But although she couldn’t draw she sure could paint; she hurled and stabbed and troweled the greasy muck of many colors at the defenseless canvas in a fury of ecstasy, dancing back and forth like a fencer. He loved it. She was dedicated, she was serious, she was far more serious and dedicated about her work than Henry was about his. As she often pointed out. And what was Henry’s work anyhow? He didn’t know. To be a philosopher? That’s not work, that’s life.
Myra’s nonobjective push-and-pull abstract expressionism was basic schmierkunst in his view, lacking form, depth, subject, object, grammar; was all verb and no reference—I am a verb! she sometimes cried out in her sleep, or I am a verb!, while Henry made his adverbial entrance through the nominative case—but at least it had a frame. A purpose. With or without any symbols from the psyche, any echoes from the collective unconscious (her analyst back in Manhattan was a Dr. C. G. Young), she knew what she was doing, and why, and how. I am a verb!
While Henry Lightcap, where was he? Erewhon. Where was Henry when the lights went out? Reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Down in El Culito reading das Denkerkraut.
He showed her the well, which she viewed with distaste. The pump worked but you had to prime it. Always leave this coffee can full of water, he explained, after you use the pump. Why? she asked. Leaky suction valve, he explained—you know what that’s like. She gave him the hard eye: That’s a joke, Henry? That’s some kind of maybe a joke, Lightcap?
He blushed, grinned, tugged his forelock, shuffled about and showed her the shithouse on its little hollow mound of earth among the dead sunflowers and last fall’s fuzzy hollyhocks. Henry, I can’t do it. Sure you can. I can’t, I won’t, it’s impossible. You’ll get used to it, look, it’s clean, I scrubbed it out myself, Myra, Christ, nothing to it, and first thing tomorrow I’m going to whitewash the whole inside. It stinks. No it doesn’t, look, we got a sack of lime here, see, you take this can here and fill it with lime and just…. pour it down the hole. After use. I never smelled anything so rotten in my life. Myra, honey, this is New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, rich multicultural heritage. It smells. This is life, sweetheart, this is art, life, the real thing, la vie bohème, the compost heap of the people, viva la raza, viva la beatniks, viva la Appalachia, what in the name of hell do you want from me? I give you my heart, my soul, my fortune, my life, my sacred honor, what more do you goddamn want?
A bathroom.
He showed her the kitchen. Impossible, she said, checking the dry faucets of the sink—there’s no water. We’ll carry in the water, he explained. We? I. If there’s no water why are these faucets here? They came with the sink. So hook them up, Henry. That involves plumbing, Myra: pipes, fittings, insulation, trenching, a pressure tank, some kind of motorized well pump—about a two-thousand-dollar job, a major construction project and a lifetime of headaches and plumbers’ bills thereafter. You could do the work yourself, she says. We don’t have the tools or the money or the know-how, he says. Your brother Will could do it. To hell with Will, he’s three thousand miles away. She stared at the stained and crusty sink, the gaping black drain hole. If there’s no plumbing where does the water drain to? He opened the cabinet doors and showed her the bucket under the sink.
Henry, this won’t do.
Simplicity, Myra, voluntary simplicity. Simplicity means freedom.
Really? This is 1956, Henry. You’re living in the twentieth century, Henry.
She opened the cupboard doors. Passable, except for a couple of dead mice, which Henry had missed, and a few surviving bands of silverfish. Myra being a city girl was not troubled by the bugs. Bugs she understood. She inspected the gas refrigerator: not only filthy but nonfunctioning. Runs on propane, Henry explained; we’ll get some soon. She looked over the cookstove, a combination wood and gas burner with enameled panels, a big oven with heat gauge built into the door, a water tank and warming compartments above the cooking area. A splendid kitchen stove, thought Henry.
Does it work? Sure it works. He made another little fire to prove it. Smoke rose in greasy strands around the edge of the stove lids. He opened the damper, the fire rumbled happily, the smoke went up the pipe. This is rather nice, she admitted, admiring the nickel-plated trim, the filigree and fretwork, the sculptured iron, the four steel lion’s feet that supported the stove above the surface of the earthen floor.
What kind of floor is this anyway?
He looked down and stared, silent, as if seeing the dark red integument for the first time himself. He kicked at it with the toe of his boot. A few chips of dirt broke off. It’s earth, he said, probably soaked with ox blood.
No.
That’s what gives it the smooth finish.
Disgusting.
That’s life, that’s the tradition, Myra, for christsake.
He led her through the remainder of the building, a dozen further rooms each more cold, dismal, cobwebbed, dusty and decayed than the one before. Storage space, he explained, you’ve got to admit we have plenty of storage space.
But nothing to store, she said; take me back to the train station. Stick it out for one month, Myra, that’s all I ask. One month. You’ll love it. Wait’ll you see those cherry trees start to bloom in March. Think of the rent we’re not paying. Think of our exotic neighbors, Hispanic folkways, a new culture, we could join the Catholic Church and learn to count beads. We’ll fix things up here, invite our friends down, have a party. We’ll have the greatest housewarming party since—Napoleon entered Moscow.
I remember that party, she said. Unmollified but weary of argument, she groped through dark rooms back to the cold bedroom, got into her working garments—long flannel underwear, baggy dungarees, a man’s wool shirt—and returned to the one part of the place she seemed to accept, her studio.
Henry built up the fire in the potbellied stove, fried some eggs for her (we’ll have our own chickens here pretty soon, he reminded her, Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, Plymouth Rocks, a couple of killer-attack roosters for home defense), stirred in the green chilies, served lunch to her on an enamel plate and rebuilt the coffee. She sat in her chair, palette knife in hand, not answering, and stared at the big white off-white canvas on the easel, as if seeking in that immaculate purity the answer to a pretty profound question in her pretty head.
Snubbed but grateful anyway, Henry slunk out front to check on his pickup. The hubcaps had vanished—both of them. We need a dog, he thought, a Doberman, no, a Rhodesian ridgeback with a sweet tooth for little boys. He looked in the bed. His jerrycan of gasoline was gone, along with tow chain, bumper jack and spare tire. The neighborhood welcoming committee. He opened the hood of the truck. The battery had fallen over, as he feared, and was dripping acid sweat. He set the battery upright and rewired it in place with a straightened clotheshanger.
Wiping his hands on a rag, he checked the oil and water. Both were low as expected, since the piston rings were about worn out and the radiator was of the self-draining type, leaky. Just as well for these freezing nights since he couldn’t afford to buy antifreeze.
Mumbling to himself, Henry looked under the truck and found the muffler still on the ground, its connection to the exhaust pipe burned through, unusable. He cut the ends out of a steel beer can with his pocketknife, making a reconnecting sleeve, and restored the assembly to its proper place with more clotheshanger wire. Pleased with his work, the pride of craftsmanship, he drove the truck around the building and into the backyard close to the pump. A winter wind was blowing.
He sat for a while in the cab, staring eastward through his dead apple orchard, past the alfalfa fields and fencerows toward the high desert above the river bottom. The desert, once beautiful, was now an overgrazed, cow-burned waste, but beyond rose the delectable Manzano Mountains edged with frozen snow, rich in firewood and mule deer and wild turkey, a national forest, public property, the commons, only ten miles away by line of sight. If he could get there.
He thought of Myra slapping paint on canvas. Expensive stuf
f that Grumbacher. He thought of poverty. He thought of voluntary simplicity and felt that she might come around again, hoped she’d accept him and his elected mode of living this time, stay with him on the rocky but rewarding road to self-reliance, independence and liberty.
The wind whipped a column of dust over the garden, where a tangle of dead tomato plants straggled across the sun-baked alluvium. The irrigation ditches were full of sand. The fences were down. The neighbors’ horses, goats, dogs wandered freely in and out. Henry noticed a plump yearling kid among the goats and thought of fiesta, a festival. The old privy creaked and groaned, door swinging back and forth on rusted hinges, loosened screws. Three black ravens watched him from their roost on the deadest apple tree. The sun glowered through the overcast from the zenith of its winter arc, deep in the southern sky.
Everything would yet be well. Had to be. Yes, there was work to do, much of it—not least of all that overdue meeting with his thesis committee, the pending French exam, the twice-postponed oral exam, the preparation of his master’s thesis. Much work. Perhaps too much work. Or could it all, somehow, be absorbed—through spongy metaphysics, an absorbent attitude, porous hope?
Down with problems. Think about—the orals. Oral exam: the curious term recalled his favorite student of the previous academic year, a certain Bonnie Colleen McIver. (She with the ponytail, the little round warm mouth, the smoky, racy eyes.) She’d done badly in the written examinations but performed brilliantly at her orals. For Henry. And then betrayed him utterly—breaking his heart—by disappearing into Texas with some cowboy shit kicker with an ag major in screwworm management. Sacrificing a great potential in linguistic analysis for cottonseed cake, block salt, feedlots, windmills and money. Well, essence precedes existence.
He shook off the brief depression.
Work to do! Tangible, manual, concrete and practical work, the kind that invigorates the body, satisfies the soul, soothes the irritable itching of the brain: patch those bedroom windows; cut and haul firewood; find a washtub for Myra to bathe in; repair the breaks in the veranda floor before somebody breaks a leg; check out the flue in the attic; find a ladder and nail down those loose sheets of corrugated steel flapping on the peak roof; look into the local irrigation system, talk with the ditch boss, establish water rights; buy some good laying hens (Henry loved fresh warm brown eggs speckled with chickendirt, nestled in a box of clean straw like an Easter Bunny surprise); shop around for a good all-purpose horse (how could a man live in the country without a horse?); find a pot for Myra to piss in at night; buy or better yet steal a few pecks of seed corn, a sack of pinto beans, some hardy tomato plants and melon seeds—for planting time would soon be here; and best of all get things ready for the grand opening of La Galerie Myra Mishkin, for a consecration of the house, get all their friends (and enemies) down from Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, throw a party like no party ever seen west of the 100th meridian since death came for the archbishop.
Good work to do! Smiling in anticipation, thinking about it, Henry relit his pipe and gazed with pride and satisfaction at the blue sky, the golden desert, the pink and frosty mountains of great good grand New Mexico, Gateway to Arizona.
III
The committee had agreed to meet in Professor Beale’s office but in point of fact no one appeared on time but the examinee, Henry H. Lightcap. He sat in the hard chair as required, facing the window and the glare of the light. Professor Beale’s binoculars—the professor was an avid birder with a life list 740 species long—rested on the windowsill. Outside, beyond an expanse of campus green, was the two-story girls’ dorm, Papaya Hall. A number of coeds lay about on the grass or sat against the modified fake adobe wall, sunning themselves in the late beams of the afternoon. Henry reached for the field glasses. He studied the pretty bird in the skimpy plumage perched on the entrance balustrade. She wore a brief tennis skirt. Her chin rested on her kneecaps. She was reading—yes, The Stranger. L’Etranger. In French. A few pale tendrils of pubic hair, escaping the confinement of her underpants, caught his attention. Also. Henry groaned. And groaned again, with deep and heartfelt passion.
Professor Fred Beale sauntered in, a dapper fellow in gray flannel slacks and blue blazer with brass buttons, tie loosely knotted under his open, unstarched collar. Hello, Lightcap, are you okay? No answer. Sorry if we’ve kept you waiting. The others will be along in a moment. You all right? What do you see out there?
Henry lowered the glasses. Well sir…. He looked again, swinging the glasses in a short arc. Her hair was long, flowing, native blond. A golden-crowned chickadee, sir.
A what? Professor Beale snatched the binoculars from Henry’s hands. No such bird. Where? Where is it?
Henry pointed. There it goes, past that tree. No sir, the other way. Around the dorm. The girl was closing her book and standing up, vaguely disturbed by something. It’s gone now.
Professor Beale replaced the glasses on the windowsill and sat down behind his desk. He looked cross. There’s no such thing as a golden-crowned chickadee, Lightcap. All chickadees have dark caps. Perhaps you saw a kinglet or a verdin. Describe this creature.
I didn’t really get a good look, sir. Kind of pink. It flew very quickly.
Like this? Professor Beale made a rapid fluttering movement with his hand, rising and falling in the air. Or like this? He illustrated with a quick swooping traverse.
Henry looked again out the window seeking ideas, inspiration, intellectual nourishment. The examination not even begun and already he was in trouble. The girl had disappeared. And he was in love.
Like this, sir. He demonstrated a straightforward spiraling motion with extended index finger.
Odd, the professor said, staring at Henry. Very odd. He ransacked the charts in his mind for some clue to proper identification. Pink, you say? Pink?
Two men entered the office, the gaunt and spectral B. Morton Ashcraft, departmental chairman, and Gunther Schoenfeld, broad, Teutonic, fundamental. Greeting Beale and then Henry, they took their places on the more comfortable chairs. In silence for a minute or so the three men meditated upon Henry Lightcap. They were his thesis committee. He was their only master’s candidate. There was no other. Ill-prepared and shocked, wits scattered, Henry waited for the first question.
Well, gentlemen, said Professor Beale, Henry’s personal academic adviser and committee chairman, shall we begin?
Another pause. Professor Ashcraft, existential phenomenologist, lit his pipe. The sweet rich odor of Old Sobranie began to pollute the air. Tell me, Lightcap, he said, how is your master’s thesis coming along?
What thesis was that, Henry thought. Quite well, sir, he said brightly. I’ve got a complete outline prepared and the introductory chapter.
When can we see it?
As soon as I get it typed up. Another week or two.
Typed up? Is it written down?
Henry hesitated. I cannot tell a lie. Yes I can. Oh sure I can. Of course, sir, he said. About forty pages with notes.1
Herr Doktor Associate Professor Schoenfeld pondered Lightcap through the thick lenses of his academician’s safety goggles—needed protection in a career devoted to the arc welding of ideas about ideas into ironclad structures of top-heavy, double-walled, unstable proportions.2 Mr. Lightcap, he said, tell us please eggzackly vat iss subject of thesis.
Henry rattled off the first phrase to pop into his brain: The Function of Erotic Love in the Analysis of Contingent Preconditionals in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. No hesitation. A quick elusion.
Doktor Schoenfeld nodded thoughtfully. Good, good…. The three professors turned their eyes to the east window, to the view of Papaya Hall with its nests of twittering birds beyond the grass, the forsythia, the eucalyptus and the Aleppo pines. Schoenfeld continued: Und dot iss der, so to say, der Zeug for Gebrauch?
Not entirely, sir, but that sums up the essential theme of my thesis.
Professor Ashcraft—gray, grave, dying of something sly but irresistible—cast a quizzical glance with
semismile at the face of Assistant Professor Beale. You approved that choice of topic, Fred?
It was approved four and a half years ago, Mort. When you were chairman of Lightcap’s committee.
I don’t think so. But Ashcraft colored slightly under his sunken features and puffed harder on his pipe. Attacking Henry: Four and a half years, Lightcap? You know, there’s a statute of limitations on these projects. Henry nodded humbly, trying to read Professor Ashcraft’s wristwatch upside down. Give us a definition of existentialism, Lightcap.
Organic or functional, sir?
Summary, please.
Existence precedes essence. Henry waited for response—none—smiled at them and airily added, Or is it the other way around? In either case the essence of existentialism can be summarized, in the words of Søren Kierkegaard, as that sensation of dread, fear and trembling with which we approach the dry cleaner’s door when the sign in the window says PANTS PRESSED WHILE U WAIT. Angst precedes choice—and in that dreadful choice we discover the absolute potential nullity of individual being—but choice, which defines and expresses our ontological freedom, also leads, aesthetically, to a state of metaphysical despair or even to protophysical suicide unless we are prepared, ethically, to make the leap into Christian faith, a quantum jump, so to speak, which has posed severe problems for later thinkers of the Hindu, Zen, Mormon, Jewish and Muslim variety.
Henry paused; he could feel the sweat beginning to trickle from his armpits. If any one of them asks me one simple question I’m dead. The three doctors of philosophy contemplated him with fascination. He continued: As for—
Tell me, Lightcap, Professor Ashcraft interrupted, that’s all very interesting but what has any of it to do with Sartre’s distinction between le pour-soi and l’en-soi?
I’m dead. Fucking Frenchmen. O Mort thou comest when I had thee least in mind. He cleared his throat. We’ll improvise, he thought. We’ll play it by ear. Like opening a new whorehouse, we’ll run it by hand till we get some girls.