’t go on much longer—for Hildred. She was worn out, exhausted. Too exhausted even to pretend to make love. And the lord and master—why, he was wide awake when they went to bed. Naturally, since he hadn’t done anything all day except to wash the dishes and sweep the floo
r. Even that was too much for him. It interfered with his scribbling.
There were times now, when they’d gone to bed, that he got up and went for a walk. Hildred didn’t even stir when he climbed over her. She was dead to the world.
It was getting to be a habit. He couldn’t fall asleep anymore unless he had taken his walk. One night—night? It was almost dawn. He had been walking along the waterfront, turning things over. Deeply engrossed, he wandered into the narrow, canyoned street just back of the warehouses. A deathlike stillness, shattered now and then by the blast of a tugboat. Suddenly there was a shout followed by the sound of scuffling feet. He turned sharply and caught a glancing blow in the neck. The next moment he was in the gutter, rolling over and over. When he got to his feet there was a man standing against the wall. “Come here, you_____!” He began to run. “Stop, you bastard, or you’ll be sorry!” He quickened his pace. He was running as fast as his legs would carry him. Then bango! There was a shot and he heard a dull splatter against the wall. He almost collapsed. For a moment there was again the deathlike stillness. And then there came the familiar sound of a nightstick pounding the pavement. That frightened him even more. Supposing the damned fools took it into their heads . . . it was like them to fire away at the first thing they saw. . . .
When he got back to the house he sat down in a chair and began to pant. He was wet and limp. He removed his things slowly, with great effort. He got into bed and lay there trembling. Hildred was lying there like a log. He dozed off. His feet were sticking out of the window. A man came along with an ax and chopped them off; he buried the stumps in the snow which covered the grass plot and then it began to rain and the rain tickled the frozen stumps but he couldn’t get out of the window to drag the stumps inside because the window was barred. A car drove up and three men jumped out with shotguns; they rested the guns on the railing and began to spray the window. The window was full of holes through which the sun poured in; it was tantalizing to lie there with the sun in your eyes and your feet stuck in the grass plot. He was walking. So then his feet must have been restored. He was walking again between the high walls back of the warehouses. And his feet were firmly glued to his legs, because he was running. Back of him was a mob armed with scythes and shotguns. And as he ran the walls started closing in on him. At the end of the street there was just a bare streak of light, as if a curtain were parted. It was growing thinner and thinner. He had to turn and edge between the walls. The walls were scraping his shins. A shot rang out, and then another, and another . . . a grand fusillade. The bullets flattened out above his head, ricocheted from wall to wall, and dropped like stars at his feet. There were cries of “Stop! Stop!” but he wriggled on, stumbling, ducking, scraping his shins and elbows. Suddenly the walls opened up, moved back like automatic doors, and the sky burst forth with a tremendous, blinding light. “Saved! Saved!” he cried. But there, barring the way, all dressed in gleaming armor, stood a body of foot soldiers with long, piercing spears thrust forward. Behind him the mob charging with shouts and curses on their lips. He could hear their scythes clattering against the walls, almost feel their breath upon him. A fear so great came over him that he was paralyzed, rooted to the spot. Feebly he tried to raise his hands. “See . . . see!” he murmured weakly, “I surrender.” The growl ceased. There was a moment of deep, shattering silence. Then, stiff as automatons, the men with the huge, outthrust spears advanced. When they were almost on top of him they halted. Slowly they drew back their huge, mailed arms. “I give up! I give up!” he cried frantically, and as the words left his mouth—perhaps they were never heard—there came a blinding rain, a sharp, cruel rain of spears plunged deep and quivering. “Jesus, they’ve killed me!” he screamed.