resentation of the Nativity, her life-sized and jolly imitation Santa Claus, and her God only knows what other execrable prettyisms and, pressed for space, had these ghoulisms crammed cheek to jowl in the bathroom against the starry-eyed and anticipated ritual of Christmas Eve. Shortly after one of his smoking respites, Mr. Blue was curled up on the davenport reading (“The Surly Sodomite of Santa Rosa”?) when he smelled smoke and almost immediately thereafter caught the unmistakable crepitation of a fire in the making. Calling to the U.S.S. Deborah, who was in the kitchen, to grab a pail of water, Mr. Blue charged to the bathroom and flung open the door precisely at the instant a jumbo-sized can of mentholated shave cream detonated, a lethal and ragged piece of it careening with furious impact into his Adam’s apple, severing his carotid artery and causing him to topple headlong into the holocaust. By dousing both the flames and Mr. Blue’s inert body, an hysterical though resolute Deborah managed to quell the fire, by which time neighbors had summoned policemen and Mr. Blue had, in the eeriest scene ever witnessed by the uncle-policeman of the attorney, all but given up the ghost. He lay, according to the lawyer, face up in the burnt-odored bath room amidst the ruined rubble of those blackened, soaked, and ersatz Yule trappings, the piece of shaving can still wedged fiercely into his Adam’s apple, the hideous contractions still pumping a venous blood that already covered him from neck to waistline. The explosion had hurled shaving cream every which way, and that which had landed on Mr. Blue had freakishly formed a nearly perfect beard. So that with his naturally snow-topped dome, his beard of riotous and fluffy mentholated green, his shirt front so vividly cerise, and surrounded by the scorched Magi and seraphs, he looked a kind of pygmy Sant Nikolaas in his death throes.
Weirder than anything to the uncle-policeman, and which, till it was later explained, he had chalked up to the momentary dementia of excessive grief, was the behavior of Deborah. Apparently she had all along known that Mr. Blue’s claim to chronic cacation was a hoax and that his frequent trips to the can were for cigarettes. While the police had tried to minister to Mr. Blue, all the U.S.S. Deborah had done, to the bewilderment and embarrassment of the curious neighbors, was thunder up and down the living room self-righteously pro claiming, “I knew cigarettes would kill him. … I knew cigarettes would kill him….”
I didn’t want to hear any more, told the guy I didn’t need the twenty after all, walked across the barroom into the terminal, and started looking for a train to Scarsdale.
Mr. Blue’s way of death was fitting. He had been utterly corrupted by America, and I find it proper that his carotid artery should have been severed by flak from a jumbo-sized can of mentholated shave cream. Like James Joyce, who tried to bend and subjugate the ironmongery of the cosmos with words (wasn’t it The Word Joyce was after?), Mr. Blue tried to undo the empyrean mysteries with Seedy and his red carpet, with his elevated alligator shoes, with the ardent push-ups he seemed so sure would make him outlast time’s ravages, with his touching search for some golden pussy that would yield to his lips the elixir of eternal life. And like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, like Quixote, Mr. Blue had become the perennial mock-epic hero of his country, the salesman, the boomer who believed that at the end of his American sojourn of demeaning doorbell-ringing, of faking and fawning, he would come to the Ultimate Sale, conquer, and soar.
And though Mr. Blue’s way of death was fitting, I never tell anybody the way it really happened; any more than in a hundred places in these pages I have told what “really” happened.
I can’t tell the mode of Mr. Blue’s death because in actuality it was so right as to force the reader’s credibility to the breaking point. Attempting to make Mr. Blue’s death more believable, I considered a number of possibilities. I thought of giving him the courage to go finally down between the U.S.S. Deborah’s legs and have her, in the moment of ecstasy, press those gymnast’s thighs about his head and thereupon extinguish the life from the luckless Mr. Blue. Standing on the lawn of some forlorn abode and mouthing his voiceless anger, Mr. Blue might have carried some typically bombarded American consumer round the bend and at point-blank got both barrels of a shotgun, scattering not aluminum siding but bloody bits of Mr. Blue all over the “dump.” Anxious about his impotence in this land of sexual gargantuans, he could have sent to a de generate mail-order house for a faradic device which attached to the genitals helps stimulate with electrical charges a more rapturous sexual act, only to have the device miscue and electrocute him, frying off his balls in the process. On my thirtieth birthday I learned that a quite respectable couple I knew vaguely had died in such a fashion, and at an age when I shouldn’t have been, I was shocked and grieved at soul. At odd moments over the next few years I reconstructed what I knew of them in the light of their death, like a would-be writer built their story from its end backward; and lying face up on a beach in Florida, my eyes opened to a universe of yellow blinding brightness, it one day occurred to me that, though had I lived to acquire the wisdom of Solomon I never would have ended their life in such a way, it really couldn’t have ended any other way. As for Mr. Blue’s death, there were any number of possibilities, none less credible than the severed carotid, and all more believable than the knowledge I carry in my heart.
Yet the endings, both the “real” and the imagined ones, I now know lack something for me, somehow don’t surfeit the romantic man, the hopeful creature, within me. With a stranger, two at the most, I am sitting at some distant saloon at two in the morning and, the bar empty now, we are sipping beer and recalling the childhood idol dead at nineteen at Anzio, the pulchritudinous creature who took our virginity, or that melancholy, self-deprecating teacher who gave so much more than all the others. And when I tell the story of Mr. Blue, and if I have good listeners I invariably do tell the story of Mr. Blue, surprisingly I have yet another ending. He died, I always say, doing a flip. He was at that point of the flip, his back arched, his face to the sky, at that point of his trajectory when he was closest to heaven, when for just an instant one was certain he was going to soar out and escape the meanness of his life, it was precisely at that moment, I say, that his heart gave out. And I always leave it to the listener to judge whether, so close to the sky and under the furious momentum of his flip, he continued toward heaven or simply thundered ignominiously back to earth.
And then I light a cigarette and take another sip of two-in-the-morning beer, and because I am embarrassed by my sentimentality and the paltry poet within me, I always add, “Whether he ever got around to kissing a snatch, I can’t say. But if he did,” I end the story of Mr. Blue, “I like to think it was some other than the U.S.S. Deborah’s.”
7/ Lament for a Conspiracy
Patience, the girl with the roan-colored hair, and I lived in the heart of Scarsdale at the General MacArthur Towers on Escutcheon Court. The Court—which was not a court but a very short street—was on either side, and behind rows of pretty shade trees, lined with storied, gabled, vine-covered apartment houses of brick and stone. And though in all the time I lived there I knew no one but the building’s maintenance man, an unintelligible though generous Greek with whom, in his cryptlike office in the basement, I occasionally used to drink a bottle of Metaxa brandy, I came to suspect that I was the only person in the Court who hadn’t dreams of moving a “little farther out,” to a place of long, cool lawns and picture windows, to a place which would give to the recipient of the news, “I live in Scarsdale,” some image less fraudu lent than the Court’s.
For me, our apartment was perfect. It was only two rooms, with a spacious, chandeliered, and mirrored hallway; but Patience, whose taste in clothes and food and furniture seemed to me flawless, had appointed it wonderfully well in Sheraton. Moreover, my bookcase overflowed. Books lined the mantel piece, books made their way into the recesses of the windows, and books strewn by me on the floor were eventually picked up by Patience and stacked in neat little piles in the hallway. In the corner of the living room, surrounded by a multitude of lamps, as though I bel
ieved the lurid glare would stay me from indulging in muddy thinking, was my writing table varnished to a brilliant, gleaming surface. Next to it stood a new metal typewriter stand atop which sat an equally new Smith-Corona, its white keys sparkling in the vivid light. My pencils were honed as fine as needles. There were reams of both bond white and yellow second-sheet paper. I had a hard-cover edition of Fowler’s usage dictionary, one of Roget’s Thesaurus, and one of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. To gauge the dictionary’s breadth when buying it, I had looked up thurible, an Oriental-looking container in which one burns incense, and gorp, a freakishly obese person who eats constantly because he achieves a kind of erotic splendor when sitting on the throne. The former was listed, the latter not, and because the latter never is listed, because I don’t to this day know where I ever heard the word, and because it didn’t seem likely I’d be called upon to use it, I bought the dictionary anyway—it was cheap. And finally, because Patience was out during the day preserving sacred institutions (or whatever it is that Bryn Mawr girls do), I had the apartment all to myself. Thus it was that I had
all the time in the world, and tremulous with apprehension, I had little choice but to sit at that brightly lighted table and try.
Like Beerbohm’s Felix Argallo, my thematic concern was to be pity, “profound and austerely tender pity.” Though the novel’s population of prepossessing, yeoman-like, and enlightened public relations men, currish, porcine-featured, and saber-rattling clients, and dazzling, nymphomaniacal secretaries had been done untold times and was not in the least conducive to such thematic notions, I didn’t know it and, like Argallo, couldn’t in any event write about anything that didn’t sadden me. Hence I assumed I would rise above my material and that my warmhearted reader would be given glimpses into the soul of a genuinely magnanimous if slightly bellicose writer. I was to forgive the tyrannical client his boorishness, the juicy nymphomaniac her exorbitant need of dongs. And as, disguised in blond hair, blue eyes, and horn-rims, I was to be the gallant public relations man who finds at the climactic moment for integrity, there would be no need to forgive me. I was certain, though, that in writing of myself I could find much to pity, and that there wouldn’t be a single episode relating to myself that didn’t sadden me. It was to be a very sad book.
From one of the many tomes I had read on the “art of fiction,” I had got the idea that, like Athena, the goddess of wisdom who sprouted full-breasted from the head of a man, the majestic sweep of my novel would roar out once I could “see” my first sentence—roar out like Niagara through the head of a pin. I wrote, “I live in Scarsdale,” added a period—. —and for the next few weeks sat staring moodily at these words. They made me sad. At the end of nine months, after unnumbered rewritings, giving the sentence striking contours and florishing curlicues, I had made it read, “Alone, I live in Scarsdale, Westchester County, New York, twenty to twenty-five minutes from the Grand Central on the New York Central Railroad commuter trains.” And though the book was by then ready to pour out, as I hadn’t written a single other word, I was still sad.
Such an exiguous output forced me, during those months, into a Machiavellian parrying with an unwitting Patience, making me tell her that I’d prefer she didn’t read the manuscript until it was completed, that by reading it in fits and starts she’d be oblivious to the “sweep of its pitiful grandeur.” “It won’t be long,” I’d assure her brightly, and Patience, a very patient girl, would smile blessedly in the suspicion (unceasingly encouraged by me) of being mated with a genius, perhaps envisioning herself on the dust jacket with me. To one side of my sparkling writing table I kept a stack of manuscript envelopes stuffed with blank paper and labeled with perspicacious chapter headings—”The Morose Merchants,” “The Sad Sirens,” “The Pitiful Prattle”—which on her Bryn Mawr oath Patience had promised she wouldn’t “read” while I was out of the apartment; and whenever she came in at night she’d find me—having just risen from, and slid Nero Wolfe beneath, the davenport—yawning and stretching over the typewriter on which, word for word, I’d just copied two pages of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, in translation, of course. While the steaks simmered below the stove’s pink top, and the peas simmered above it, I’d allow Patience to massage my weary shoulders, squeeze and pop pimples on my back, and query me on the progress of my masterpiece. “Fatiguing,” I’d say mo rosely, “fatiguing as hell. But it won’t be long. Scratch lower, will yuh, under the right shoulder blade?” Le roi le veut.
To say that I didn’t write during this period is not precisely true. Her lovely, shoulder-length roan hair in an upsweep, bespectacling herself in severe-looking horn-rims of window glass, using a minimum of makeup, dressed in tailored, twohundred-dollar dresses and expensive low-heeled pumps charged to her parents, Patience looked both less feminine and somewhat older than she was; and being both a bright and smartly turned-out young lady, she had managed to get a job working for judges interviewing potential divorcees, of whom in Westchester there were no few. For one judge it was her duty to try to re-establish harmony in the marriage and, if this was impossible, she was to make recommendations concerning the custody of the children to the family-court judge. I taught her how to prepare these reports. When I took the girl in hand, she had a bittersweet habit of reticently sneaking the most outrageous facts into the body of the report, thereby making them appear more egregiously horrid than in fact they were. If by his own admission the husband and father of four had been recently arrested at the urinals beneath Grand Central for reaching over and grabbing a chesty and beribboned army colonel by the penis, in her charitableness Patience suffered a compulsion to ramble on for two pages describing the man’s commendable educational background, his undisputed ability as a provider for his family, his deaconship in the Episcopal Church, his unquenchable love for his wife and kids, his lavish grief at the whole sordid business, and—boom —here he was grabbing alien cocks. With Patience it was both an admirably feminine diffidence and a true bounteousness of spirit.
“Believe me, Patience,” said I, “you’re doing these people a grave disservice by evading the problem and indulging their egos with all that sham nobility of theirs. That’s all this divorce shit is about, egos being stomped on and in turn demanding satisfaction. Like a bunch of emotional Frenchmen insulting each other and sending for their seconds. So he grabbed a colonel by the balls—so what? That old fraud of a colonel probably loved it!” Patience laughed uneasily, unsure of herself. “Seriously, though,” I said. “Just write the reports sans editorials, including, if you think it pertinent, that the guy went to Harvard and blew the Hasty Puddings and that he keeps his kids in velveteen knickers and banana splits. When you get that done, at the very end, and in a paragraph or two, make a sincere appraisal of the situation along with your equally sincere recommendations. There’s no one,” I said, and I was not being facetious, “to whom I’d rather trust my marriage. Do it my way, and you’ll see.”
Patience still wasn’t convinced, but I was determined to have my way in this and persuaded her to let me work up the next dozen or so reports (“cases,” they were called), minus the summarizing recommendations. Patience wouldn’t let me
v/rite the latter since I invariably suggested divorce (left to me, I’d have had the whole of Westchester divorced) and that the “issue” be placed in the “loving” care of an institution, anyplace save with their wretched, grief-indulging parents. Within two months both judges had complimented her on being the best counselor they’d ever had, using such laudations as “relevant, intelligent, and possessed of a hardness tempered by compassion.” In the highest accolade, a judge called her “a real professional,” and for that Patience gave me a kiss.
That Patience and I were saving others’ marriages while ours was squirming on such wobbly pins provided me over the years with a certain rum irony. We worked on these cases week nights; when Patience was home weekends, I had my most trying time. On Saturdays and Sundays I was compelled to sit for four and five
hours a day at my typewriter, over and over again typing “Now is the time for all good men to come …” This debilitating lunacy was finally alleviated when, mutually agreeing that we were both “working” too hard, we started spending our weekends in north Westchester with Patience’s sister Prudence, her husband, and their three small children, two girls and a boy who were all indiscriminately referred to by their father as “Sam,” for which reason I never did learn their names.
Before me now—as though in my relationships I hadn’t already paid the price of a little peace—I see Christopher (“Call me Bumpy”) Plumpton, who was married to Patience’s sister Prudence and who was therefore my brother-in-law. Give or take a year, Bumpy was my age, twenty-nine, and there the resemblance ended. Having been bright (or rich) enough to be admitted to Dartmouth, Hamilton, Wisconsin, and Colorado College, Colorado Springs, after five years and still without enough credits to enter his junior year, Bumpy had decided that he and higher education should never have married; and with the bitterness resulting from an unsavory divorce, Bumpy forever after coddled an unhealthy and surly yen to appear the most uncouth nincompoop in Christendom. Whenever Bumpy told me where he was from, he invariably identified a different place as home: Palm Beach, Scottsdale, Southampton, Shaker Heights, Beverly Hills, Greenwich, Bucks County, Winnetka—”wherever,” as Fitzgerald said, “the rich are rich together”; and though I had thought he was joshing me, or that he was one of those people who despise being labeled by place, I later learned from Patience that as a child, and a very wealthy child, he had on demand been passed from one covetous and ingratiating relative to another. In his infancy his parents had been killed when a cable on a mountain sightseeing coach in the Pyrenees Orientales snapped and hurled them into the abyss (another telling had it in the crash of a hydroplane his father was “testing” over the Azores); but his grandparents on either side of the family were “in” oil, public utilities, automobile and plumbing sup plies, a printing company, and I don’t remember what else; and for these grandparents, or their representatives, during the week Bumpy did something in the mysterious world of finance in downtown Manhattan. Because his sixteen-room house was on Todd Road in Goldens Bridge, some thirty miles north of Scarsdale, I one day asked him if he wasn’t rather far out to commute. “Naw,” Bumpy explained, “I’m a Tee-to-Tee man.” “A what?” “Ten to two, Tuesday to Thursday!” Bumpy roared approval at his own bad joke, exposing as he did so his yellowing, food-clogged teeth. There was little about himself that Bumpy didn’t approve, a fact perhaps best evidenced in his love for his stomach. For a young man Bumpy had girth, a waistline over the fifty-inch mark. Like an old, canny, and deceptively jovial tycoon, he hickishly wore his belt way below the tummy that he carried thrust defiantly and affectionately forward. Chomping on a Corona, he was always unconsciously patting and pinching and caressing that belly, doing so with something like reverence. He looked about to smile and reveal to a friend that he had just lost all the friend’s dough in a gold mine that bore no gold.