In those old days Lance was far more discreet than I when she started talking while painting. He would usually be as quiet as possible, removing his shoes so that his steps on the creaky floor would be less apt to disturb her and when I would interject a comment or question he would most likely place a hand over my mouth with a warning gesture toward Moise.
“What, what, what?” she would cry with a look of broken enchantment.
“Nothing, honey, rien de tout, ma chère!” Lance would whisper and she would drift into her reveries and her hesitations of finger or brush before the “The Mystery” which was her name for each unfinished painting.
I was thinking of these Blue Jays I kept at Moise’s as I approached her “atelier” on Bleecker through the mist of the winter morning when the headlights of a prowl car cut through it and stopped just behind me on the street.
Needless to say I have wasted no affection on police cars, especially when I’m alone on the streets of that section at such a desolate hour.
I pretended to ignore the car slowing down close behind me till a menacingly macho voice bawled out, “Hey there, drop what you’re holding, turn to the wall and put your hands against it.”
“Do you mean me?”
“I said drop what you’re holding and”
“It’s a framed photo with glass.”
I didn’t drop it, of course, but lowered it slowly from its position over my head. With the quick and incongruous images of fever shuttling through my brain, I recognized the gesture of lowering Lance’s photo slowly from over my head to directly before my face as that of a priest handling a chalice at Mass and this image startled from me something between a laugh and a gasp. I didn’t hear the car door open or slam shut or the heavy officer’s steps but I gasped again, this time without a laugh, as the photo was snatched from my hand.
“It’s a naykid man’s pitcher.”
“It isn’t a naked man’s picture, it’s a photograph of an ice-skating star in tights.”
“Another pervert. Git him aginst that wall.”
I was wheeled roughly about to face the corner building and shoved against it and hands began to frisk me. My fever must have exaggerated their size and brutality. I hate to admit it, but the mauling was almost pleasurable, I think it must have reminded me somewhat of Lance’s occasionally violent approach to lovemaking when I was sitting up with a Blue Jay too long to suit him.
“What’s all these papers on yuh?”
“Literary works I’m moving to”
“You’re moving to the car.”
Then I felt something hard and cold clamped about my ankles, pulling them together.
Handcuffs, on my ankles, and told to move?
“How and where?”
“You’re goin’ to the station.”
“Grand Central or Pennsylvania?” I shouted with a burst of hysteria.
“Nobody likes a smart ass unless he fucks it.”
He wheeled me from the building and sprawled me into the gutter with a shove.
“Christ, you’ve broke my wrists.”
“I’ll break ev’ry goddam bone in your cock-suckin’ body if you don’t hop like a toad, tha’s right, hop or crawl it and make it quick.”
Looking up at his face I saw it was hardly visible through the winter daybreak fog and I trusted that my face was equally indefinite to him.
“I think you should know you’re molesting a minor without offense.”
It didn’t make much sense and the result was a vicious kick in the butt.
I know it’s incredible but it is possible to live half your life in this city and never encounter an incident of this nature without any provocation but odd behavior in public.
“I am not going to hop and I am not going to crawl and if you were on the job, the Actress Invicta wouldn’t have had to scare a mugger away from West Eleventh.”
“Kick him in,” said the officer in the car.
The kick was repeated, harder.
“Heh heh heh.”
It was a guttural New York red-neck laugh that reminded me of all the unidentified bodies, young and old, some of them stripped and mutilated, discovered in empty lots and trash bins or dropped off bridges in the five furious boroughs of the city.
“Christ, oh, Christ,” I said, dropping flat onto the street.
At this moment, precisely, a tall, thin figure emerged from the Bleecker Street mist, and it was Moise, still in her transparent garment.
“What are you savages doing to my brother?” she demanded with a vocal power I didn’t know she possessed.
The other officer now hopped out of the prowl car and went up to her apparitional figure.
“What are you?”
“I am still who, not what. And you are a pair of apes in public service and I am not just a member of the public but one with the highest connections.”
A window lighted across the street; an old woman’s face peered out.
“Lady, lady,” I called but her response was to draw her head back in the window and switch the light off.
The officers glanced at each other. One nodded, the other shook his head.
The one who had nodded now spoke in a mock-polite voice.
“How would you and your brother like a little ride around the neighborhood, Miss?”
“Moise, a witness looked out a window,” I gasped.
“Unnecessary, not at all necessary,” said Moise, “I phoned headquarters before I came outside.”
The cops muttered together, then one said aloud, “Le’s quit foolin’ with this coupla nuts.”
My ankles were unshackled by one while the other attempted to give Moise a libidinous feel.
I heard a loud slap.
“Resisting. Indecent.”
“Shit, it’s morning, le’s go.”
Car door slam, motor starting.
We were alone on the corner.
“Jesus God.”
“Who?”
“I’ve lost Lance’s picture.”
“There are duplicates of it.”
She had gathered up the literary properties which the officers had scattered on the street.
“How did you know this was going on, Moise?”
“Mystery but simple.”
(Perhaps she’ll explain it later.)
IV
WHEN A PLACE contains no clock or watch, that circumstance does not dismiss my concern with the passage of time: it is more inclined to accentuate it. The winter light admitted by the large window in the back wall is the only timekeeper here, and I find myself, today at Moise’s, glancing again and again that way to surmise what hour it is, but the window is frosted over and its function as timekeeper is very far from precise. Why it is frosted over I don’t know, since there’s no heat at Moise’s except that of my fever and my anxiety and her quietly living presence.
For I am anxious despite Moise’s Buddhistic calm. I am not reconciled to drifting out of existence even with her. I try to make conversation between us but she is either inaudible in her replies or monosyllabic. I know she prefers my presence to being completely alone in her retirement from the world of reason (or unreason), but she is keeping her counsel, not in a way that is catatonic, but in a way that is more like waiting for a verdict of yes or no and not wanting to be distracted from this passive waiting by my efforts to engage her in talk. She is sitting on the edge of her bed as a female deity might and she hasn’t glanced once at the large frosted window, seeming not to share my concern with time-passage at all.
Lance would have advised me to keep my mouth shut, but since Lance is long gone from this room and all others of which I know, his admonitions are also permanently absent and I persist in trying to entice Moise out of her chilling silence.
“Moise?”
“Yes? Now what?”
“Will you please talk to me, we are sitting here like strangers in the waiting room of a station.”
“Doesn’t everybody do that who sits anywhere with someone???
?
“No. It was never like that when Lance”
“When Lance, when Lance, it’s like the flower of knighthood, that far away from our present existence.”
“I know, but I did hope that when you let me back in the room there’d be a little comforting communication between us, if only by signs or glances, but you sit there completely sunk into your thoughts, you’re remote as the Himalayas to a traveler without passport or means of passage.”
“Well, I will break my silence to tell you this. There’s always been something a little marked-down, a little depreciated about your character since Lance’s departure and the advent of your catamite on the prowl. I must tell you that you writers, you people of the literary persuasion, you substitute words and phrases, slogans, shibboleths and so forth for the simplicities of true feeling. Put a few words in what you think is a clever arrangement, and you feel absolved of all authentic emotion.”
(It had struck me till this outburst that Moise in her improvised see-through garment was almost without bodily sensation or mental animation, that she was suspended in both: she breathed without sound and hardly perceptible motion of her chest, and if her eyelids flickered, they did it in a way that escaped observation. Now I knew that she was in a turmoil of feeling that made my own seem relatively serene.)
“This doesn’t seem like you at all.”
Her response was a four-letter vulgarism which she had never used before, at least not in my presence. Vulgarisms of word or deed did not seem in her province, they seemed to belong outside the door on Bleecker, despite the confessions made the evening before of “unnatural relations” with the patron “eighty-seven at Bellevue.”
“Scriveners fuck off.”
“Why?”
“When have you ever gotten out of your skins, your crocodile hides, to exhibit anything but yourselves and your blah-blah cleverisms? You can’t see life through your lives which stink to the devil’s nostrils. Yes, put that down in your Blue Jay.”
“Moise, I don’t recognize you.”
“You thought I was complicated, not a simple barbarian. And you say I am thinking but I am not thinking at all. Thinking involves cogitation like wrestling mentally with specific problems which I am not doing. What I’m doing’s reflecting, and reflecting’s knowing of things which are not problems since they have no solution, none whatsoever, which are simply fixed conditions that only time and mortality can affect, I mean in a terminal fashion, and don’t use the word ‘semantics,’ don’t throw that fucking word at me or I will know that you’re a familiar of that horrible red-bearded professor at NYU that even Mary McCarthy’s dropped like a sizzling hot rock.”
“Still I would like to know the subject of your reflections.”
“All right, you shall and I think you’ll be sorry. I was reflecting upon the fact that there is such a profusion of crones in this city.”
Well.
My natural cunning advised me to profess ignorance of the word “crones,” and as for her reflection upon their profusion in the city, this was indeed peculiar, for though Moise has about her a timeless quality, she is certainly not old.
“What is a crone, Moise?”
“Look it up in a dictionary,” she replied sharply.
“All right, where’s the dictionary?”
“If there is a dictionary it will be in”
She pointed to a cabinet built into the opposite wall. It contained a curious mélange of “found objects” and so forth, the most remarkable of which was a copy of Who’s Who for 1952.
“Why do you keep a copy of Who’s Who for 1952?” I asked her.
“Because in 1952 a society lady I met by accident on upper Park took up my acquaintance, wanted me for a model, she was an amateur painter of portraits, a wretched old thing of no talent but much academic training and afflicted with a malignancy that her doctors fooled her about, declared her health to be perfect except for adhesions from her last operation. Well, that’s neither here nor there. She took me under the wing of her enormous wealth for some weeks, which is a pertinent detail, and one day she said, ‘I want to give you a party, sort of a debut, here, look in this book and give me the names of the guests you want invited from it.’ She gave me that Who’s Who for 1952. Well. It so happened that I did have a relative named Coffin who was in the book, but this relative was afflicted with chronic melancholia, she had purchased two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Belgian lace when a dreadful attack of the melancholia came on her and she left the lace exposed, nobody dared to touch it except an army of moths which destroyed it almost completely. Well. I called this relative Coffin and she appeared to be on the upswing of her cycle and she actually accepted the invitation to the debut party. I then took the liberty of inviting my close friends not listed in Who’s Who but on the subversive lists and welfare rolls. Well. The relative Coffin never recovered from it and neither did the Park Avenue lady, summoned a doctor far too late for medical intervention and died in the elevator from her two-story penthouse. The 1952 Who’s Who I have kept as a memento of her short-lived patronage, love. Now what have you picked up?”
“Moise, I’ve discovered a candle and a book of matches.”
“Oh, my God, for his sake. Is it one of my thick, aromatic candles?”
“Yes, identical to last evening’s and is intact.”
I placed the candle on the table, replaced Who’s Who in the cabinet, and returned to sit by Moise. She drew a long breath and then said, “Christ on a crossbeam, lofted, you said ‘What is a crone’ as if you’d never noticed them crouching on doorsteps in all weather or leaning out of windows to suck in breath or, in the midtown section, you must have passed through it sometime, they creep about the streets where they congregate singly.”
“‘Congregate singly’ is a”
“Yes, but they do, it’s the truth, there’s no contradiction about it. The midtown section is infested with crones and the wanderings of them, my God.”
“So, crones . . .”
I believe that I was justifiably disappointed in Moise at this moment, for here I had been crouching like a priest in the shrine of a sibyl, Blue Jay and pencil in cold-stiffened fingers, trusting her to emerge from her silent revery with speech of a pure and elevating nature, oracular utterances that contained the quality of which the poet Keats must have been dreaming when he referred to “huge, cloudy symbols of a high romance,” and now that I had provoked her to speech, she had spoken of nothing more inspired or inspiring than what I’ve now transcribed, faithfully as I could, in my last notebook. She had sat there looking like Garbo as Karenina or Camille: then had produced a verbal accompaniment to that image as incongruous as a bathetic score by Max Steiner. I know, of course, that a terminal situation frequently draws the victim in a descent to, not a rise to, new levels of concern. I also know that the true nature of a person’s concerns in extreme circumstances may be obscured by sayings that are inappropriate if not altogether irrelevant to the awesome finality of a situation such as seemed to enclose Moise in her world retired from reason.
“‘Ah, Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth,’” I quoted from the bard.
Her reply was a scatological expletive which I prefer to delete and a slight but ferocious shrug of her shoulders and a hitch away from me on the bed.
“You wanted me to talk and now I’m talking and there’s nothing funny about it, I can assure you that I am as humorless as the invincible living actress or the great narcissan of diarists, Anima Nimes.”
“Moise, have you caught the fever that I caught from Charlie?”
“I am immune,” she shouted, yes, she literally shouted, “to fevers contracted from catamites on the prowl.”
“But you are talking with the extravagance of fever.”
“I believe I am shouting.”
“Yes, you are crying out like a heretic put to the rack who is in such pain that she”
“Denies, confesses, même chose.”
“Perhaps you are worrie
d about the problem of future prospects.”
“Not in the least since my time has already broken the tape of its distance. You know that my life-style has dropped far below the level of subsistence which it barely approached in the past except for the month I modeled and made a debut for poor Miss Who’s Who on Park. I suppose that Scott Fitzgerald would have observed a great mystic difference between a very rich crone and a destitute crone, but when I remember that old Park Avenue lady, besieged by relatives gasping for her demise, spending her time either painting without vision or filling enormous scrapbooks with clippings about her idol Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against radical infiltration and going to The Colony for lunch which she couldn’t digest, which she’d vomit after two bites despite its incomparable quality in ’52. No, crones are crones and wealth or destitution makes no difference in their desperation, except that maybe the ones that sit on winter doorsteps with dirty wrappings about their legs are distracted by physical sensation in a more fortunate way. But in the midtown section where I lived before Bleecker, I tell you there was a real profusion of crones and they crept about the streets like snails, all about the same height and color, for camouflage purposes, I guess, and all with one hand trailing the walls and the other hand clutching a cane or a stick and they never have pocketbooks with them, sometimes they manage to clutch a brown paper bag filled with refuse they’ve gathered in alleys, they clutch it under the arm that has the hand with the cane, and, oh, they’re gray, they’re past gray, clothes, faces and hands, all that camouflage gray for protection from death. Instinct takes them outdoors and cunning brings them back in and they dwindle away like the ranks of veterans of old wars in Memorial Day parades. But there are always replacements. Always new crones. They never look at you since they don’t want to be noticed and they don’t carry pocketbooks because they can’t cry out or lift a hand in defense if the pocketbooks should be snatched.”