Barbary Shore

  “With a sadist like you,” I said in an attempt at humor. My answers were invariably dull, my temper ragged. He had a facility for wearing one down, and it was not surprising that when I swung I was wild.

  McLeod nodded. “Oh, yes. When I’d examine my motives, I’d find elements which were ugly enough. I’ve been a bad piece of work in my time.” He said this with great severity.

  Almost immediately, however, he would be prodding again. “Now, I don’t know about you, Lovett, but when I’d drift out of an affair I’d find if I started to think about it that the reasons were somewhat interesting. There were women I quit because I made love to them ineptly, unpleasant as that may be to admit. And then, taking the converse of the proposition, there was a woman or two in love with me and wanting to get married.” He began to laugh, quietly and ferociously. “ ‘What? Get married?’ I would say to them. ‘Who, me? Why I thought it was understood from the beginning that this was on a give and take basis.’ ” His mouth curled, his voice whined in a grotesque of outraged innocence. “Girlie, you got the wrong number. I thought it was understood we were modern individuals with a modern viewpoint.” He roared with laughter now. “Oh, my mother.” And then, his mouth mocking me, McLeod said, “That’s another one belongs with the driftwood.”

  “Now, look,” I’d object, “does a man have to get married every time he starts a relation with a woman?”

  “No.” He lit a cigarette, amused with me. “You see, Lovett, there’s a difference between you and me. You’re honest. I never was. I’d start off with the lady, and we’d have a nice conversation at the beginning about how neither of us could afford to get tied up, all understood, all good clean healthy fun.” His voice was steeped in ridicule. “Fine. Only you see, Lovett, I could never let it go at that. The old dependable mechanisms would start working in me. I’d begin operating. You know what I mean? I’d do everything in my power to make the girl love me—when you think of the genius I’ve squandered in bed. And sure enough there’d be the times when I’d talk her into being in love, when I’d worry her to death until there was never a man in the world who made love like me.” He coughed. “But once she admitted that.… finito! I was getting bored. I thought it was time we drifted apart.” He laughed again, at himself and at me. “Why, when the little lady would suggest marriage you should have seen me go into my act. ‘You’re welshing on the bargain,’ I would tell her, ‘I’m disappointed in you. How could you have betrayed me so?’ ” Once more he roared with laughter. “Oh, there was a devilish mechanism in it. You see, she betrayed me, you get it, she betrayed me, and it was time for us to drift apart.”

  “I’m to take it that the shoe fits?”

  McLeod looked out his window at the apartment house beyond. He seemed to be listening intently to the clanging of the steam donkey on the docks below the bluff, working overtime into the night. “I can’t say, Lovett. It’s always a good idea to know oneself.”

  “I think I do.”

  His face was still impassive, his thin mouth straight. “I suspect in your case there are special conditions.” Casually, he flicked the next sentence at me. “Mind telling a man how you got that patch on your skull?”

  I was caught without guard. “It’s not your business,” I managed to stammer, and I could feel myself blushing with anger.

  He nodded without surprise, and continued in the same casual tone. He could have been a scientist examining a specimen. “My guess is that there’re other tattoos on your skin.”

  “Guess away.”

  “You need maintain no front with me,” McLeod said quietly. “It’s friendly curiosity.”

  “Anything you want to know,” I murmured.

  He did not answer directly. “The analysis I gave of your motives and mine in drifting out of an affair is very curious.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not the least bit true for either of us. I presented it merely as a construction. I, for example, have never been tormented by excessive sexual vanity.”

  “Then what were you getting at?”

  McLeod shrugged. “I was interested in the way you spoke so casually. It would not be surprising if the affair with the little lady you mentioned were more painful than that to you.”

  He was not far wrong. Casual it had been for her, and painful for me. “Possibly,” I admitted with some discomfort.

  “You see, Lovett, the thing I noticed from the beginning is a certain passion to pass yourself off like anyone else. Perhaps someday you’ll tell me why you choose to stay in this rooming house, a lonely proposition I should think.”

  “I want to be by myself, that’s all,” I said.

  McLeod went on as if I had not spoken. “A young man might do that who was seriously alone, and had lost most of the normal forms of contact. Or”—and he puffed at his cigarette—“it’s possible that somebody like you stays here and talks to me because it’s your job and you’re paid to do that.” With a startling intentness his eyes looked into mine, waiting for some informative flicker perhaps.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “No … Well, maybe you don’t, m’bucko. Maybe you don’t. You’re not the type, I expect,” McLeod said cryptically. “More like you to drift,” and he was silent for a long time afterward.

  Such conversations were hardly soothing. I would leave him to spend troubled hours by myself while the questions he had asked so easily went wandering for an answer. There were times when I shunned his company.

  And days after I moved in, I found myself still thinking of Guinevere. She would be so fine for me. Her hips waggled in invitation; she was obtainable. In retrospect I understood that I had gone to visit McLeod the first time with some idea of learning about her casually. Guinevere’s name, through lack of opportunity, had not been mentioned, and now it was impossible. No matter how flatly I might inquire about her, McLeod would be certain to appreciate the reason for my curiosity.

  By shifts I did my work, went for long walks through the hot streets of Brooklyn, and apportioned the sixteen dollars a week I allowed myself for meals in a lunchroom, a few drinks, and a movie. It was quiet, it was lonesome, and the last evenings of spring I tasted vicariously, watching the young lovers parade the streets of the vast suburban mangle which extends beyond the border of Brooklyn Heights to the dirt, the popcorn underfoot, and the quick sordid gaiety of Coney Island, sweet and transient, soon to be swept away in the terrible and superheated nights of midsummer.

  FOUR

  AFTER a week Mrs. Guinevere came to the room with a change of linen. Once again she was dressed uniquely. Although it was nine o’clock in the evening, she wore a nightgown over some underclothing whose complex network of straps could be seen upon her shoulders. This ensemble of slips, girdles, gowns and bands was covered by a short flowered bathrobe open at the throat to exhibit her impressive breast.

  “Oh … hello,” I said, and found it difficult to add anything. I was too absorbed in what I had been writing to make the transition smoothly. “I guess I owe you four dollars,” I managed to say.

  “Yeah.” Guinevere seemed uninterested in the money.

  I rummaged through my bureau drawer, came up with my wallet, and paid her. In the meantime she had stripped my bed and tossed a fresh sheet and towel upon it. When she finished, she sighed loudly and purposefully.

  “How’re things going?” I asked.

  “So-so.”

  This would hardly do. “You look tired,” I said intimately. “Sit down.”

  Guinevere glanced at the pile of folded sheets upon her arm and shrugged. “All right, maybe I will,” she said, “seeing as the doors open.” The sentence was invested with a wealth of vulgar gentility.

  Perched beside me on the bed, she sighed again. I lit a cigarette and discovered that my hands were not at all steady. I was very aware of her.

  “How about letting me have one?” she asked.

  Inwardly, I was shaking. I did something she mu
st have found surprising. I picked up the pack and the matches, and placed them in her lap although we were sitting not a foot apart. She opened her large blue eyes then, glanced at me, and waved the match to the tobacco. I had no idea what we would talk about.

  Guinevere solved that for me. “What a terrible day I’ve had,” she sighed.

  “The linens?”

  “No.” She shook her head dramatically and stared at me. “No, I’ve been having trouble with my nerves.” Her lipstick, an experimental bluish pink, had been applied this once to conform to the real shape of her lips, and it made her look less attractive. “What’s the matter with your nerves?” I asked.

  She fingered a curl in her red hair. “I’m just too high-strung, that’s all.” Her eyes came to rest on my typewriter, and I have the idea that for the first time since she entered the room, she knew where she had seen me before. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?

  I nodded, and she said what I expected her to say. “You know, I could be a writer. I tell you when I think of all the real-life human dramas I’ve lived among”—her voice took on the shadings of a radio announcer—“and the experience I’ve had, for I’ve lived a full life although you wouldn’t know it to look at me, why I tell you I could make a fortune just putting it all down on paper.”

  The lack of contact between us was considerable. Her voice sad and reflective, she recited to an unknown audience. I coughed. “You ought to sit down and write.”

  “No, I couldn’t. I can’t concentrate.” Her hand played over the pile of sheets. “Today is linen day, and do you know I haven’t been able to do a thing. I just sat and looked at those linens until my husband came home, and he had to cook supper for me—oh, I had a horrible experience last night.”

  “What?”

  “It gives me the creeps to talk about it.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  She fingered her bosom, adjusting the brassiere to conceal a quarter inch more of the gorge between her breasts. “Well, you know I got the downstairs apartment, and we keep the windows open in this weather, and guess what happened? A cat got in and crawled over the bed around four A.M., and I woke up and saw it looking me in the eye.” She sighed dolefully again. “It’s a wonder I didn’t wake the whole house with my screaming. My husband had to calm me for an hour. And this morning I opened the cupboard, and that same cat, a big black thing, jumped out at me, and scratched my face. Look!” She showed me a faint red line on her cheek.

  “It happened, and now it’s done,” I said.

  She blinked her eyes against the unshielded glare of the light, a single bulb which hung from a cord above the desk. “No, it isn’t.” Dramatically she whispered, “Do you know what that cat was? It was the Devil.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or not, and so I grinned doubtfully.

  “Yessir,” she went on, “you may not know it, but that’s one of the manifestations of the Devil’s spirit. A black cat. It’s in the Good Book that the Devil, the Lord’s disinherited brother, is a manifestation as a cat, a black cat. That’s why black cats are unlucky.”

  I wondered if this were a joke. Her words had tumbled out in a pious breathless voice which had little relation to the first picture I kept of her, hand on hip, jeering at Dinsmore, “All you writers are nuts.”

  “Well, how are you sure of this?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s in my religion. I’m a Witness, you see. My husband and myself, we’re Witnesses. And the reason the Devil came is because he’s making a last attempt to catch me. You see I’ve got a lot more knowledge now, and the more you got the less chance he has to catch you. So he’s putting Temptation in my way.

  I could not help it. This time I smiled.

  “Oh, you don’t believe me, but if I were to tell you the kind of Temptation I’ve had this last week.” Here she gave a practical example. “Honestly, every time I’ve turned around, there’s been another man propositioning me.”

  Her plump hand darted into the space between her breasts and gave the brassiere a hefty tug. It began immediately to slide down, and I found it difficult not to stare.

  “If they propositioned you, they must have had some reason,” I suggested slyly.

  “What?” she cried raucously. “You don’t mean to tell me you characters need any help. You run after us like a bunch of hound dogs.”

  Sensing that the continuation was not meet to what she had been saying, her voice became sad again. “I don’t know,” she said, “the world is so full of sin. Nobody loves his neighbor any more. On Judgment Day, the Witnesses teach that Christ is coming back, and we’ll all have to stand up and be counted.”

  “Not many of us will pass.”

  “Exactly. That was what I was telling my husband. You know, you’re not a dumb fellow. I could tell from the first moment that you had brains.” As she blew out the smoke, she pursed her mouth, and I had the passing idea she expected a kiss. She continued, however, to talk. “Now, I don’t know anything about politics, but it seems to me that everything’s going wrong today. Everybody’s turning his back on the Lord. We’re going to Gethsemane, that’s the truth. We’re going to be destroyed.”

  I listened to an automobile roar through the street below. Its muffler was broken, and the blast of the exhaust quivered through the warm evening and stirred the air in my room. I could see the royal blue of the summer sky as it deepened into night. I sat there trying to remember the biblical meaning of Gethsemane. “Yes,” she continued sadly, “you’re all goners because you’ve deserted the true way. I tell you there’s going to be a world catastrophe.” In the same tone, without transition, she asked, “What religion are you?”

  “I don’t have any,” I told her.

  “Then you’re damned.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She shook her head. “Listen, I used to be like you, but I found out there’s going to be wars and plagues and famines, and the Witnesses’ll be the only ones saved because they bear true witness to the ways of the Lord, and they don’t have false idols. You know I won’t salute the flag, and nobody can make me cause it’s in my religion.”

  “The Witnesses are the only ones to be saved?”

  A fair question. She seemed perplexed. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure.” She could have been a clubwoman discussing the best method of running a benefit. “Probably it’s just going to be our organization, but there might be a couple of other organizations, and maybe, this could be, a combination of our organization and a partial membership of one or two other organizations.”

  Guinevere lit another of my cigarettes. “It’s funny you being here,” she said casually; “I mean just taking this room.”

  “Have to live somewhere,” I murmured.

  “Yeah.” She considered this. “You writers are weird guys. Never know what to make of you.” Her speech completed, she dumped the sheets on her arm, and stood up. “I got to go,” she told me. “Pleasant talking to you.”

  I tried to detain her. “How would you like to clean up the room for me?” I offered.

  “Clean the room?” she asked flatly.

  “I know you’re not obliged to do it, but I was wondering—is it worth a buck to you?” Immediately, I was horrified. The dollar would come out of my meals.

  “It isn’t the money. You know I’m very busy,” she said. “This place may not look like much, but it’s a man-sized job.”

  “You can find time.” Now that she was reluctant I had lost my regrets over the dollar.

  “I don’t know. I’m going to have to think about it, Lovett.”

  Merely by using my name, she created another mood between us. Suggestions of her rough intimacy with Dinsmore were bandied. “I don’t know, you crazy guys, didn’t you ever hear of cleaning your own room and saving a buck?”

  “We’ll talk about it,” I said smoothly. “I’ll see you in a day or so about this, I suppose …”

  She nodded with disinterest. “I’m not hard to find. I never go any place
.” Kicking the open door with her foot, she mumbled something about, “Work, work, every goddamn day.”

  On the stairs she called back a last time.

  “You better clean the room yourself.” I could hear Guinevere clumping down in her bedroom slippers.

  FIVE

  MY friendship with McLeod progressed in no familiar way. I grew to like him, but I learned no more than he had told me the first time. I knew where he worked, I thought I knew where he had been born, and with dexterity he managed to offer nothing else. It seemed as if we always ended by talking about me; to my surprise I discovered myself telling him one day about the peculiar infirmity I was at such pains to conceal from everyone else. He heard me through, nodding his head, tapping his foot, and when I was finished he murmured, “I suspected as much, I have to admit.”

  His next remark astonished me. Sniffing the air as though it were a sample to be tested, he added in a soft voice, “Of course you’re presented with a unique advantage.”

  “What?”

  “You need furnish no biography for yourself. And if you think that’s not a benefit for certain occupations …” He let the comment die in a silence he created, and asked no questions.

  Yet there were incidents, trivial enough, upon which he placed curious emphasis. At night he was often out of his room, and apparently concerned that I should not be curious about his absence, he would go out of his way to present the reason. “There was a particular party I had to see last night,” he might say. “Feminine.” The corner of his mouth curling with mockery, he would go into his solitary laughter while I waited with an uncomfortable smile, not knowing at what it was directed.

  He interested me a great deal. I was certain he was relatively uneducated, yet his intelligence was acute, and from passing references, it was apparent he had read and absorbed a surprising number of books. I had a theory McLeod had begun his serious studies—it was difficult to think of him reading for pleasure—comparatively late, and had spent his time with major works. The collection in his bookcase indicated little personal taste. I said something about this once and he answered glumly, “Taste, m’boy, is a luxury. I don’t have enough money to dance around with this and that. Nor the time either.” It was obvious, I deduced, that he must set aside perhaps a dollar a week, gleaned from petty sacrifices, and when he had saved enough he would buy the particular book he wanted at the moment. Such denial would cost him something, but he gave little evidence how it might pinch, cocking his sneer at the world and seeming oblivious of any other existence beyond the stale cabbage smell of our dark and dusty rooming house.