Barbary Shore

  “McLeod?”

  “Yes.” Her yellow fingers fluttered a match at her unlit cigarette. “He sat, and he talk talk talked as if he thought that he could tell me something when I knew him immediately for what he was. And then he said as he was leaving that he was Guinevere’s husband, and I should have said that I was sorry for her.” Lannie’s face, to my surprise, was venomous.

  “He told you that?”

  She inhaled nervously and expelled the smoke with uncharacteristic force. “She’s so beautiful and alive, and he can say with that voice of his, in modesty no less, that he’s no better than she, when all the time I was with him I wanted to scream.”

  Hollingsworth smiled. “And then it was yours truly who came to pay Miss Madison a visit.”

  “Yes.” She beamed. “Oh, I don’t know what I would have done without him. When your friend left, I walked around, and I knew that if I didn’t have something to drink I’d be ill, for how long may a bee live without nectar?” Lannie hugged herself, her thin arms protruding like stalks from the soiled cotton cuffs of her pajamas. And her voice suddenly hoarse, she said, “Lovett, you said you’d loan me some money.”

  I handed her two ten-dollar bills.

  “Mikey’s my banker,” she said to Hollingsworth with an ironic gesture.

  The sum of many small frustrations exploded for me. “I’m not your banker, and if you think I don’t need that money, you’re mistaken.”

  She danced out of her chair and over to where I sat on the sofa and pinched my cheek once. “He is a banker,” she said to Hollingsworth, “but he’s a charming one, and though he suffers through investment, and the black hand of money grips his heart in the middle of the night, he cannot escape his desire to be charming, and so he must always raise bond issues for Bohemia and resent his fate.” She whirled about with amusement. “Those are the worst bankers of all when they turn upon you.”

  I recognized without much elation that this performance was for Hollingsworth, and not a word of her speech, not a gesture in the dance of her limbs was uninspired; she might have been a geisha tracing the ritual of the tea ceremony. And Hollingsworth sat and watched her, his buttocks seemingly suspended a millimeter above his seat, a polite look upon his face, an expression of mild curiosity in his eyes as if he would be the hick who has paid money and now watches the carnival girls strip their costumes. This is the magical evil of the big city, but he is wary of being taken in: “I come to see pussy,” he says to his neighbor, “and I ain’t seen pussy yet.” He will smash the carnival booths if he is cheated. Perhaps he has come to be cheated.

  “I would say,” I offered, “that Ed Leroy here knows more about banking than I do.”

  His eyes blinked at the interruption, and in a small severe voice, he said, “I don’t like to contradict a fellow, but you know very well that my name is Hollingsworth, Leroy Hollingsworth.” He took out the silver and black cigarette lighter, and clicked forth the flame. “Naturally, a fellow who employs his brain power will use another name from time to time, but that’s only common sense.” He turned to Lannie. “Somehow I find it less of a confinement, if you know of what I’m speaking about, when there’s one name for such and such an occasion, and another for a situation that’s not exactly the same.” He smiled expansively. “I always feel as if I can take a deep breath upon such transfers, do you know?”

  “Oh, of course I know,” Lannie said breathlessly, “you’re so wise”—an ecstatic look upon her face. She threw her head back carelessly. “That’s so important and no one understands it, everybody runs and nobody breathes, and when I wake up in the morning I’m choking so.” A nervous hand searching her pocketbook, she pulled forth a toothbrush, and held it up like a standard. “I never can get this in my mouth. I start to brush my teeth, and everything in me says no, no, spit it out.”

  With an abrupt spasm of her fingers she snapped it in half, throwing the handle to one corner of the room, and the bristles to the other. She yawned and murmured contentedly, “Tomorrow, I’m going out to look for a job.”

  I turned to Hollingsworth. “Why is it you’re not working today?”

  He seemed to raise his buttocks another millimeter into the air. “Oh, my vacation has started.” For the first time since I had entered the room, he leaned backward, allowed his shoulders to touch the chair. “I suppose we’ll all be seeing a great deal of each other now.”

  A small but apparent reaction was evident after this statement. His shoulders left the back of the chair, and he was sitting upright again, his eyes concentrating on something, some object, some motion in the wall behind me. I turned around and saw the door handle move, first to the left and then to the right. This was done silently at first, but after several purposeless attempts, it was rattled violently, and then a second later, when this was without effect, a foot began to kick with steady application against the base of the door.

  “Demme in, demme in,” a voice demanded.

  It was Monina. She entered the room with a smile of delight and pranced over to me. Then she curtsied and extended a finger in an aristocratic gesture. “Kiss the boo-boo,” she told me, and I brushed my lips against her hand. Satisfied by this, she rose haughtily, moved toward Lannie, and unable to sustain herself as a queen a moment longer, climbed into her lap. “You kiss me,” she commanded.

  Lannie obeyed, and framed the child’s face with her palms. “Oh, you’re beautiful,” she said to her.

  In response Monina hugged her passionately.

  Hollingsworth hawked his throat. “Hello, Monina,” he said to announce himself.

  The child twisted in Lannie’s arms at the sound of his voice, and then buried her head. Unaccountably, she began to weep.

  “Mommie frightened today.”

  “Why?” Lannie asked.

  “Mommie’s crying.” To say this upset Monina even more, and panting and hiccuping she delivered herself of a long story which I could barely comprehend. She had picked up the rug, or so I translated it, and there were insects beneath. She had gathered a few in her fist and put them into a glass and poured some of Mommie’s boiling coffee water upon them. Then she brought it to Mommie who was lying in bed and crying, and Mommie had thrown the glass to the floor, and screamed that she would get the strap. Monina began to bawl, and Guinevere clasped the child to her breast, and they wept together, and Mommie had cried, “I was afraid of him, but he was going to change our lives; oh, my baby, it would have been all different.” In anguish, she had shrieked, “Oh, my lover’s deserted me.”

  And Monina, her face wrinkled into a parody of Guinevere’s misery, repeated in a high piping voice, “Oh, dover’s durted me, my dover’s durted me.” Somehow, in saying the words she crossed the child’s boundary from real sorrow to the imitation of it so that her delight in herself became greater than the woe she would project, and she luxuriated upon the phrase as if it were a jelly bean of incomparable flavor. When she finished she could contain herself no longer, and giggles, malicious and childwise, tinkled from her mouth. She gave herself to Lannie’s arms, her small body shaken with mirth.

  Hollingsworth had listened to this without expression, without movement save for his foot which slid back and forth upon the carpet. I heard the story through his ears, and it provided me a portrait of Guinevere, perhaps my own as much as his, face swollen with weeping, her features puffed from the hornet’s nest of discovery which had beset her. Hollingsworth would watch her, eyes blinking to the metronome of his brain, his toe pawing her upon the carpet. She was the turtle tumbled onto her back, even as the dream had in advance prepared her. And slowly he wiggled his toe, debating perhaps, remotely tempted to flip the turtle upright again.

  He looked at Monina who was sitting primly on Lannie’s lap, the child at intermission who has forgotten already what is past, and cannot conceive what is to come. Slowly, she wriggled within Lannie’s arms, and revolved her head to stare at Hollingsworth, her mouth sullen again.

  “Monina,” he said, “
do you think that was a nice thing to give those bugs to your Mommie?” He smiled frostily.

  Her reaction was unforeseen. I do not know if his reprimand excited her guilt, if indeed she contained any, or whether it was with a sure grasp that a rebuke from him, from him, was too unjust to bear. In any case she was out of Lannie’s arms and across the room more rapidly than I had believed she could fly. And like a missile whose fuse was her mouth, she buried her teeth into Hollingsworth’s hand, emitting in advance one single shriek which graduated her at a bound from a child to an avenging banshee.

  Hollingsworth was caught by surprise. Unguarded, a moan escaped from his mouth, his eyes opened in fright. What nightmares were resurrected? He sat helpless upon the chair, his head thrown back, his limbs rigid, a convict in the deathroom, his body violated in the spasms of the current.

  “I’m innocent,” he screamed.

  And with the cry, Monina released him, ran weeping out the door and wailing down the stairs.

  Doubled with pain, Hollingsworth grunted, his paw held out before him to reveal in bleeding outline the opposed small scimitars of Monina’s teeth. He writhed back and forth upon the chair, and then tentatively his unmarked hand fumbled through his hair. There was no spot shaven, no electrode upon his skull. He groaned, and mother to himself, supported the bleeding hand with the other, kissed it gently, tenderly, through a welter of self-pity and adoration.

  We sat transfixed. As his anguish receded, he sat back, arms dangling, his face pale, sweat upon his brow. “Ohhhhh,” he shuddered. Then he drew upright in the chair, his mouth deadly. “When I see that kid again,” he said, “I’ll cut her fucking heart out.”

  Lannie stood and made a vague gesture toward him. “Does it hurt?” she asked inanely, her yellow fingers plucking at the corner of her mouth.

  He extracted a handkerchief from his pocket. “I’m going to see a doctor,” he said; “this can be a serious injury.” His voice was recapturing the anonymity with which he cloaked himself. “I must apologize for swearing, being as there were ladies present.” When Lannie made no response, her fingers only nipping her mouth more fiercely, he continued. “It was such a sudden shock, after all. These things have a way of taking a fellow by surprise.” Deftly, he wrapped the handkerchief about his hand. “Some children are badly brought up, it’s a question of manners I would say.” He stood up, and in the way he grasped his chair for support, I knew that he was still shaken. “One can never tell. A child’s bite can be poisonous, I’ve heard.”

  Lannie could restrain herself no longer. Arms at her side, she laughed helplessly, “Oh, what a fool . . I never dreamed,” she gasped. “You’re stupid.”

  Hollingsworth suffered through it, fumbling in his shirt pocket to find a cigarette, and managing at last to light it. “Some people have a very unusual sense of humor,” he muttered.

  Delighted, I joined her. We laughed at him without pause for almost a minute, while he remained motionless, his face losing at last even its caricature of outraged dignity, so that he seemed to wait, patient and resolved, until the insult had run its course.

  “Are you done now?” he asked her coldly, and for its effect upon her he might have pressed a button. Her laughter stopped. She quivered through every inch of her body, and I realized suddenly how close she was to hysteria.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  “I suppose I’ll go now,” he said. He started toward the door, and with his hand upon the knob, he sniffed at his bandage, and delivered himself of a speech.

  “I have a great deal of interest in all my friends, and so after I left that girl Alice with whom I spent an interesting few hours, if you know what I mean, even though she was what I would call a coarse girl of low upbringing, the passion’s creature sort of thing that one reads about in the newspapers …” The statement had become unwieldly, and he let it lapse to smile pleasantly at us, his youthful face without guile, his yellow hair blending pleasantly with his blue eyes. “In any case, upon my return, I happened to pass this room, and you know there were a few sounds of the sort a fellow can hear very often in New York around four in the morning if he keeps his ears open.”

  “Oh,” Lannie said, “oh, you misunderstand; you do.”

  “Yes, I hope so,” he said modestly, “but I think, Miss Madison, that between you and Mr. Lovett there’s certain kinds of … intimate exchange.”

  “Now, do you want to get out of here?” I asked. A murderous discharge of feeling left my limbs powerless.

  “Leave him alone!” Lannie cried out to me.

  “Oh, I’m going,” Hollingsworth said. He was alert, his weight balanced to parry attack.

  “You’re scum,” I told him.

  “No.” An expression of wistfulness set his features in unaccustomed patterns. “No, I don’t do this to be a mean fellow. I have to do it. You see that’s the only way I’m safe.” And with a curt nod, much as though he regretted what he had just said, he passed through the door.

  Lannie, standing motionless, her arms rigid, her face white, sang after him, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  SEVENTEEN

  NO sooner had the door closed and the sound of his steps disappeared, than Lannie began in the same breath to laugh and to weep. “Terrible. It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,” she kept repeating in a monotonous voice.

  What was terrible I could hardly have said. I followed her mechanically across the room, trying once to encircle her waist with my arm but she flung it off. And each time I attempted to soothe her, she appeared not to have heard me. “Oh, it’s terrible,” she kept saying.

  “What, Lannie?”

  “Ohh.” She dropped into a chair, started to light a cigarette with her trembling hands, and when this proved impossible, threw it to the floor. I brought her a glass of water, and she gulped it with disproportionate effort as though her throat refused to swallow.

  I allowed a few minutes to go by without saying anything, and slowly, measure by measure, she grew calm again. A tired smile widened her mouth. Limp and pale, she remained in her seat, her fingers still shaking. “We should never have treated him that way,” she said at last.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, Mikey, you could never understand him because he’s different, and do you know how rare that is?” She shook her head, watching with an abstract curiosity the quiver of her fingers. “You see he’s consecrated, and we just wander, and every day is new to us and ends by being silly, but he has a purpose and so he’s fortunate.” This time she succeeded in applying a match to her cigarette. “He doesn’t know what he possesses, and I could show it to him.”

  “Then why did you laugh?” I asked.

  “Yes, why?” I thought she was going to answer me; perhaps she even searched a moment for the reply. “Oh, it’s beyond you,” she said finally.

  Yet my question must have had its effect for Lannie became silent again. As the minutes passed without either of us furnishing a word, I sensed melancholy settling upon her. She smoked the cigarette dreamily, her head back, her eyes following the passage of the smoke toward the ceiling. Once or twice she sighed. “There’s no rest,” she muttered. And the smoke curled from her limp hand and clung to her sleeve before drifting upward.

  “Why don’t you tell me what it’s all about?”

  Lannie stood up and walked to the window. Her back to me, she stared through the dirty pane. “When night comes, I’ll be able to see the courtyard better. There’s a pool at the bottom, and I float in the middle with lily pads about my hair, and a bird calls for me. I can hear that clearly.”

  “What are you talking about?” I snapped.

  “I don’t know,” she went on, “who comes before Mr. Ter-Prossamenianvili, and that isn’t even his name. If I could find a record of myself I would tell you.” She perched herself on the window sill, and held out her hand as if to capture the sunlight. “You see, Mikey, they were always putting me on a bed, and then there were hands and the shock. I know what they were doing beca
use each time they gave me the shock it would leave a little less of my brain, and they wanted to render me stupid as others render fat. They hated me, and they made a record of everything they took from my brain, and there was the girl in the corner with the eyeglasses who kept writing everything on the pad, and now it’s in some green filing cabinet. They hated me, and I loved them for their sins.”

  This outburst apparently finished, she remained leaning against the window. The afternoon sun had lowered, and the last rays of light shone from outside. The worn gray nap of the furniture was oppressive again, and the dust-laden air shimmered in the bare and empty spaces of her room. Against a wall the sofa still remained as she had left it, facing no one, its monumental back a reminder of how she must sit when she was alone. I could see her in another chair turned to hide in still another room, and she would be watching the glow of embers in a fireplace. The room would be dark and quiet, and as the coal turned to ash, a chill wind would blow about her. The fire would die, and she would sit there in the darkness, her hand extended toward the whitened embers. And behind the chair with the breath of malevolence, another presence would fill the room, and she could only wait, terror-struck.

  Tears started in my eyes. I could have wept for her. “Lannie,” I said.

  The large brown eyes, liquid and unguarded, looked at me from across the room, and with a pity I offered to her in preference to myself, I heard my voice say, “Don’t you understand? I think I love you.”

  I might have given a blow across the brow for she ducked her head and held her nose as if all the grief she were able to contain had lodged suddenly there. She was aware of me now, and for an instant there was a directness in her response which I had rarely seen. “Mikey, you’re good,” she said.