Moise and the World of Reason

  “Ain’t it just?”

  “You understand, don’t you?”

  “I don’t understand and don’t know.”

  Just at that moment, a cat streaked out of the warehouse with a squealing thing in its jaws.

  “My God,” she said, “this is worse than the Dakota!”

  The scene then became scrambled by a tall and dark human figure crossing the street toward the cab and the cab starting off and the actress crying out, “Lot.”

  When the scene unscrambled, the actress was confronting the tall figure which she had hysterically mistaken for Lot and was shrilling at him, “Do you suppose I’d be on this corner at this hour without a revolver on me!”

  The man crossed away, much smaller.

  “Would you like to come in and wait with me till later?”

  I don’t think she heard me.

  She stalked away in her heroic black cloak as if she had never heard of danger at a wolf’s hour in her life, and as I went back up the stairs I said to myself, “Well, now I know that love is demolition.”

  But having returned to the hooked rectangle, I correct that facile and small definition of the only thing that is larger than life by the following bit of rhetoric.

  “Among the things love includes, unlimited as life and perhaps as death, there is demolition of self and possibly also of the object of the love! Which led me back to that long-ago whisper of Moise’s, ‘It isn’t good but it’s God.’”

  Without at first being aware of what it was in the room that was no longer there, that was very disturbingly missing (and I don’t mean Charlie), I sat before BON AMI, pencil clutched, watching, listening, alert as, say, an aged and crippled villager of some distant embattled country would watch and listen skyward at the sound or sight of approaching enemy planes. I don’t believe that I knew, at first, whether it was the sound or sight of something that had ceased to be present in the hooked rectangle number one to infinity of my existence. I was, of course, stupefied, much as I was while sitting in tense silence (which was my own only) in a corner of the violent ward on the island in the River East.

  (Forgive these scrambled images, my hands shake like my thoughts as I now continue to attempt to write in very small but legible script on laundry cardboard #2.)

  What had stopped was that hitherto faithful sound of the one-legged clock which I had removed to the furthest possible corner within the rectangle’s confines but which, though muted by that distance, had still been audible to me and so reassuring to me as a familiar presence. Yes. It—it had now stopped dead, and the fact that I had simply not wound it up that night did not improve the omen of its suddenly noticed cessation. I suppose I felt as an old man must feel who has lived his whole life, or the important half of it, beside a mountain cataract, and one day or night, half-emerging from the dream that time has gently drawn him into, notices that the eternity of that waterfall’s murmur has been stilled without warning.

  Clock-beat, heartbeat: you don’t want to hear either, but you always trust their going on with you, for otherwise you’d stop, too.

  Stopping, stopping, who wants it, even from an old travesty of a clock or a heart worn out at thirty.

  Now there will be no future way of knowing if it is still night or into morning without periodic ventures into the cat-and-rat battleground of the loft outside.

  After it did become clear to me that it was the clock’s sound which had stopped, I went once again into that no-man’s-land and saw through its windows that time was indeed into morning, dimmed by the dust of the windows and by dockside fog. I stood there, paralyzed by bereavement, for time enough to accept a totally new condition of life.

  And then I sneezed, once, twice, repeatedly. I touched my forehead and found it burning as his body had burned, and whispered to myself, “I won’t survive it.”

  (I won’t read back through this passage for the embarrassing footprints of self-pity, that most despicable emotion of humankind still living, for it would stop me dead on cardboard #2 like the clock.)

  Then, then, then.

  Behind me I heard sounds, not the clock’s, not mine, within the hooked rectangle, and I turned that way and moved toward the narrow opening of the plywooded section that would admit you thinly.

  And there was Charlie back from his all-night excursions, not greeting me but looking down at my army-store boots as he unlaced them.

  It was I that broke the silence.

  “Charlie, I think I’m dead.”

  “But still at work on BON AMI.”

  “Naturally, what else?”

  “Shit.”

  “Probably, since I’ve spent the night alone, obsessed with”

  “Huh?”

  “A positive frenzy of lascivious”

  “Thoughts of me and your spade that cracked through the ice?”

  “I have arrived at something.”

  “Such as?”

  “Recognition of you.”

  “Never now or ever.”

  “No, I think at last I know you, Charlie.”

  “Bully for you, old sport. Now why’nt you go out and look at that green light on Daisy’s dock and eat your heart out in private?”

  “It’s the truth, like Scott and Jack Clayton told it.”

  “Well, go and skate on it, I’m dog tired and I intend to sleep.”

  “Alone.”

  “Hope so.”

  Now he was removing his clothes with the leisure of a stripteaser, instinctively provocative even now, but the provocation was not of the kind to which he was accustomed when unclothing.

  It wasn’t loathing or hatred on a conscious level, but it was building to something that could crack thick ice with the ease of a toothpick through a pitted olive.

  I looked at him as he slowly stripped himself bare and crawled into bed; then he spoke and what he said was like a quotation from something.

  “Infidelities are not confined to the present.”

  He meant that I had loved the ice skater for those thirteen years until he, Charlie, had come into my life, one week after the ice skater had cracked the goddam ice forever, meaning retired into the silent ice world forever and no more skating on it, through a possibly accidental or deliberate OD on—you name it, I never knew, all that I knew was that he alternated continually between big highs and lows and was constant only to beauty. And I don’t mean me. . . .

  “Well, Charlie, tell me about it, what was it and how did it go?”

  “Don’t start that shit.”

  “What shit?”

  “The questions bit, I don’t need it.”

  “I know you don’t need it any more than I do but I suspect that you’d like to tell me something about it.”

  “I don’t much care if I tell you but I will. After the thing at Moise’s, Big Lot said that you were going to stay with her and he said, ‘Let’s drop by the Factory,’ and we did and LaLanga was there. All right, he was there, and this thing happened between us. You know, Big Lot and I had run out with the bottle of red Gallo and we drank it on the way to the Factory and I saw LaLanga as a living poem which I know that he is and I also know that what he put in my body was a poem, too!”

  “Oh. So.”

  “Yes.”

  I knew that I had lost Charlie to the living poems of poets and what remained of what I had thought was a poem between us was now expiring like that warm aromatic bit of a candle last evening at Moise’s.

  Isn’t it always like that, in the world, gay or straight?

  My answer to that is yes. It simply takes longer in some cases than others for ice skaters to stop skating on the ice but to enter it for the silence of forever.

  “Going out?”

  “That’s right. Goodbye, Charlie.”

  “Where you think you’re going, man, at this hour?”

  “I’m going back to Moise’s.”

  “I don’t think you’ll get in there.”

  “What gives you that impression?”

  “Refug
ees from the party say that when the candle burnt out there was a sort of riot. A pregnant girl was trampled kind of bad and somebody hollered police and Moise bolted the door and Big Lot says it’ll never be opened again unless the great red-bearded father in South Orange gets the message and breaks down the door.”

  “Goodbye,” I said again. Then with that touch of bitchiness that can never be quite excluded from lovers parting, I said, “Watch out for the sudden subway, that’s all, Charlie.”

  “Huh?”

  (Perfunctorily spoken.)

  “Goodbye.”

  “Oh, are you really going back to Moise’s?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Why?”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you. If I got in bed with you I would profane the poem LaLanga and I don’t want to do that.”

  “I wouldn’t allow you to.”

  “No. So. Goodbye.”

  “You say goodbye instead of good night to me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  I didn’t answer that till after I had put on the army coat and muffler which he’d thrown off, and then, as I started toward the door, removing the ice skater’s photo from its hook on the dingy wall, I said to Charlie, “I’m going to Moise’s and although to go there now is to return there sooner than expected and certainly sooner than I’d be welcome, it would be much more appropriate than—”

  I started out the door and Charlie said, “That was an incomplete sentence but what else is life made of?”

  “Well, in Ethiopia the nomadic tribes who live by their cattle have lost ninety-eight percent of their cattle in a big drought there and I saw a picture today of vultures sitting on a long line of telegraph poles along the road to the sea, waiting for anything that might come along there.”

  “Yes, that’s life, too,” said Charlie, his voice still perfunctory.

  Now I had this last door almost closed between us and he said one more thing.

  “Skates said she’d killed Moise.”

  “I hardly think so, Charlie.”

  But I hesitated a few moments longer at the door.

  “What gave Skates that impression?”

  “Its been going on a long time,” said Charlie with an indifferent yawn, not even turning to give me a glance as I lingered one last moment.

  “Yes, I know that the malice of Skates is practically inexhaustible as the lecheries that you mistake for a love life.”

  “How’s that so, lover boy?”

  Then he did turn to look at me and I would not have believed it possible that he could look at me in such a different way than I had known, well, either known or imagined, for nearly two years. That was a thing that had to be turned away from and not carried with me from the makeshift partitions of our section of the dockside loft, no, it would not go with me like the photo of the lover I’d removed from the wall.

  He seemed to be looking with real contempt at me now, no, it wasn’t possible, it wasn’t part of the world of reason, and yet there it was, the cold knife of his look hurled at me as I waited.

  “You hardly think so, you hardly think anything but that creatures like you and Moise can survive on nothing. Are you a couple of air plants, is this the tropics? Why, Christ, you pitiful son of a bitch, you won’t live through the flu at Moise’s or on the streets of this city. Moise has packed it with Skates’s assistance, she knows it’s finished with her, but you, ho, man, you think that old photo of a spade which thank God you’re taking out of here with you and your demented pieces of writing will suffice to keep you going, well, man, the truth is nothing to what you’re going to face.”

  “Charlie, the trouble with you is that you mean the truth is nothing.”

  I came back into the room and kicked the door shut so violently that it fell backward onto the landing.

  “Don’t you come near me!”

  “Oh, I’m never coming closer to you again than I am now, but I want to tell you something. I happen to love LaLanga as a poet but you don’t know a poem from ejaculations of sperm in your butt which is not always going to be haunch of venison, baby, nope, you’ll discover that being buggered by a poet hasn’t injected you with his talent and it never will and that is the truth which is something, not nothing, as in your adolescent opinion, and your opinions will not mature but simply wither on you, and you and Skates may think that you have the power to defoliate the world with your falsities and your venom, but, hell, baby, the world will defoliate you because your eyes, the look in them, is like the hiss of Skates, and you know why she did that to Moise, it was because Tony Smith has lectured on the work of Moise and has no knowledge of Skates and Skates is so invidious by nature and so aware in her bone-dry heart, I mean her hissing center of being, not to be called a heart if you live in the world of reason or beyond it, that she is an imitator of Moise but will never make it and will survive because of her sideline of newspaper illustrations of women’s wear at thrift prices, and nothing will advance her in what she fancies is her creative calling, her vocation she has the nerve to call it, not fooling even herself, and as for that hiss at Moise, I can assure you, cunt divine, that Moise didn’t hear it, she certainly didn’t heed it, and I can assure you, too, that the hiss of a snake called Skates has never and could never kill anybody, even if it was heard and heeded.”

  “Look,” said Charlie, “you have kicked down the door which is the only effectual gesture you have made in your life which is finished. Now get through the space where it used to be quick as you can haul your tired ass out of my life to the apparition of Moise, Christ, did any two people belong so much to each other? I belong to LaLanga and tomorrow am posing for Andy and Big Lot says that with you out of my way there is nothing can stop me!”

  Of course these words rang like the fire bells and police sirens of hell as I staggered down the steps and out into the almost impenetrable iciness of the street, wondering if Moise had indeed bolted the door quite finally against the world of reason and would not hear or heed my knock and cry for admittance.

  But it occurred to me then that I was not a part of the world of reason which she had announced no longer tenable to her, and besides, to wonder if she would hear me and heed me was like wondering if God, as abstraction or persona, had ever existed and I remain incorrigibly a believer.

  The ice of the air softened then, and I moved east on Eleventh and crossed to Bleecker, witlessly and serenely, holding the photo snatched from the rectangle’s wall like a cross above me.

  For of the earth’s frozen waters I wanted now only the ditch where a child crouched at dusk to release from his fingers a paper boat, as frail as a May butterfly, and if the ditch water is frozen, apologies to Rimbaud for these recurrent images of ice.

  III

  HOWEVER, that haunting last image, somewhat paraphrased in the lifting from Rimbaud’s Bâteau Ivre, has to be fractured now by the account of an incident, unsuitably raw and vicious as the lash of a bullwhip. I would prefer to omit it, but since it occurred I shall have to include it and accept the shattered mood of what could well have served as the curtain lines to an atmospheric play or to a composition for a well-tempered clavichord.

  I don’t like theater because I don’t like curtains: they always seem contrived and I don’t like contrivances. I guess this aversion to completion is another serious flaw in my concept of creative work. When Moise completes a canvas it is truly completed, even to the almost indistinguishable M that is her signature and that is worked into the painting as if it were a part of it. She believes in curtains, in completion, but she accomplishes it, this completion, as if it were there, visible to herself only, from the beginning, an instinct of a thing’s fullness or perfection which has always eluded me in my course through the Blue Jays of my life.

  Well, she’s a visionary, she works in a state of trance that cannot be broken without shocking consequence to herself and the strictly ordered anarchy which she lives in. That is the wrong way to put it. It is making out of it somethi
ng that sounds more like an aphorism than a simple truth. It is a kind of magic to which I’m not initiated, it seems, and when I try to discuss it I resort to wrong words such as “strictly ordered anarchy” which is a phrase that doesn’t stand scrutiny. Lance would say “shit.” Moise would say nothing but would probably throw something at me. Or would have a spasm, one of those seizures that only come upon her when a trance is disturbed by the intrusion of something or someone that is alien to her “room” and I put the word “room” in quotes because its meaning is larger than room, it is her world and existence.

  It was once only Lance and then it became Lance and me who were trusted to watch her at work.

  “There is the wooden spoon, dear.”

  She would point out a rather grimy-looking tongue depressor on a table by her easel with a challenging smile that Lance understood but did not explain to me.

  Obviously Moise did not have these attacks when she was working under conditions entirely within her control: I think it’s also obvious that she liked the presence of Lance and later of Lance and me when she was at work on a painting even though there was always the possibility that even a very familiar and loved presence might disturb the inwardly strong current of her way through a painting. It was understandable to me as an image. Her work on a canvas had the compulsive flow toward completion that a mountain stream has toward the basin it is drawn into: a cataract that emptied into a state of rest like the seventh day of Genesis, and Lance would say “shit” to that too, and I learned soon not to question or notice the point at which her initial M was painted onto the lower right-hand corner of a canvas in such a way that it seemed a part of it from the beginning.

  I may return to this nearly inscrutable history of Moise at work later, but I have mentioned an incident that took place as I made my crazy way from West Eleventh to Bleecker.

  To go directly into an account of this brutal incident would still be too abrupt. I feel that I have not yet told you enough about the room of Moise as it was when Lance and I were admitted there every night when he was not on tour with his ice show.

  Almost since I first came to know Moise I’ve kept a Blue Jay notebook in her Bleecker Street room, usually two of them, and the contents of these Blue Jays are devoted almost entirely to the spoken reveries that she’s inclined to go into while holding a brush or paint-smudged finger before a canvas. I don’t think she knows she is talking since she always appears quite startled when these reveries are interrupted by my voice or much more rarely by Lance’s when Lance was still with me.