Moise and the World of Reason

  Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a truthful report on your love life and what they call prurience but I don’t let it stop me now in these last remaining pages of the Blue Jay which may well be my last ones of all.

  I was telling you how I wandered into the area beyond the hooked rectangle of love. It is called deviant love so it’s appropriate to “their” definition of it that from time to time one should wander out of its confines, especially when those confines contain no window and you are in them alone and want to see if there is a sign of daybreak.

  It was foolish of me to have thought that there would be a sign of it while still in the wolf’s hours of winter.

  I stood there for a while, my presence known to the rats and making them freeze in motion as addicts of hard-core drugs are said to freeze in motion at times when they feel a strong hit.

  Then I turned on my heels and slipped back through a crevice of the plywood that sectioned off the hooked rectangle from the inhuman vastness outside it in the warehouse, wondering once more why it was not condemned and demolished, being so long unused except as a habitation by myself and two lovers.

  I smiled wryly and said, “God has forbidden them to”

  Then I sat down and said, “It’s a monument to the living nigger on ice.”

  Then, like the cock crowing thrice, I said to myself the last line of a lyric which I’d read once.

  “Boys are fox-teeth in the heart.”

  I recalled that the poem also dealt with girls and with men but couldn’t remember what it had to say of them except that it was more flattering and less feeling.

  But the feeling was pain and the pain was excruciating and for the third time in my life I seriously considered doing away with myself and by what means I could do it.

  (Other two times? When committed to that island in the East River and the first time that Lance infected me with that yellow drip of a pickup on a faraway street.)

  Doing away with myself.

  On the island in the River East I had thought of slashing my wrists but there was nothing that I could slash them with since they had confiscated my reading glasses, my wristwatch, anything that had glass or a cutting edge to it, except my longing for Lance which was strong enough to draw blood but was not a material thing.

  The time of the drip I had considered water, probably because it suggested that old Baptist hymn called “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb.”

  (Mother used to sing it so passionately in church that people would turn to look at her with startled eyes.)

  This brought to mind another short lyric poem on the subject of boys, again just a single line of it.

  They offer you their eyes like startled flowers.

  (Referring to boys on street corners.)

  And I remember saying to the poet, “I think they offer their eyes like broken crutches.”

  And he replied, “That is because you are negative by nature.”

  Was that true about me? I honestly don’t think so. Not even now as I stare at the next page of the Blue Jay with its pale blue parallel lines still undefiled by the pencil. I don’t think it’s pessimistic to look upon ugliness as well as beauty bare, although, like Millay and Euclid, I prefer to opt for the second.

  And now that next page of the Blue Jay has been fucked by the pencil and is no longer bare beauty. . . .

  I am not the only writer in the direct line of the maternal side of my family. My grandmother Ursula Phillips was the widow of a very handsome and dandified young gentleman who was struck by the sudden subway at the age of twenty-seven. By contemporary standards of this Eastern metropolis I don’t suppose his accomplishments in the field of literature were particularly striking except in a ludicrous way. His career could be called meteoric. He flashed into it at the age of twenty-two and dropped dead five years later, a burnt-out wreck of a handsome young man who had physical attributes, according to Grandmother Ursula, which would rival Apollo’s: a strong but slender physique, flawless skin, large eyes between green and blue which were heavily lashed. “Some people accused him of wearing cosmetics,” she told me, “but you know, dear, all that he ever put on was a light cologne called Lilac Vegetal.”

  When Grandmother Ursula said that to me, I laughed and said, “Grand, do you mean he went out naked except for the light cologne?”

  She boxed my ears and said, “Boy, your grandfather was out of blue-grass Kentucky land with blood as blue as the grass. You just remember that and don’t make sarcastic remarks which you mistake for humor.”

  “Oh, now, Grand, don’t we all, and nobody means much by it.”

  “Your grandfather would have spit on Alabama if he’d been the kind that spits.”

  She creaked up out of her rocker with the intense concentration of those possessed by an idol and brought forth two of her long-lost idol’s literary creations. One was a very thin published book, a novella it could be called, which was titled Edith of—oh, I forget of what—and the other was a screenplay which he had written when he was picked up by Hollywood as the result of the novella’s rather startling success.

  “Look here, boy, I understand that you fancy yourself as a prospective writer. Just open this book and read the first sentence of it.”

  And despite my failure to recall, at this moment, the title of the novella, that first sentence of it is clear in my recollection.

  “Edith was a sub-deb, meaning a debutante to be, and it was already apparent that she would be the glamour girl of next year.”

  “Yes, lovely,” I remarked and handed it back to Grand, and then I picked up the screenplay that he had been hired to write on the strength of the book about Edith. The screenplay was of more interest to me then. I recall that I was mystified by the camera directions and the knowledgeability with which Grandmother Ursula interpreted them to me. Of course I can’t reproduce the dialogue nor Grandma’s technical interpretations at this distance in time, I can only improvise something of a likeness. The setting is/was an exotically furnished pied-à-terre on Sunset, and my grandfather, who describes himself with narcissan extravagance as silhouetted in a damply clinging silk robe against a picture window that seemed intended to present him to public view, much as a master portrait is framed and lighted in a way that is both delicate and dramatic, addresses his lady-companion—presumably my grandmother—without turning to face her. He says to her something like this:

  “You know I had no intention of prostituting myself when I permitted my publishers to reproduce on the dust-jacket of my novella a photograph of myself in bathing trunks that were a bit too revealing.”

  “I don’t quite know what you mean,” says the lady-companion, obtusely. “I thought the photo was lovely.”

  “So lovely that it inspired a pederastic producer to engage me to write a film play for a silent-screen star attempting to make a comeback in the talkies.”

  I kept running into a camera direction called POV, I remember, and Grandma explained to me that it meant the position of the camera, and it struck me, young as I was, that the POV seemed to be rather heavily in my grandfather’s favor. Even when the dialogue switched to the lady-companion, who kept expressing remarkable surprise and stupefaction over the fairly obvious revelations which Grandfather Krenning was delivering to her, the POV remained upon Krenning, and I remember that his eyes or his face or his whole being was repeatedly described as “ineluctably” something. Although I had an extensive vocabulary for an early adolescent in a small Alabama town, I did not understand the word “ineluctably.” I asked Grandma what it meant.

  She replied evasively. “Son, your grandfather was a literary giant.” Did she mean that Krenning was a literary giant each time he was “ineluctably” something? I am now aware that to be ineluctably something is to be inescapably something and so it appears to me, now, that Grandfather Krenning Phillips could not have been so inescapably or ineluctably a giant of literature, or prodigal of purity, yes, I believe it was pure that he “ineluctably” was in his own opini
on, as the film script indicated.

  Well, he kept at it in this scene of the movie. In the idiom of today, he was laying a heavy number on his lady-companion’s head with these searing confessions and with his climactic outcry, “For God’s sake and mine, don’t let this monster corrupt me!”

  This cry of appeal left the lady-companion speechless, but the POV remained upon Krenning, in the silk robe that was transparently green as his eyes. Even then I knew there was something wrong there. If the clinging robe was both transparent and green, would it not imply that his skin was also green?

  I decided not to ask Grandmother Ursula about the color of her long-gone husband’s skin, I let it slide, that question, and simply said to her, “Wow, this is dynamite, Grandma. Did they make the picture?”

  “Boy, they’d have made that picture over the dead bodies of the Breen office and the producer whose perversity was exposed in it. So just remember, if you do make it as a writer, and are offered a Hollywood job, turn it down, ignore it, it killed your Grandfather Krenning whom you resemble in everything but height, you’re about five inches short of his divine six feet.”

  “But, Grandma, if he fled from Hollywood to Egypt, Kentucky, why do you say it was Hollywood that killed him?”

  “Well, boy, this celebrity thing and this glamour thing which Hollywood glorifies like the golden calf of the Bible, as if without them there’d be no point in existence, is a very hard thing to shake. Now this screenplay for a picture was never shot but a month or two after we were back in Kentucky the very same producer who had seduced my husband sent him a wire: ‘Come back at once to star in Heart Like a Black Jack opposite the First Lady of the Screen, who is, needless to say, Bette Davis.’ This picture was never shot either, but for five years we shuttled back and forth between Egypt, Kentucky, and Hollywood, California, like a couple of migratory birds or more like lemmings, those creatures that swim out from the shore and drown from exhaustion somewhere. I wanted no part of it but the wires kept coming with promises never kept.”

  “How did Grandfather die?”

  “Boy, you have inherited the Phillips talent but also the cardiac weakness which ran in the line. Don’t run. Walk. And look where you are going. Your grandfather was enticed back to that city of false hopes and footprints in wet cement and luau banquets by shimmering night swimming pools. Yes, I said swimming pools with blue underwater lights and replicas of coral and of the grotto in Capri, Krenning wrote me and told me about these things with ominous emphasis on the swimming pool and the grotto, the replica of it, and he also told me that the producer would devote a few minutes between tequilas to look over Krenning’s synopses and notes and scenarios, murmuring, ‘Perfect, a dream, a vehicle for Gary and Marlene! And now, dear boy, how about a dip in the pool to clear our heads for discussion? Never mind trunks, the pool is private tonight, it’s just you and me, Ganymede.’ Well, Krenning was not a good swimmer, preferred to float alone on a raft of inflated rubber, and had a claustrophobic horror of the replica of the Blue Grotto, but after many excuses not to, he dove in one night and the lecherously enamored producer got him into the grotto from which his perfect young body was removed without life or lights. Oh, my God, I had told him, when you are pursued with lecherous intent by this Hollywood mogul, turn about and kick him in the groin, and maybe he did that when the producer propelled him into the replica of the Blue Grotto, but a kick under water is not effective, you know, it’s not an effective kick since it’s reduced in speed and impact by the weight of the deep water. Well, at the inquest it was discovered that both of them had on oxygen masks when they dove into the grotto but that one of the masks provided little oxygen while the other provided a great deal of it and I leave you to imagine which was Krenning’s and which his seducer’s, and at the inquest sexual molestation of Krenning was hinted at but hushed up. Money dies, I mean buys, especially when accompanied by influence of power and position. Of course beauty dies, too, and youth dies, being rarely accompanied by sufficient influence and power, but, boy, remember my advice to your grandfather: whenever pursued with lecherous intent, turn about quick and kick in the—”

  “Mother!” cried out my mother.

  She had been standing behind my Grandmother Ursula’s back for a minute or two and neither of us had noticed her standing there.

  “Mother, go to bed, Mother!”

  I stood up as the slow procession of the two ladies from my Grandmother Ursula’s chair to her tiny bedroom progressed, but just before it was finished, I said to Grandmother, “Don’t worry. I’ll never go there.”

  “No, no, no,” said Grandmother, disappearing. . . .

  I come from a line of disappearing ladies. Once I said to Moise, “I feel that I have a female incubus in me.”

  She looked at me reflectively for a moment and then said, “There is the animus and the anima in us all, it’s universal, so don’t put it down as an incubus which is an evil thing.”

  “What shall I do with it, then?”

  “Use it, baby. What else?”

  I am no longer writing in my Blue Jay but on the backs of an impressive collection of rejection slips and the envelopes which conveyed them—I wonder if this is significant? I have a feeling that I am writing in order to avoid thinking of time and Charlie, he ten years ahead of it and I ten behind, and once again the specter of self-pity is lurking closer than the clock in the corner of the hooked rectangle.

  But when I say specter I mean exactly that. It is not pity of self but mockery of self and rage at

  I’ve just picked up a particularly depressing rejection slip, I’ve picked it up because it came in a legal-size envelope with some good writing surface on it. The message of the rejection depresses me to such a point that I feel transfigured by it. I know that this is a peculiar statement. You will naturally think I’m a nut to associate profound depression with a state of transfiguration, that is, if you are not acquainted with a piece of music by the Strauss that didn’t write waltzes. He wrote a composition called Death and Transfiguration. Of course death is different from depression but they belong within the same general area of human experience, I would say tonight, with Charlie’s flu without Charlie.

  The rejection slip says to me, “Unsolicited manuscripts are not accepted by Broom.” That much is in print on the slip, but beneath this is a furious put-down in red ink by felt-tip pen. It says, “You could be prosecuted for using the postal service for the transfer of such filth. It is not only filthy with prurience but it reeks of self-pity and should be transferred only by a garbage disposal. Sincerely, Manley Hodgkins IV.”

  It seems to me that I have heard of something called Hodgkins disease and that it affects the lymph glands in a gradually fatal way, so that this editor’s name could be interpreted freely as a lymphatic malignancy in the fourth degree which I should think would be fairly terminal.

  But what I want to write on the envelope is about self-pity as an element of humanity and of human expression. I think maybe I will merely write out as best I remember a conversation between myself and Lance.

  “Baby, you pity yourself and so do I for good reason.”

  I didn’t contest the point.

  “But pitying yourself is a top-secret thing that belongs in the little bank vault of your heart until you know how to”

  He stopped talking at “how to,” but I think he meant how to transfigure it into

  You see, I’m not sure, either.

  Poetry of humor? Very hard to accomplish, expecially as a skater in palaces of ice nationwide. And yet I once saw him whirl in air with a dazzling smile on his face which contained euphoria along with a sense of doom’s approach.

  It all ties together except that Lance and not I achieved the approach of doom without a glum expression on the face.

  Lance was asleep when he failed to complete his sentence, and I, with my customary sense of the marvelous, very gently picked up the thick and velvety length of human asparagus that sprouted from his bush, half hoping that
it would stiffen into erection, and, since it did not, even when tongue tipped, I turned him half-over slowly and entered the velvet of his natal cleave.

  To Manley Hodgkins the Fourth this might reek of prurience but surely not of self-pity, which I admit I’ve never learned to transfigure past depression to a radiant smile in the air.

  In Thelma, Alabama, we had warm water that ran all night and I would sometimes slip into the bathroom and run it and soap my prick and thrust it rhythmically between the palms of my hands clasped about it until I came, thighs clenching a corner of the washbowl.

  A lonely, nocturnal habit, delicious ejection of the come of creation down a washbowl drain and where it belonged in my instance, which is an instance not suited for descendants.

  During my confinement to the violent ward on that little island in the River East, I was interviewed once a week by a student psychiatrist whose visits I valued nearly as much as those of Moise. He wore starched white, of course, and was by far the most agreeable staff member to look at. On the days of his visits I would not only bathe with unusual attention to detail but would shampoo my hair with that thinned bar of laundry soap in the men’s shower so that my resemblance to the young Rimbaud would be accentuated.

  At our last interview he said to me, “I would know without reference to your file that you are a sexual deviant by the way that your eyes drop continually from mine to a part of my body which is only concerned with my wife.”

  (He may have put it more bluntly.)

  “Now tell me,” he went on, “have you never had normal experiences of love, in your life?”

  (He probably used the word sexual experiences.)

  “Yes, once, as a child of thirteen.”

  He yawned and made a notation in his flipbook as quickly as a mark.

  “I see, tell me about it, whom was it with and what was your reaction?”

  “It happened in the attic of a little girl playmate. We used to spend afternoons up there in the attic of her home drawing pictures and inventing stories to go with them and once it was very warm, it was summer in Thelma, Alabama, and I noticed that she kept lifting her skirt, which was knee-length, inch by inch higher and separating her legs and finally the skirt exposed her very, very transparent little panties of nylon, light blue, and through them I saw what looked like an indented triangle of a roll, curving outward a bit.”