Barbary Shore

  I was unprepared for this. “Kindest man?” I parroted.

  “Oh, you are. You mustn’t be ashamed of it. You know you’re so fussy, and you’re old-maidish, and you’re proud, but underneath it there’s such kindness in you.” Trembling, she lit another cigarette. “I knew only one man who was kinder than you, and he was a middle-aged man, a teacher in a little school in a small town, and he had beautiful hands, and he used to love to touch little boys with them because the little boys were so beautiful, only he never did dare; he would keep his hands in his pockets. They used to nickname him Wing, and they treated him dreadfully.”

  “Why I read that,” I blurted. “It’s a story.”

  She looked at me like a child, a finger upon her lower lip. “It is, that’s right.” And she gave her husky laugh with its overtone of exhaustion. “I’m getting silly again.” Her head was lowered. “Oh, let’s go home.”

  We started out across the park, her palm dry and feverish against my hand. When we had gone a little way she halted, murmured, “I forgot something,” and fled back to the bench. By the time I followed she had recovered the bottle and held it aloft with triumph. “It would have been a shame to leave it there. Let’s find someone to give it to.” She set off immediately, prancing from bench to bench to examine the sleepers, and stopped finally before an old man with a white stubble. He was snoring powerfully. “Listen to him.” She mocked his sounds. “Here, old graybeard,” she murmured, slipping the flask into his coat pocket, “with this for sustenance may your dreams be sweet.” And she darted away with a delighted laugh.

  I caught up with Lannie after running a few steps, and encircled her waist. Beneath the cotton of the pajamas, I felt her grow rigid. “Philanthropist,” I murmured.

  She smiled at me. Yet her body, independent of what she might desire, would not bend, and along the length of my arm I felt its constraint. Soon I released her, and we strode along hand in hand toward the rooming house.

  I can hardly account for the route I took. Call it curiosity. In any case I passed by the bar where Hollingsworth had made his date, and found him standing on the street with the waitress. His head lowered, he was plunged into a conversation directed at her throat.

  “Well … hello,” he broke off, as he saw us, his head going up, and his eyes flickering from the waitress to us and back again.

  I introduced Lannie, and we stood around in a circle not saying anything at first. She and Hollingsworth examined each other closely, but with a surface indifference almost successful in its subtlety. The silence continued, uncomfortable only to myself and to the waitress, who was probably petulant at the interruption.

  Then Hollingsworth began to perform. Cockily, he extracted his lighter for one of Lannie’s cigarettes, and flourished it in my direction. “Well, I guess this has been a long night for certain people,” he said at last.

  Lannie puffed at the light he had furnished, her body inclined from the waist, her eyes staring at him. With her free hand she still held mine, the pressure intent.

  “I’m the new roomer,” Lannie said in a husky voice.

  Hollingsworth put the lighter back in his pocket. He cleared his throat. “Well, I know I’ll be pleased to have you for a neighbor, Miss Madison,” he said. “I think you’ll find our place a very interesting specimen of life in New York.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” Lannie said vaguely.

  “Indeedy,” said Hollingsworth. “And the roomers are generally a high class of people with some culture.” He tapped the pipe against his teeth. “I’ve always been very concerned with culture.”

  The waitress, who was standing to one side, interrupted brusquely. “Hey,” she said, poking him in the ribs, “I thought your name was Ed Leroy.”

  I had introduced him as Hollingsworth. He pivoted slowly, and said, “I told you, Alice. My name is Ed Leroy Hollingsworth. Perhaps you missed the last name.”

  “I don’t like it,” the waitress said. “Come on, let’s get going. I’m tired.” She stared with suspicion at Lannie’s pajamas. “I want to get home.”

  “In a minute,” Hollingsworth snapped at her. With a look at me, he bent toward Lannie and asked, “Miss Madison, what do you think of our friend, Mr. Lovett?” And in his manner he made the question part of a game which linked them together.

  “Oh, I think he’s been very kind to me,” Lannie said, accepting his gambit.

  Hollingsworth nodded. “He’s one of the best. We’re great friends. Lovett’s more studious than I am, very bookish, but he’s a capital fellow. And they’re other capital fellows in the house too.”

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m wilder. I don’t know why, but I’m very wild. Wine and women, you know, although nothing that’s off-color.” He spoke as if I were not there.

  “I’m glad I moved in,” Lannie said with a burst of feeling as strong as it was unaccountable. Hollingsworth nodded his head to this, but I had the idea he was hardly listening. “Yes,” he went on, “I suppose I am the complex type. What do you think, Mr. Lovett?”

  “I agree with Alice. I want to go home.”

  “Yeah,” Alice chimed in.

  Hollingsworth smiled. “I guess now is not the time to embark upon long conversations. But sometime I would like to talk to you, Miss Madison.” He shook hands with both of us quite formally, and then stared again at Lannie. “You have an interesting dress,” he said in his mildest voice. “I suppose that’s the new advanced style.”

  Lannie looked up and nodded her head vigorously. “I knew you would like it, or at least I had hoped you would; there are so many fools and no one sees anything.” We were all silent, and she was shivering.

  After a moment we separated. Moving down the street, I heard Hollingsworth say to the waitress, “Well, come on, sister.”

  Lannie and I walked on for some distance without speaking. Her hand, still squeezing mine, gripped harder and harder, until with a sudden motion that might have signified a decision taken, she pulled it away. “He’s very beautiful,” she said without preamble.

  “Oh, extremely,” I said.

  “No, you could never understand. He has no idea of himself, and that’s what makes him so exciting. I love his pious little voice.”

  “I detest it.”

  Lannie stiffened. “Oh, you would. You don’t understand anything.” To my amazement, she was quite angry. “He’s unique, and there are so few who are. And they’re always being condemned.”

  After that we fell silent and walked back without another word. Her head was turned away from me, and I might have thought her in a study if the tension of her body whenever it grazed against mine were not so evident. We climbed the steps of the rooming house, mounted to her floor. At the door I paused, and to my surprise, she invited me in. She was shivering again.

  “You must have a glass of water before you go to bed,” she said in a poor attempt at whimsy.

  I discovered that she had moved the couch to face the wall once more. It must have required some heavy labor, for the two of us had been able to shift it only with difficulty. Now she sprawled upon it, her heels jammed against the baseboard. I sat beside her uncomfortably, and the gray dirty wall, its plaster cracked, stared back at me.

  “I love this,” Lannie said, her voice going on and on as though to pause would mean collapse, “if I had a dime I’d go out and buy some popcorn and sit here eating it. And whenever I wanted I’d throw a piece upon the floor.” Lazily, smoke drifted from her mouth. “The wall is so nice. I can make it anything I want. This afternoon when you left, I kept looking at it, and I decided it was Guernica, and I could hear the horses screaming.” She sighed to herself.

  With a stubbornness she seemed to evoke, I asked, “What are you going to do for a meal tomorrow?”

  “I won’t be bothered thinking about it now.”

  “Do you have any money left?”

  “Millions.” One foot was lifted into the air, and with a slow absorption s
he waggled her moccasin which was loose at the heel. After a moment she took it off, poked a finger through the gap in the sole, and twirled it about her hand.

  “Let me lend you money,” I persisted.

  She flung the moccasin against the wall. “Do whatever you please.”

  I was busy with private calculations, wondering how much I could give her from my small cache. “Will you take twenty dollars?” I said at last.

  “I’ll take whatever you give me,” she said passively. She yawned. “Oh, Mikey, you’re such a guardian. You should be handling investment funds for silly widows.” She cocked her arms behind her head. Abruptly, she giggled. “I ought to make love to you. I’ve always wanted to make love to a guardian and whip his behind with his watch fob. What could be more exciting?” She nudged the ash from her cigarette with a finger tip.

  I said nothing. I carried the residue of this long day and longer night. My limbs ached, my stomach was uneasy, my body was tense. As she talked my responses lost proportion. I would be indifferent to some of her most astounding declarations, and in turn would stifle the irritation she might summon by a passing word. I gazed at her wall, suffering its oppressive emptiness, discovering upon it none of the distractions she would claim.

  When I looked at her again there were tears in her eyes. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know.” She scoured her moist cheek with the back of her fist. “Oh. We always have to move, don’t we? I know I’ll have to leave this room, and Mikey I’d like to stay here and close the door and have my food slipped in through a trap. Tomorrow I’ll have to go looking for a job.”

  “Lannie, where were you living last?”

  She smiled ruefully. “I had an apartment.” Somehow this was difficult to believe.

  “How did you lose it?”

  “I donated it to the enemy.” Lannie gave a small laugh. “What a stupid girl I was.” She looked at me, and then she drawled, “I got kicked out of my own bed this morning, and I was the one who invited him there. Never show kindness to a drunk.”

  “Why didn’t you make him leave?”

  She gave her smile of wisdom to indicate that I was innocent indeed. “Oh, I couldn’t. That wasn’t possible.” Lannie tossed her head mockingly. “And anyway I don’t remember, not exactly. I woke up, and then I don’t know what happened except that I was on the subway, and I had been sleeping. He threw these pajamas at me as I was going out.”

  “But …?”

  “Oh, I took pity on him. He was just an old drunk, and they’d canned him from his job, and so I took him in. He’d worked in the same agency I was in once, and he had beautiful black hair and fat red cheeks. And he just stayed, and I think he knew that I was getting bored with him, and he hated me because I was all he had. And today he just ordered me out. I’ll never talk to him again.”

  “But why did you let him keep it?”

  She shrugged. “Descend to cabbage and the pinching of a penny? How mean! Let him fight over some walls, let him come after me and take everything I have, one after another, and don’t you understand in giving it away I win every time.” She smiled with forced delight. “Besides I was bored with my apartment.”

  I laughed suddenly, explosively, as much from exasperation as from mirth. Lannie yawned. “You’re much nicer when you smile,” she said. She reached over and stroked my face. “You have a wonderful nose,” she told me. “I love the way it’s turned up and your septum is pink. I knew a girl once with a nose like that, and she was very cruel.”

  I yawned too, and stood up. “I’m going to bed,” I announced.

  “Oh, you can’t leave me yet.” She said this casually, but for an instant I had a glimpse into the hours she anticipated alone and the bare walls which weighed upon her.

  “I’ve got to. I’m exhausted,” I said.

  Lannie led me to the door, and then halted before it, barring my exit. Her head was at the level of my chin, and I kissed her forehead almost automatically. With a quick motion she came into my arms, thrust her mouth upward, and kissed me. Her lips were feverish, and her slender body bore against mine, hugging me in a wiry embrace. Intoxicated with fatigue we clung to each other, swayed across the room to sprawl upon her bed.

  Her body arched against mine, rigid to the touch, her mouth tight as though she must repel even as she would accept. I held her in my arms, gave her my body to which she could cling, and remotely without tenderness or desire or even incapacity I performed, riding through the darkness of my closed eyes while she sobbed beneath me in fathomless desperation.

  If it were love, it was also fear, and we might have huddled behind a rock while the night wind devoured the plain.

  “Save me,” I heard her cry.

  SIXTEEN

  ONCE, McLeod had said to me, “You know, m’bucko”—his voice relishing the outrageous brogue he would affect whenever he said anything which he had considered for some time—“it’s onanists the world is forever shaping, and if you have a taste for dialectics, it demands little more to see that it is only by onanism at last one can receive the world.” He had vented the sound of his private mirth, and stared at me. “If this doesn’t ring a bell for you now, it’ll toll a mass someday, for ye’re in the archetype.”

  I stayed with Lannie through the night, and it was almost dawn when I climbed the stairs to my room. Yet I did not fall asleep for over an hour, every nerve of my body protesting against the events of that long day which had just ended. I would dream, and then I would be awake again. And despite myself, deprived of the rest of afterlove, I exhumed the hours I had just spent, and twitched irritably in my bed.

  I had not really wanted Lannie; I had driven myself, not once, but again and another. She had wept, she had … why recount the details? It was done, and I had my regrets. I would end it as soon as possible.

  Unhappily, our decisions are more plastic than we would allow, and in the afternoon when I awoke, my night with Lannie lost what had been without attraction. If it had been with the image of other women I had scoured my loins for her, it was now with the thought of Lannie that I lay comfortably in my bed, and her face in recollection seemed beautiful. I could have the desire to hold her, to embrace her gently.

  McLeod’s words returned to me then, and more. Out of that long day and longer night, I could be troubled again by the talk we had had on the bridge and the memory which followed it. Where had I learned the words I said to him, and what remained of them now? I would force my mind to yield more, but nothing could be forced; from the effort I came up with no more than a question. What, I heard myself asking in the silence of the room, are the phenomena of the world today? And into that formal void my mind sent an answer, the tat to the tit; I could have been reciting from a catechism.

  The history of the last twenty years may be divided into two decades: a decade of economic crisis, and a decade of war and the preparations for new war.

  Hands at my forehead, I repeated this as though in rocking back and forth I might find momentum to carry me further, to provide, from that time when I had languished like a hand-maiden before a revolution which did not come, one face, one friend, one name which might present itself and offer a thread for the maze. But nothing followed. Nothing but the single answer: a decade of economic crisis and a decade of war and the preparations for new war. My mind had its own pleasure and I could force nothing. After a while, I wearied, went down to eat a meal, strolled afterward through a short walk.

  When I returned I stopped on an impulse at Guinevere’s door and rang her bell, hearing it sound with such clarity that I could picture her apartment in all its confusion, the beds unmade, the bread crumbs upon the table, and somewhere on the floor a puddle of coffee. Would she be drowsing, or did she sit in the kitchen now, staring into space? I rang again and listened. In one of the recesses I heard her footsteps, slow and listless, as she dragged toward the door. Then there was no sound at all, and I imagined her motionless in the hall, standing with her weight balanced, one f
oot to answer, and one to retreat. So I rang still again, and as if it were only a cumulative pressure which could summon her, the steps became heavier, and with a steady slovenly clumping of her slippers she approached the door, paused with her hand on the knob, and slowly opened it a crack.

  We stared at each other. I was shocked. Face swollen, hair undone, her eyes stared emptily ahead as though I were not there. For two seconds, three, perhaps four, we stood looking at each other, a minim of recognition in her face, and then, her mouth pinched and small without make-up, she fluttered her lips in an attempt to speak, and instead, closed the door in my face.

  I shrugged, and climbed the stairs to Lannie’s apartment. But the encounter with Guinevere, delayed in its reaction, fell upon me as I knocked on Lannie’s door. I was abruptly depressed. From inside her room, I could hear the sound of laughter, and though I continued to knock, I wanted to slip away.

  The laughter ceased, and there was silence on the other side of the door. When she welcomed me, her eyes were without enthusiasm. She squeezed my hand, erected a smile, and that was all.

  In the corner sat Hollingsworth. He had selected with his dependable instinct the only wooden chair in the room, and he sat upon it stiffly, his hands turned in upon his knees, his narrow backside biting no more than the last inch of seat, so that he might have been a cadet, his body frozen into an agony of immobility, his mind shrieking, “Brace! Brace before they make you brace.”

  The muscles at the side of his mouth tensed, his teeth were revealed in a greeting. “Well, this is a surprise and a pleasant interruption,” he said.

  Lannie dropped in a chair, her body twisted, her head lolling over the arm. Strewn about her upon the floor were a dozen cigarette butts. “Oh, Mikey, I’ve had so many visitors today,” she said. “I woke up this morning, and there was a mouse upon the bed, and we talked for a while, and he told me many things, although I found him pompous and a bore at last. And although he would not admit it I knew that he was Christ, and I wept for him because instead of dying, he’s come back, and now he’s lived too long. I told him he should go back to his cross, and without a word, he put on his hat, jumped off the bed, and left through a hole in the wall.” A wan smile passed her sallow mouth. “And then there was another visitor, come to bring a towel, and he was like the mouse too, only I hated him. He said his name was McLeod, and he was a friend of yours.”