Excessively silent, perplexed and brooding, for perhaps half an hour Mr. Blue wove the Cadillac round and round among the blocks in the neighborhood before, my anger finally abating, I turned to him, intent on saying dreadful things. “The Yucatdn, huh!” I was going to say. “Why, you’ve never been out of this crumby city. Not only that, you’re crazy to boot! A proper loony! If you’re going to eat a snatch, eat one! But for lord’s sake, shut your bloody yap about it! You’re turning me into a spluttering idiot! An eeeed-yuuhhht!” It was going to be a superb piece of venom, it was! As though it were all in some way his fault, I was even plotting ways to tell the Counselor off. Before he got a chance to roll his eyes about, dribble his tongue over his chin, rap me tentatively on the skull, and calmly say, “Straight-shooter, it is, I think, about time you went away again,” it would be necessary to disarm the Counselor. Creeping up behind him, I’d just start screaming, “I’m the one who’s supposed to be nuts!” Perhaps here I’d pound myself dramatically on the chest. “I’m the one who’s been locked up! But everyone who comes to this fruity apartment is nuttier than I am! Absolute, unequivocal lunatics!” “By God,” I thought, “all those madmen will get a real dressing down; sheer murder, they’ll see a real paranoiac in action! Ha!”
Ha indeed; for when I turned and looked at Mr. Blue, I found that I couldn’t even begin on him. Sheepish and saddened by my fury, he hadn’t said a word in the half-hour we had driven around and had sat there hunched over the Cadillac’s wheel, just a runt whose legs barely reached the brake pedal, an earthenware dwarf. He was dirty, hot-browed and weary, old—old. About him there had always been this lapse of personal care intimating slummy origins: if his shoes were shined, his collar was dirty; if he wore a spanking-new tie, his soiled, three-day socks cascaded over his shoe tops. As a “factory representative” he had never been able, so to speak, to put it all together at one time and make himself convincing. On this day the brow and the face were sweaty with fatigue, the fingernails and hands smudged with dirt, the shirt and collar wrinkled and stained, the pants oil-flecked and unpressed, the shoes turned-over and scuffed, the nostrils and ears gardens for unseemly hairs—everything was wrong. Moreover, studying him I was suddenly sure that it wasn’t so much a princely neglect of person as a thing ingrained. He exuded tenement beginnings, an aura of dark and oppressive places, rat-filled infancy, Saturday-night baths, underwear fouled with three days’ sweat and intimate body dirts; and I knew, too, that that ppttoooooeeeee wasn’t so much a hyperbolically farcical gesture as an unavoidable one. Rising up from such dreary places, it was little wonder he couldn’t accept the labia as a proper altar at which to place one’s murmuring devotions. And, as I have suggested, worse for me than anything was how old he suddenly seemed, perhaps even seventy! For all his youth-seeking exercises, his arms looked infinitely frail, the ancient muscles falling prunishly away from the humerus. The femurs of his stubby legs showed so fleshlessly prominent and sticklike through his unpressed trousers that I wondered if the flesh of that other, that “poignant bone,” hadn’t shriveled, too, wondered if his oral fixation wasn’t sublimation for the irremediable impotence of age. I almost asked, “Can you still get it up, Mr. Blue?” But I didn’t. Then I almost demanded, “How old are you really, Mr. Blue?” But in the same way I was unable to sustain a need to vent spleen, watching him hunched up over the wheel of the Cadillac that was too big for him, so unkempt and so giving off his harsh beginnings, I couldn’t say anything finally.
Nor did it make any difference. One o’clock, it was time to go to Moose’s or O’Reilly’s or Big John’s for “lunch.” Doubt less motivated by the tacit knowledge that our partnership was dissolved, we remained in the bar for seven hours that day and got very drunk. Despairing that I’d ever get him into any houses, Mr. Blue had increasingly given his tales over to dreams of sales; and that final day proved the one he related the barmy nonsense about the farmer’s storm windows and gave the whore fifteen dollars for her dress. Since he spent perhaps fifty dollars that day, I must say that Mr. Blue was a prince when parting with dough. When by eight o’clock I had drunk myself sober, I found that I still had four, ice-melted highballs in front of me, and that Mr. Blue was passed out with his head face down in the sour booze of a table behind me. Knowing that I’d somehow have to get him home, I told the bartender to take away the drinks, ordered a cup of coffee, and removed the Cadillac’s keys from Mr. Blue’s clasped hand laid out before his head on the table.
When I met Mr. Blue’s common-law spouse, the U.S.S. Deborah, I understood the ultimate reason why he approached cunnilingus with such single-minded and fastidious wariness. In high school we had had a math teacher, a great wide, jolly soul under whose thunderous stride the creaky halls had trembled ominously and who, by one of those brilliantly cruel strokes to which adolescents are given, had been dubbed (to endure forever, luckless lady!) the U.S.S. Clarabelle. No sooner had I cast a blurry eye on Deborah than I made a mental note, should I ever by chance find myself chat ting with one of her pupils (for Deborah was a teacher, too), to test the nickname on him—”Oh, so you have the U.S.S. Deborah?”—that I might determine how the naughty humor of my ingenuous generation held up with present-day sophisti cates.
Bit by bit Mr. Blue had revealed his domestic situation to me. For two years he had been “shacked up” with a school teacher. Occupying adjoining apartments, they had begun by sharing their meals, he had gradually found his way into her bed, his clothes had found their way into her closet, his razor into her medicine cabinet; and though, for the sake of Deborah’s reputation, he still paid the rent on his own apartment, they were for all practical purposes “hitched.” “A great girl,” Mr. Blue had said. “A little on the tall side.”
Deborah, a girls’ gymnasium teacher, was indeed “a little on the tall side”: six feet, one. With a Sapphic coiffure approaching a brush cut, shoulders that wouldn’t have gone unremarked in the Giants’ shower room, from earth to sky she was caparisoned in dirty tennis sneakers, navy-blue gymnasium trousers striped down the sides with white, a maroon sweatshirt bearing, of all things, the legend Property of USC in gilt lettering, a corded whistle hanging about her formidably bemuscled neck, and a black baseball cap mounted with the New York Yankees’ emblem, NY. As other women exude the musky, arousing aromas of lilac powders and lavender perfumes, Deborah gave off an aura of rubbing alcohol, athlete’s-foot powder, and sweaty athletic supporters; nor should I have been surprised to discover that she was the Olympic champion hammer thrower from the Soviet Union, now defected to the West. Even above the astonishment her over-all presence inspired—and at first look I had christened her the U.S.S. Deborah—one thing glared out at one: her imposingly blocklike jaw was as blue as an adman’s dream. In the hour I passed in the apartment, and whenever I could do so with impunity, I gave that jaw a most scrupulous going over; and though, amazingly, nothing like a beard revealed itself, her jaw was, notwithstanding, a brilliant and utterly disarming blue. So blue was it that I continually conjured an image of Deborah facing the television camera, her gymnasium-trousered right leg propped up on a locker-room bench, her fore arms resting comfy on the thigh of that upraised leg. A voice off camera earnestly inquired, “Deborah, what does it really take to make a good defensive tackle in the National Football League?” Deborah smiled modestly, a hole opened in that striking blue jaw, and she mumbled, “Speed. Tenacity. Timing. An ability to get the job done!” Presently she was holding up to the camera a can of Alpo (no, that’s dog food, isn’t it?), she was holding up to the camera a can of Jet-Shave and inviting the incredulous viewer to share an analogy between flattening Jimmy Brown and disposing of his morning chin hairs. Deborah had a big blue jaw.
When Mr. Blue and I had first entered the apartment and had gone into the kitchen, where Deborah was washing dishes and angrily clanging knives and forks into the silverware cup of the strainer, and I had got my first open-mouthed look at her, I believed I was in for a gay evening, thinking that here
was a girl who had unquestionably cultivated a sense of humor about herself. On the sidewalk in front of the apartment house, a bewildered (I had difficulty in convincing him that he was home, and that I had driven him there), word-slurring Mr. Blue had led me to expect as much, insisting that I come up for a drink, a laugh, and an introduction to the little woman, rather ominously implying that unless I did so he wouldn’t give me cab fare back to the Counselor’s apartment, at the opposite side of the city. Meeting the little woman was not what Mr. Blue had in mind. Gaiety was not one of De borah’s more evident hues, and what Mr. Blue wanted, I now know, was for me to provide him immunity from a good physical thrashing.
No sooner did Deborah look at him than she shrieked, “You’ve been drinking!” Alas, this was true: Mr. Blue was wet-and red-eyed, staggering and belching drunk. Yet, as most wives are willing to do, I thought Deborah might have given him a chance to protest his innocence. Mr. Blue at tempted as much. Staggering toward her at the sink—apologetically muttering, “Ah hon, ah hon, ah hon”—as he went, he tried to put his arms about her thirty-two-inch waist, and affectionately rest the cup of his right ear on the nipple of her massive left breast (he didn’t even have to bend down!), right at the lower curl of the C of USC. But he never completely made it. Heatedly casting him off when his ear was within an inch or so of the teat, she cried, “And you’ve been smoking, too!” For the first time she wheeled and sniffed accusingly in my direction. I started to quake. Though it was spineless of me, I wasn’t about to be disputatious with the U.S.S. Deborah and found myself self-righteously nodding my head in vigor ous assent to her steamy indignation. “Drunker than a coot and smoking like a fiend,” that nodding agreed. Compounding my treachery, I sighed dramatically, shrugged my shoulders, and, palms upward, threw my hands out from my sides, as though to add, “I’ve done all I can for the little bugger, but he utterly refuses to help himself!” “Your supper’s been in the icebox for hours,” Deborah sneered. “Get in the living room, you little weasel, and I’ll bring it to you.”
Moaning “ah hon” and something about being embarrassed in front of “mah guest,” neither of which amounted to a glimmer of real protest, Mr. Blue resignedly turned and, head weighed down with heavy and burning humiliation, staggered through the door into the living room. Still quaking, I fled right at his elevated heels.
Mr. Blue and I sat on the davenport, and Deborah sat in an easy chair facing us, her blue-trousered legs crossed, displaying through the pants the long, bulging thigh of her topside or right leg. On her lap she held an open book, From Here to Eternity, which she feigned reading, occasionally looking up to allow the hole in her blue jaw to open and whistlingly sneer something in Mr. Blue’s direction. On a snowy china plate on the coffee table before Mr. Blue sat his supper, at which he nibbled grudgingly, almost painfully; and on the table before me sat a bourbon and water whose single ice cube had long since melted and which, between bright smiles, I brought to my lips for minuscule sips, biding my time until I could get the “little weasel” aside and extract the promised cab fare from him. Having offered me some supper, which with the most brimming thanks I had declined, Deborah had informed me that though Mr. Blue and she didn’t drink, she wasn’t so boorish as not to be aware of her guests’ needs and kept liquor in her apartment for them. Looking with homicidal intent at Mr. Blue, she had added, “Locked up!” Beginning her explanation with “Mr. Blue—Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!—and I don’t drink,” she had ended it by drifting into a rowdy and demented hysteria which made me wonder if she weren’t a bit tetched, and which made me quake all the more. But I kept gritting my teeth and maintained my cheery, near-Mongoloid smile; Mr. Blue continued his painful nibbling; the hole kept forming itself and sneering, “Not so much salt—it’s bad for your kidneys”; and Mr. Blue kept offering something like a protest: “Ah hon.”
My sanguinity was not altogether rigged. In front of Mr. Blue sat a twelve-ounce glass of what I had taken to be orange juice but which Mr. Blue had informed me—by prodding my elbow, distastefully wrinkling his nose, and drunkenly whispering—was carrot juice, a slander that didn’t go unremarked by Deborah, and which elicited from her a battery of triumphant Ha’s! Apparently a “health” dinner, the rest of the meal consisted of a dozen hard-boiled eggs, a half-dozen celery sticks about a foot long, a couple pounds of sliced raw tomatoes, a half raw cabbage diced into almost edible squares, and a mountain of something I couldn’t distinguish but which may have been cold pickled cauliflower. Smiling amiably, I was thinking I might have accepted something to eat.
Another reason for my jolliness was a fantasy I had been indulging inspired by the U.S.S. Deborah’s library, the volumes of which filled a small, white-enameled bookcase directly facing me, set to the left of and against the wall behind Deborah’s easy chair. Though Deborah was of an indeterminate age between thirty and forty, I wasn’t surprised to see that she had kept her college texts, Adolescent Psychology, Living Religions of the World, Philosophy of Education, and the inevitable Margaret Mead, those symbols that she had suffered exposure to loftier things and by such exposure had become a sanctimonious and blubbering ninny. What did surprise me was the dozen or so novels, ranging in time from Moby Dick daringly down to the fairly recent All the King’s Men, books which indubitably represented the “required reading” for a course in “The American Novel.”
Other than the text and the novels a good part of Deborah’s library consisted of books designed to titillate the sweat glands, books on mountain climbing, speed walking, water treading, muscle toning, gum massaging, and dumbbell lifting. By far the larger part of it, though, was given over to volumes Deborah had undoubtedly accumulated since her virginal and unmourned departure from the university (had it really been my alma mater?), Successful Love, Love in Marriage, Pride of Orgasm, Blissful Bunkmates, Sunniness in the Boudoir, that kind of thing, volumes which in the jarringly aseptic prose of the Ph.D.’s are given over to naughty erotic nuances and which, still seeing no way of getting an egg-munching Mr. Blue aside, led me easily into still further fantasy, this time envisioning the U.S.S. Deborah and Mr. Blue abed to gether.
His runty, agingly muscular and naked body curled up fetus-like to one side of the bed, Mr. Blue was lying elfin-like with his snowy head resting atop his pillowed hands, his eyelids blistered fiercely to his eyeballs in a frenziedly feigned sleep. Next to him, propped stolidly against both the bed’s pillows, sat the imposing, block-jawed Deborah loudly reading aloud. From the waist upward she still wore her Property of USC sweatshirt, and from the waist downward, under the commonsensical plain white linen sheets, she was naked, too, the muscles and glands tingling, poised, anticipatory. Knowing that Mr. Blue was not asleep, she read, as I say, loudly. “To make oral contact with the female clitoris—” Here I paused. Why, I wondered, did they always say female clitoris? What was the male clitoris? “To make oral contact with the female clitoris one should gently insert his thumb and index finger —” Finger, I thought, would never do; there was something egregiously sordid about the thought of fingers, something that in such a tome would smack of the untidily human. Throughout all of this, incidentally, my brimming smile, turned back and forth between a chomping Mr. Blue and a sneering Deborah, never left my face, an equable facade that might have been housing angelic visions. “—one should gently insert the thumb and index member—” but wasn’t gently rather too suggestive?—”of either hand (depending on whether one is right-or left-handed) into the vaginal area and, much as a gynecologist uses his surgical tongs to distend the labia in a pelvic examination—” At this point in my fantasy I saw Mr. Blue’s body tense, his eyelids became glued even more fiercely to his eyeballs, and I laughed with sibilant heartiness as he issued a half-dozen histrionic snores charged with the whistling tremors of deep sleep, his body shuddering
with intimations of inviolable and innocent dreams.
“Ask Freddy!” Mr. Blue was suddenly and irascibly demanding of Deborah. “Ask Freddy!” Whatever prompted
the argument I was meant to settle had pushed Mr. Blue round the bend. He was on his feet, his body stricken with rage, his nose thrust out with the defiance of a boar’s snout. In the face of Deborah’s stolid sneer, such defiance seemed to warrant medals. Whatever had caused it, Deborah had this time pushed Mr. Blue too far. Choking back angry tears, Mr. Blue again demanded, “Ask Freddy!”
“Ask me what?” I said good-naturedly, having by now risen completely from my reverie.
“She says I never exercise anymore!” Mr. Blue’s face was livid with the pain of false accusations. “Tell her! Tell her, Freddy!”
“Well,” I hemmed, still possessed of an aversion for disputing with Deborah. “He exercises quite a bit. Front flips, back flips, hand-springs, push-ups, that kind of thing.” Deborah’s fiery eyes were flashing hate in my direction. “Between drinks, of course,” I hastily added, and chuckled amiably at my own cowardice.
My treachery proved more at the moment than an enraged Mr. Blue could endure; and before either Deborah or I could prevent him, and intent on showing us both, he had placed his hands on the narrow wooden spine atop the davenport’s back and with a barely perceptible effort had pulled himself up on it, amazingly ending in a beautiful, perfectly back-arched hand stand, his white hands pinched a fierce red by the sharp wooden edges of the one-inch spine. Standing thus, he turned his upside-down head—furred tongue, nostril hairs, and inverted eyebags—in Deborah’s direction and, adopting her sneering tone, challenged her. “You never could do this!” Thereupon, slow hand over slow hand, and with his back always perfectly arched, he began a splendid handwalk down the davenport’s painful spine. He almost made it, too. He had got almost to the end of the davenport, his breathing excessively labored, when he stalled, tottered very slightly, then fell.