Looking at the situation with eyes wide open, Tony Bring asked himself one day what difference it could possibly make if they did establish a ménage à trois. True, he had refused to permit Vanya’s trunk to be moved in, but what of that? Did that prevent her from sleeping with them, from using the same bathtub, from wearing his ties occasionally or criticizing the economy of the household?
7
“THEY WERE crazy, not me! They strapped me down for I don’t know how long. I couldn’t breathe. I begged them to let me up—for five minutes—but they only laughed at me. In the next bed was George Washington. ‘Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you. . . .’ Night and day she sang it. She drove me crazy, that woman. All day, all night—sweetheart . . . sweetheart. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I exploded.
“Jesus, do you know what it’s like to be strapped down? No, you don’t! You can’t imagine it. You kick, you holler, you curse. They come and shake their heads at you . . . they laugh. They make you believe you’re crazy, even if you’re not. After a while you get worn out . . . you quiet down. And then you pray. You don’t know what you’re saying, but you beg, you whine, you crawl like a worm. And then they come again with their cold, lizard eyes and they look down at you foolishly and they yell, ‘Be quiet! Shut up!’ You curse and swear, you beg, you whimper, you promise everything, but all they say is ‘Be quiet! Shut up!’
“See! See these marks! That’s what those dirty bloodsuckers did to me. Wait . . . I’ll show you more. Hildred, you saw my breasts . . . what did they do to me? I’ll kill them someday, the dirty brutes!
“They’ll remember me, all right! Twice I broke loose on them. The second time I cut George Washington loose. The whole ward went crazy. We broke the windows, we danced, we sang. . . . We put the fear of Christ in them, I tell you. . . .”
Vanya’s fevered brain was twitching like a frog under the scalpel. Though she had narrated the story for the fourth or fifth time she insisted on going over it again . . . she wanted them to know everything . . . she was afraid always of overlooking some detail.
What happened the night that Hildred deserted her friend Vanya? Why did Hildred permit her to go off with a stranger, especially when Vanya was drunk and unable to take care of herself? Was she jealous of her good friend, or did she have an appointment with someone else? And why was she so sure that Vanya had disappeared? These were some of the questions that Tony Bring could find no solution to. It was he who encouraged Vanya to relate her experiences. He egged her on slyly, adroitly, despite Hildred’s protestations. He pretended to be moved, he applauded her when she was dramatic, he soothed her when she was at the breaking point. He would excuse himself and go to the bathroom in order to make notes. He would return and wind her up again, remind her of things she had forgotten, trip her up when she contradicted herself, agree with her when he knew that she was lying. . . .
As the story pieced itself out, this, briefly, is what took place. Vanya, Hildred, and the man, who was an utter stranger, had had a few drinks together at the Caravan. Hildred left abruptly after a silly exchange of words with Vanya. The man offered to escort Vanya to her door. When they got in the cab he ordered the driver to go uptown. Vanya pleaded with him to drive her home but instead of paying attention to her he proceeded to hoist her on his lap. A rumpus ensued. Before she knew what had happened she found herself on the floor of the cab, the man on top of her, beating her and twisting her arms. When she came to she was lying on the sidewalk beside a pump. She sat there for a while, dazed, searching her pockets for her keys. Finally she picked herself up and limped away. A clot of blood was stuck to her temple; she picked at it absentmindedly as she walked along.
She couldn’t get her bearings—the streets were deserted and the names of the streets were unfamiliar to her. After a while there loomed up out of the grime and mist a scramble of hulls and sheds and funnels and masts. A helpless, frightened feeling invaded her. Perhaps she wasn’t in New York anymore. Perhaps she had been shanghaied. Presently she heard a truck rolling up behind her. She beckoned to the driver. The truck stopped and she climbed up on the front seat. It was a moving van and there were two men—Polacks, she thought—sitting with the driver. She asked them to drive her to the Brooklyn Bridge and they agreed. After that not a word passed between them. They didn’t ask her what had happened to her or what she was doing or anything. Not a peep out of them. She was terrified. She wondered if they were really taking her to the Brooklyn Bridge—and if they weren’t? She didn’t wonder how she would get away. She simply didn’t think. She just kept mum and shivered. There wasn’t anything in her head except a vague, paralyzing fear. Her brain felt as if it were petrifying.
Finally the van stopped. Immediately four or five huskies spilled out of the interior of the vehicle. One of them reached up and pulled her off the seat. He carried her indoors. It was pitch-dark inside. A match was struck and then someone poked around in the corner where there was a bottle with a candle stuck in it. The men began to speak—quickly, and with low ejaculations. She couldn’t understand a word. They seemed to be speaking several tongues.
During this brief interval she hadn’t opened her mouth—she hadn’t even made a gesture of protest. Suddenly she said to herself, I must scream, and she tried to scream but there came from her throat only a faint scraping sound. Immediately she felt a big, hairy hand, full of sweat and dirt, clap itself over her mouth. Almost at the same moment her clothes were whisked off. For a moment they left her standing there in her stocking feet while they put their heads together and held a brief, unintelligible consultation. Her stockings were slipping down; she bent over and pulled them up. Perhaps a minute went by while she stood there naked, her stockings neatly pulled up. Suddenly an arm was slipped under her knees and she was given a toss. She felt her spine crack as it hit the tabletop and there was a hand over her mouth, smothering her. She felt a cold strap laid over her stomach and then a quick, vicious tug. They took her hands and fastened them down. Her legs were free and, not knowing what else to do, she kicked out wildly. She was still kicking wildly when suddenly a tremendous weight descended upon her. The room went dark. . . .
When she opened her eyes there was the taste of brandy in her mouth. Again she kicked out and again the weight descended upon her . . . again, again, and again . . . as if a regiment were passing through the room.
When she came to again she was lying in the gutter, at the waterfront. She screamed at the top of her lungs—but nobody came. Louder and louder she screamed. Finally footsteps sounded and then a club dropped and made a banging, droning noise. Once more the darkness enveloped her and then there were buttons gleaming and a man bending over her. His breath was foul and in his eyes green bottles danced and then the wheels rolled again with a grinding noise and joggled her and her spine cracked and she begged them not to grind her to pieces. They carried her into a dark room. It was cold and she felt her stockings slipping down. Shadows swooped down from the bulging walls and a soft, spongy hand that smelled of Lysol fastened itself over her mouth. She tried to struggle, but her limbs were caught in a vise and the vise was made of ice and there were tons of it weighing her down, searing her burning flesh. After a time the shadows disappeared and she struggled, fiercely and quietly this time, to free herself. Pains shot through her loins, her muscles were twisted into knots, and her spine—her spine felt as if it had been cracked with an ax. She waited for someone to come and pour brandy down her throat, to pick her up and toss her again. But no one came.
She was in a dream. She dreamed that she had imagined it all. But when she awoke she was still pinned down and there were people standing about her bed, men and women with evil faces and deaf ears. They massed together, shifted from side to side, moved toward her as if to fall on her and then faded away; they circled above her head like angels, rested on her bosom with their fat behinds; they fell away and added up again, like a column of figures. “Be quiet!” they said. “Shut up!” When she tried to push them away
she couldn’t move her limbs. She was paralyzed.
For hours and hours no one came and the walls remained solid and white and nothing changed. The monotony of it was driving her mad; she knew that she was mad because when you are not mad things happen, the walls have doors and they open, there is sunlight and fragrance and people passing and voices and you can move your hands. . . . Later, much later—weeks, it seemed—the faces reappeared. They were different now—more kindly, and not so deaf. They unloosened her straps and they touched her gently. Angels they were, but crazy, crazy angels. She asked for water and they recited from Zarathustra. And while they were reciting suddenly there rose a queer, cracked voice singing off-key, singing like a ventriloquist drinking a glass of water. The angels began to sing, too. They sang in unison and rolled their eyes lasciviously. Even when they had gone the singing still continued—at first high up toward the ceiling, then directly beneath her bed. It sounded as if they were singing in the chamber pot and the chamber pot cracked. Always the same cracked tune, always the same greasy words . . . over and over, as if a Victrola stuffed away in the belly of an automaton were running down.
Part 3
1
THE NIGHT came on and he fled before his thoughts. Hildred had been in with Vanya, and then they had gone, or rather, they had fled, after a shameful scene concluded with curses and threats of violence.
He wandered dismally from one sordid memory to another. Time went by but he made no movement; his breast was empty, his limbs composed as if already he had made the final gesture, had dropped off into deep and everlasting sleep. Was it like this, then, at the end, when the eyes stared round and glassy and all the sounds of the earth fell away?
The shadows of the night stretched out and flattened against the wall with somber fantasticality. He riveted upon them his large, dolorous eyes, and behold, they trembled and all the room began to dance lightly. A rush of familiar phrases came to his lips—a good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of one’s birth. . . . the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. He thought of Bob Ingersoll standing at the tomb of Napoleon with a torrent of words on his lips; he thought of all the infidels who had recanted on their deathbed and a voice sounded in his ears, saying: “How dieth the wise man? As the fool.”
The phrases leaped from his brain in a confused cloud, as if all the mornings of all the Sundays he had spent in church were united in a tangled dream, nothing of which remained but a loud Presbyterian voice spewing the cruds of hoary grace. An odor of bay rum filled his nostrils and he felt again a wiry mustache pressed against his lips. A voice, honeyed and ingratiating, whispered to him, but he would not look, for the sight of the old man’s throat was like an open sepulcher.
He stood before the open window and exposed himself to the shivering blasts. It was winter and everything was dead. A deep, painless sleep. In the yard there was a gaunt, bare tree. It would be droll, he thought, if in the morning when Hildred went to the window she would see his frozen body fastened like a curse against the sky. But in the morning what would it matter how they found him, or where? By morning he would have joined all the mornings that ever were.
He went to bed and pulled the covers over him. A numbness spread through his limbs; he began to glow, to burn. Were there minutes allotted him, or only seconds? At least he ought to leave a message—one always left a message at the end. He jumped out of bed again and searched feverishly for pencil and paper.
The words raced along as if driven by a lash, staining the smooth, white surface in a continuous, erratic line. As he finished, a cold dank breath that savored already of the grave passed over him. The pencil dropped from his hand, and as the heavy lids fell over his eyes he was rapt away into another time, into a world without end, a frozen void that twanged to the doleful notes of an iron harp.
Over the frozen rim of the void there rose a fiery ball raining rivers of scarlet. He knew now that the end had come, that from this livid, smoldering circle of doom there was no retreat. He was on his knees, his head buried in the black scum. Suddenly a hand seized him by the nape of the neck and flung him backward into the mire. His arms were pinioned. Above him, digging her bony knees into his chest, was a naked hag. She kissed him with her soiled lips and her breath was hot as a bride’s. He felt her bony arms tightening about him, pressing him to her loins. Her loins grew big and soft, her belly white and full; she lay against him like a heavy blossom, the petals of her mouth parted lasciviously. Suddenly, in her clawlike grip, there glittered a bright blade; the blade descended and the blood spurted over his neck and into his eyes. He felt his drums bursting and a flood pouring out of his mouth. She lowered her head and rubbed her scaly lips across his cheeks. Gory, she raised her face, and again the blade descended, slid along the side of his face, plunged into his throat and laid the gullet open. Swiftly and neatly she cut away the lobes of his ears. The sky was one great river of scarlet churning with swans and silver whales; a hollow, mocking twang filled the void and the swans flew down, their long necks vibrating like taut strings. . . .
THERE WAS a bang and the door flew open. He heard his name. He turned and sighed deeply.
Hildred threw herself on the bed. “Tony, what have you done?” She gathered him in her arms and rocked him, rocked him to and fro. Like a river drowning in the sea it was. They were one again, as they had always been, as they would be forever more. Nothing, no not anything, could ever separate them again.
And then there came a loud knock at the door. Hildred trembled, twitched in his grasp. “Lie still!” he whispered, and tightened his arms about her. Again the knock, louder this time, imperative, threatening.
Vanya enters . . . à la Modjeska. Surveys the scene with cool comprehending glance. Stands beside the bed and regards the prostrate figure as if it were an ikon of our Lord Immanuel. She speaks to Hildred in a low, intimate voice, and as she speaks she slowly raises her eyes from the bed and focuses them on some invisible object far and beyond the walls.
Solicitously Hildred bends over him. “Vanya wants to know if she can do something for you,” she says.
He pulls her close. “Tell her to go,” he whispers.
Hildred pulls herself up and looks at Vanya confusedly. “He wants to rest,” she says. “That’s it, Tony, lie back and rest. We’ll leave you for a little while. We’ll be back soon.”
Vanya had already slipped out. She was descending the stairs.
“You’ll come back alone?” he said.
“Yes, I’ll come back alone,” Hildred answered.
“Then, take this,” he said, stuffing the crumpled pages into her hand.
2
EXACTLY TWO and a half hours later, Hildred returned—with Vanya. They were radiantly happy. They hummed softly as they flitted about the room. They came and sat on the edge of the bed and attended him like ministering angels.
“Why do you look so miserable?” said Hildred. “We didn’t mean to stay so long.”
“The time just flew,” said Vanya, gazing straight ahead of her with that far-off expression and the cocoons in her eyes.
“I wish you would sit still,” he said, “and not talk.”
“You’re nervous,” said Hildred, and then she remembered suddenly that she was to have brought something back with her.
WHEN THEY were gone some time he got out of bed, closed the windows, and quietly proceeded to dress himself. On the bureau, where she had thrown it carelessly when she returned, lay Hildred’s bag. The pages he had given her were sticking out of the bag, a little more crumpled than before. He took them and smoothed them out, and as he did so, he noticed that they were not in order, neither were they in the disorder which might follow upon a hasty reading. He spread them out and examined them closely. He followed the mark of her thumb—there were food stains here and there and one of them had been burned by a cigarette. But some had not been touched at all.
It was clear to h
im now how the time had flown. They were so hungry that they had gone to the restaurant and gorged themselves. While waiting for the food, Vanya no doubt had suggested glancing over the letter. The letter? Why Hildred had almost forgotten about it. They read it together, and Vanya tilted back in her chair and blew smoke rings while Hildred waded through the soft slush. A comment now and then—“I really think you love him!” or “What does he mean when he calls you his vulture?” Etc. And then the waiter arrived with the food and the letter was placed to one side and a little soup was spilled on it. And the waiter smiled probably as he read a few lines over Hildred’s shoulder. And after they had laughed and chatted, made plans for the morrow, or perhaps for the night itself, the coffee came along. The butts piled up in the swimming saucers. And then, no doubt, they stuck their elbows on the table and leaned forward to talk brilliantly, because when they struck a pose like this the eyes of everybody in the restaurant were fastened on them. They probably admitted to each other that they were unique in the world, and the world a sordid, stupid place. And as they prattled on thus their elbows dug deeper into the table and the time flew and they were very happy sitting there together and their bellies were full.
He closed his eyes as if to bring back more vividly the scene he imagined. Now and then his lips moved. Clearly he saw it all, directed their movements and their speech. Just as a play can be more real than reality so he was able to interpret for them what they were unable to interpret for themselves. Every detail stood out in a blinding, scorching light. Even to the last gesture when Hildred, swinging through the revolving door, a laugh on her lips, suddenly remembered that she was to bring something back with her. Yes, and the waiter running up in his greasy jacket, flourishing the crumpled pages. . . .