“All the girls have been great.” He cocked his head, smiling, moustached like a cat, cat’s eyes humorously watching Will, and, nervously, Will smiled back.
At last Will said, “They … know about each other?”
Buz laughed, reaching around Will’s heavy shoulder to pat his back. “Know about each other? Sometimes we do it six in a bed—I bet you can’t believe that!”
Will cleared his throat, and still Buz was smiling.
“The sheer logistics of such an undertaking—” Will began.
“Come let us fix you another martini, and I’ll tell you the whole secret.”
“Do,” Will said. It came to him that his fingertips were numb already. He had a sudden, fierce hunger to tell him about Kleppmann and the tragic madness of his Uncle Tag. “Yes,” he said, “do. By all means! Yes!”
3
At the corner of the house, standing in the twilight shadow of hundred-year-old oaks and eight-year-old maples, in the cool perfection of pointlessly curving stone walls and wide slate shingles, the Senator paused and pointed across the broad, flawlessly mown and deeply shaded lawn toward a long stone building as handsomely gabled and ornately dressed as the house itself. “Old mews,” he said. “Left empty for years, but my son-in-law’s been fixing it up. He’s the City Manager in Ferguson. Great future ahead of him. Well, he’s got horses in it now. Thurbreds from Texas. Beautiful animals, horses!”
R. V. Kleppmann looked at the mews, and his expression of mournful patience and scorn did not change. “I was bitten by a horse once in Europe,” he said as if innocently.
“They’re known for that,” the Senator said. He grinned. “But I like an animal with spirit.”
Kleppmann went on staring, standing with his hands in the pockets of his cheap gray coat.
“My father kept Tennessee Walkers,” the Senator said. He had his hand on Kleppmann’s elbow again and was guiding him toward the long, wide, gracefully curving driveway where Kleppmann’s Ford was parked. “Beautiful animals. Beautiful. But every man to his taste, I say. De gustibus.” He laughed, orbicular by study. “Now this birdbath here,” he said abruptly, stopping and extending his arm toward it, “came over here from England over seventy years ago. Came from a church. Just the base is old, originally part of a cross or something. Chiseled out by hand, as you can see. Now that’s something! Notice the interlace. Proves its antiquity. Anglian, I think they said. You can tell it’s hand-carved because these squares here are all different sizes. They look pretty much the same, you see, but if you look there closer you can see there’s no two of ’em alike. Like snowflakes.”
Kleppmann bent down, grieved and indifferent, to look.
“Well, everybody likes something different,” the Senator said. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”
Kleppmann straightened up and turned to look at the Senator mildly but critically. “I never noticed that,” he said. “Seems to me everybody wants the same thing. Curved driveways whether or not there’s anything to curve around. Wife that looks half-starved to death. Dogs, cats, horses.”
“Come now, Mr. Kleppmann,” the Senator said, “you like expensive things yourself.”
Kleppmann shrugged as if meekly, like a Jewish tailor. He patted the Senator’s arm in a way he knew the man would find offensive, and said, “I suppose I do. I suppose we’re all made of the same stuff under the skin.”
He ate his dinner—a cold hot beef sandwich and a glass of milk—in a small, filthy hash-house in south St. Louis. The potatoes were lumpy, the beef underthin and overcooked, the gravy watery; but Kleppmann did not notice. He was not simply indifferent to food, he was fanatically indifferent. He knew good food from bad, expensive from cheap, and he could use his knowledge to impress his business associates, as he called them, when necessary; but he had no respect for what is known as fine food—meats cooked with wines and spices brought in flaming, as though they would look and taste of decay in their natural state; vegetables chopped or diced or shredded in the decadent French manner, as if for the toothless gums of superannuated uncles and aunts of the royal house. It was not the food itself that disgusted him: it was edible enough, though not appealing. What turned his stomach—and turned his stomach violently—was the people who admired such food: piglike people (whether they were fat or thin, he saw that pig’s-eye glint in their piggish little eyes) who prided themselves (as even pigs do not) on knowing which marination was considered superior by persons of superior discernment. What turned his stomach was people who took one sip of wine and glanced expertly at the corner of the room and passed judgment with the greatest solemnity, as if the head of the winemaker hung on their sentence—”nutty,” or “tart,” or “bland,” or “smooth,” or some other perfectly obvious designation of a perfectly obvious, wholly unimportant sensation. As for those who could say, and with a fair measure of accuracy, “1963,” or even “1937”—a thing he certainly could not do himself—he felt a kind of moral outrage he could barely hide from even the most obtuse observer. It was not simply the connoisseur, the snob, that Kleppmann detested. He was equally revolted by people who took smacking delight in fried chicken or porkchops or Christmas ham, or by people in the suburbs who ate rare barbecued steak and could not help wincing when asked by a guest for a piece “well done.” (Kleppmann unfailingly asked for his steak well done, in the hope of offending.) He was no more pleased by the “simple Negro” with his affected and self-conscious taste for chicken necks and gibbets (or giblets or whatever they were called); and he hated with equal intensity the Occidental who learned to eat with chopsticks and the Oriental who ate “naturally,” that is, with his mouth at the level of his plate and his sticks slightly higher than his head. For these reasons and others, Kleppmann ate alone whenever possible, just as he went to the bathroom alone, and paid no more than he had to for the privilege.
His wife was of a different inclination, of course, not only with respect to eating but with respect to almost everything in life. She liked big houses, beautiful views, and parties where dinner was served by candlelight. Kleppmann suffered her as he suffered the rest of mankind. She was of use. Nevertheless, when there were no guests and therefore no reason to bend to the ridiculous and annoying fashion of eating by light one could not see by, Kleppmann took dinner in his room, as he called it (his wife called it his study), in solitude. He made no pretense of loving her and never went to bed with her. It was a business arrangement, by no means mutually satisfactory or for that matter more than tolerable on either side. She loved luxury and had so little taste that he could pawn off on her the most disgusting baubles. As for Kleppmann, he liked making fools of people (though he did not like that or anything else in this world very much), and his wife not only provided a willing subject, as quick to sit up and beg as any fawning, stinking lap dog, but also helped him to make fools of other people.
The diner was alone when he entered it—he might not have entered it otherwise—but when he was halfway through his clammy hot beef sandwich two teen-age girls came in. One had blue pock-marks; the other was tanned and pretty except for a suspicious, slow-witted, cowlike look, a slightly affected pout, and large, square ankles. Kleppmann wiped his mouth on the paper napkin and pushed his plate away. Leaving no tip—he never left tips except to impress—he carried his restaurant check to the ornate, ostentatiously large black cash-register, long obsolete but still very grand, counted out the exact change, and went out to the street without a word. He walked to his car, unlocked it, and got in. A freight train stood on the siding across the street, and Kleppmann shuddered, went pale, averted his eyes.
At home, among other messages awaiting him, he found this:
W.B.H. has a tax claim against him, in amount of $40,000. Own firm has advised him to buy them off, case too chancy.
Kleppmann nodded. He crossed to the window, picked up his Barron’s Weekly, and sat down on the stiff, plain wooden chair he always used for serious reading—a chair fit for a monk.
 
; 4
What happened was obscure to Will, afterward. He had, strange to say, no particular regrets: it was all hardly more real than a dream, and though he would never have imagined that he would feel that way, he found that it scarcely occurred to him to feel guilty. It was as if, taking a wrong turn of no particular consequence, he had found himself in a sweet shop where the air was heavy with the scent of candies, and display cases were piled high with pink and yellow and white things and chocolate things and things in fancy wrappings. They stood in the kitchen, he remembered, the music howling in at them from the livingroom, the girl perhaps in bed somewhere—he’d lost track of her—and Buz was saying, holding up the martini pitcher to watch the level, pouring in gin, “Say what you like, there’s nothing in this world more fantastically beautiful than each of your hands on a different girl’s breasts and your legs wrapped around two more sets of breasts, and one of them sucking and another one giving you a kiss with a taste of gin.” He cackled with pleasure.
Will watched the martini turning round and round in the pitcher.
“Right,” Buz said, nodding as if Will had spoken.
Will’s head was not as clear as he would have liked. He felt stimulated by it all, and the sexual stimulation was the least of it. He felt new worlds were opening up before him, and what he wanted at the moment was not to explore them, plunge into the raw adventure of it, but think out, boldly, without shrinking, the implications. Buz handed him his martini, surely knowing he was already drunk as a skunk. “May be too wet,” he said, “try it.” He beamed. Will sipped and nodded—at that moment he might as quickly have approved plain kerosene. He lifted the glass toward the ceiling and said, “The world is round!” “Round!” Buz echoed. They drank to rotundity.
He remembered saying later, slowly and carefully—several drinks later it must have been—“It’s immmoral, that’s my obshection to it.”
“That’s right,” Buz said. “Immmoral.”
However, there was another side to it, no question about it, and they spoke of it in lofty phrases. An aesthetic side. (They were sitting out on the lawn now. He couldn’t remember coming out, but he was here: Buz in the aluminum lawn chair across from him, growing more quiet, more dignified moment by moment, and mentioning often how much he valued this rare opportunity for conversation.) “There is an aesthetic side to the question,” Will said. He solemnly belched. “Note the frequency of extraliteral relationships—” Extraliteral? he thought. He decided to brave it out. “Of extraliteral relationships among painters and poets and the like. It’s very interesting.”
“Right, I’m glad you mentioned it,” Buz said.
“Now painters and musicians, we may safely presume—” He slung out his jaw and frowned, judicial. “Painters and musicians have a marked aesthetic proclivity.”
“Exactly! Exactly right!” He banged his fist on his knee.
“Good. Bien. Bongiorno.” He giggled. “So far so good.”
“Right.”
“If the Universe is apprehended aesthetically, which is to say in terms of sensation—”
“Exactly! Sensational!”
“—then any curialing—”
“Exactly!”
“—of the aesthetic proclivity is, in one word, immm-oral!” The idea filled him with righteous rage.
“Whooey!” said Buz. He agreed. Then, realizing Will had finished, he looked slightly puzzled.
Will leaned toward him and spoke more confidentially. “We must live life fully.”
Buz nodded, musing.
“We must understan’ that there are situations which entail commitment, and there are situations in which no commitment is implicated.”
“None.”
“Nothing different from eating with a person, or playing a game of golf with him, or, as the case may be, her.”
“Not a parcital.” He laughed, then looked sinister. “Or a tracklium.”
Will laughed too. “Rise above ourselves.”
“Excelsior!”
“Shaving cream!”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Will pursed his lips but the belch came anyway. “I better go bed,” he observed.
“Excellent,” Buz said. “You want company?”
Will frowned, dizzily waiting.
Buz said, leaning forward and touching his knee, “It would give me great pleasure—” The word came out badly and he formed it again. “Pleasure to unzip your pants.” He smiled like a dog, his face very blurry, like a white flower under water.
“What?” Will said. He tried to stand up.
“You said yourself—”
“You monster!” Will said, deeply shocked.
Buz shrugged, slowly and loosely. “Well.”
“I’m astonizzhed!” Will said. “Astonished.” That’s better.
Buz brought out, just intelligibly, “You weren’t astonizzhed when I told you about burying a girl in feathers, or pouring syrup over them—”
“Stop!” He had made it to his feet now. “This is horrible,” he said. “What’s the matter with you people?” With what he knew himself was ludicrous premeditation, he raised his martini and dashed it, glass and all, to the sidewalk. The noise rang through the night more loudly than he’d expected. Buz laughed sadly, and after a moment Will laughed too.
“Help me up, old college frien’,” he said.
Will went over to him carefully, and carefully bent to help him up out of the chair. Then, very slowly, reeling with every tilt and lurch of the wobbly planet in its fall through the void, they worked their way to the porch steps. On hands and knees they made it up to the porch, and the light went on. “Just joking, Will old friend,” he said. They laughed and scratched at the door.
“I understand,” Will said. “A cunning joke. I must try, tomorrow—” He’d lost the thread.
Hours later, as it seemed to him, a girl in a yellow bathrobe opened the door for them. They laughed and patted each other’s backs and rolled in. (It came to him that his suitcoat was gone.) The door closed behind them, and the girl disappeared. He had an impression—but he couldn’t be sure—that the girl was not the same one. Then he must have passed out. It must have been sometime after that that he awakened to the half-dream half-reality of lying naked in a dark room, with a naked woman pressing her bush to his face, thighs clamped to his head, pushing at him, her smooth back arched and one hand closed around his penis. He never saw her face and afterward he sometimes was not quite sure that she was real. It was all, well, very strange.
And sitting in his office in Buffalo, giving in once more to bemused staring, eyes passing over his closely reasoned, now meaningless page, he knew what it was about it that was weird. He could see nothing either wrong in it or especially right. He’d betrayed people before, from time to time, in trivial ways, like any man—though he’d never betrayed Louise before, not sexually—and he would have said he knew very well what betrayal was, by his chest. But if so, this was no betrayal. He felt nothing, not even disgust. If she learned about it, which she wouldn’t, he knew, he would be sorry about it, but not unduly. If she took it for more than it was, then that was her problem. It was all exactly as people claimed—a trifle, a thing one could easily get used to, not at all the shocking and terrible sort of experience he had imagined. It would be different, perhaps, if the girl were someone he believed he loved. But sex, pure sex—”like food,” Buz had said, or a game of golf—it was merely a pleasure, meaningless and harmless. Or was it he himself who’d said it? The fact that all his life he’d guessed wrong about how it would feel, was a shock to him. And more shocking yet was the fact that it seemed, afterward, only a dream. He understood clearly, all at once, that if he did it a hundred times, a thousand, it would still be mere dream, as vague in his mind as his morning recollections of love-making with Louise. That was the reason for the ropes, it struck him, and the six-in-a-bed, and the rest. The pleasure was unspeakable, but only for a moment, like the unspeakable pleasure of dinners forgotten l
ong ago.
He was arrested by a memory, sharp as a vision, of Danny talking with the Indian boy at Uncle Ben’s farm. They were in the chickenhouse, and the Indian was hunkering in front of Danny, teaching him to whittle. The word was musical on the Indian boy’s tongue, and Will had remembered—as if all the time between had vanished in smoke—how the word had sounded when he himself was a child and someone—Uncle Ben, or maybe his grandfather, or some hired man at Stony Hill, he couldn’t remember any more—had bent down to show him how. Danny took the knife in one hand, carefully, the stick in the other, and Will kept in his uneasiness about a four-year-old’s handling a jackknife. He watched the small face, haloed in light from the chickenhouse window, furrowed with concentration, tongue between teeth. The knifeblade cut in and moved slowly, jerkily, down the point of the whittling stick. I was whittling willow, he remembered with a start. I was going to make a whistle. It was Uncle Ben. He kept his hand on my arm, and not to steady me, but because he wanted to.
And now, fists clenched, remembering the pistol in his briefcase, Will thought: What makes it die? Wordsworth. Trailing glory. And when it’s dead—mere duty, is that it? To what?
He found the new package of Tums and opened it and ate one. Still staring at the papers on his desk, he hardly noticed June, his secretary, when she came in with the collection forms for him to sign. He was aware that all lines were sharper than usual this afternoon, that his eyes were curiously sensitive to trifling detail—dust specks in the air, the pages of the book on the desk beside the papers—and he was sensitive to smells as well. It was her scent that made him glance up at her, raising his eyes only to the level of her waist, where the hip-flesh jutted out. He looked up at her face. She was looking a little past him, lifelessly pretty. It had begun to come to his attention, recently, that every woman in the world was sexually attractive.