The Collected Stories Page 19

  “You can begin calling me Nell. Why do you want a marijuana? Didn’t you like fucking me?”

  Her expression was imperious. Her voice was irascible.

  “I see no connection.”

  “There is one. Answer my question, Phillip. Didn’t you like it?”

  “I didn’t like it, Nell.”

  “Are you being moral?”

  “My only luxury.”

  “A luxury of poor, sad, uneducated people. I liked it very much. Perhaps you’re more fussy than moral.”

  She made an amused eyebrow and leaned back in the theater of great class.

  “I’m sure my husband may give you the job.”

  I forgot that she wheezed and didn’t sweat right. She saw that in my face. Fresh color leaped into her bronze, as if to meet some gift I held. She was ready again. So was I, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t predict tomorrow’s feelings if I allowed no forbearance. A man needn’t be immoral to know that. He feels things. Her hand on mine. We stood up together. Pretending to dance, we drifted toward the zoo, both of us quivering with the nastiness of our exchange. Sobs issued from the corner. Blows persisted. She said, “One of those chaps is a plastic surgeon.”

  “Which?”

  I asked the question in a quiet, natural voice, like hers, to seem as ready as she for anything, even conversational drivel. And I turned her slightly to face the corner. “Which one?”

  “The bigger one. His name is Swoon. I’ll introduce you, if you like. I’ve never seen him at a party where he doesn’t fight.”

  “You’ve invited him here before?”

  “God, yes. About fifty times. You and your wife are the only ones never here before. He killed a man in that corner. February. Yes, it was February.”

  “Curious name.”

  “Silly. I mean he killed him in February.”

  She kissed my cheek. Stanger and Mildred receded through hair, vapors of perfume, alcohol, and cigarettes, immobilized figures on the couch, begging for trouble. In the zoo I buggered Nell. She noticed smears, said, “Shit,” and ran off to change.

  Nothing definite had been said about the job, but I was doing all right. Swoon, on the other hand, was down, spinning on his back while the other man, with pointed shoes, kicked him in the face, skipped away, stopped, kicked him in the face again, and skipped away. A lady with bulging eyes and tendons scoring her neck shouted, “Get up, Jack, get up. Get up, you fairy.” Beyond the fight, through agitations of dancing couples, I saw his hand on her thigh. She offered semiparted lips, lick of bare leg, pure neck and arm, and inflexible attention to him. She was lovely all in all. To me, a stranger. I’d have fucked her myself, though the idea seemed unnatural. She was mother of my child, not lady of this glory. However unnatural, I wanted her and envied her. I wondered how long before I was homosexual by circumstance. “Didn’t you want me to do it, Phillip?” That they hadn’t once left the couch was proof they felt something. “I did it for your job.”

  “No lies. Just tell me if you liked it.”

  “He was revolting. An old man.”

  “That means you liked it.”

  Swoon suddenly seized the dancer’s crotch and dragged himself up through seven or eight punches in the face. The move was brilliant and courageous. I found myself shouting, “Go, baby. Kill. Kill. Kill.” A voice hissed into my ear, “Devil.” In another dress, another degree of fresher, whiter person, Nell smiled, then pinched at my kidney, screwing the flesh until I thrust an elbow into her abdomen. I giggled and tried not to look at the fight or across the room at dirty Mildred. To my giggles, shifting, and lack of focus, Nell said, “The toilet is that way” I said, “Thanks,” wondering if I had to piss. She smiled, and her smile deepened, taking knowledge of her devil into places she’d taken the man. She knew him, this devil: he had to piss. In fact he didn’t, but he smiled, too, at her periodontal plastic, pink, low in the gleaming tooth. As I started away she grabbed my elbow.

  “Tell me one thing.”

  The fighting and the music were loud. I gave her a steady, deaf look.

  “I want you to tell me one thing before you go.” She didn’t stop smiling.

  “It was all right, Nell.”

  “But?”

  I waited to see what she made of nothing.

  Her smile strained as if tugged by waters. “You’d like to beat me, wouldn’t you? I think you’d like to beat me.”

  I winked.

  The other man went down. Swoon was grinding a heel into his neck. People were cheering, calling his name. “Jack. Jack.” That was love, waves of love. Nell clasped her hands on her breast and jumped up and down. “Oh, kill, kill,” she said. “Make him be dead.”

  Like a child, a little girl. Yet her exquisite jumping epitomized the party, spoke for the fighting men, and the others, too, even the servants. They served, danced, fought for the lady in white and gold, of the symmetrical face. The spot where she pinched me seemed to burn a message into my kidney. Her crowd wasn’t made of phonies. Between desire and action they interposed no mask. Impulse didn’t twist into perversion, into games. They were whole, straight, noble creatures, slave and master. To me, the challenge they represented left no alternatives. Maybe Stanger and Mildred had seen to that, but I was glad that I’d made the first deadly stroke, going to the zoo with Nell, killing Mildred as surely as Stanger killed giraffes. I imagined him on the veldt, amid naked blacks who hand him gun after gun, begging him to shoot straight as the giraffe charges. Great, but I’d buggered his wife. I’d wanted the job. Now, I could not not have it. Something definite would be said tonight. Yes or no. Either answer would be a comment on myself. Before the evening was over I’d be purged of irony. Made clean. Hired. Or a simple schmuck. I’d walked off in the direction indicated by Nell. My step was light. Too light, nearly wraithlike in the spacious, winding substance of this apartment. It made me feel weak and sick, the apartment, the creepy trivial way I walked in it. Like a man looking for his own pathetic step on a huge ship at sea. A man who has never seen or felt a high sea, never learned to walk its long surge, its remorseless drag and lunge. I needed this moment away from the blazing, loud incoherence of the crowded land, alone, out of sight, to practice walking. And my feelings, while practicing, were like those of a young captain in a novel by Conrad. First opportunity to command. He is alone, pacing the deck, getting a sense of himself. A storm is rising on the horizon. Members of the crew try to call it to his attention, but he has already noticed it, and seen through it to himself. He is sympathetic to their fears, yet more sympathetic to his own. Could I get at that sense of myself required by this storm? I notice it’s a moral storm. The worst kind. The ship is fraught with goods meant for the best people. Could I bring it home intact? Was I the captain? I tried to walk right. One, two, three, six, fifteen … It wasn’t easy to walk right. No prerequisite of honor is easy. I was afraid I might kick a jug, scratch a painting, the way I walked, like a crazy, spastic, stoned, drunken gawk. Not a captain. I might even fall off the whole fucking ship. But then I felt it begin: one, two, three, four … I was walking, and all right. I was the captain.

  A hallway led to hallways, to rooms opening into rooms, a labyrinth, a weight of money, accumulating in vistas of paintings, etchings, hanging rugs, pewter, throbbing lacquers, silver, gold. Touch these good things, I thought. Let sublimation steel you. Touch. Let lech. Love any hole that feels. I smacked a door, hands flat to spare me a broken nose, and fell through onto my face. I looked up moments later and saw a girl at a dressing table. Her back was to me. She was brushing long brown hair, like the household genie of serene indifference. She didn’t seem to know or care that I lay behind her on the floor, watching. She spoke:

  “Please don’t apologize for being late and slamming through my door like the offensive pig you happen to be. I much prefer your silence. Any apology will make me exceedingly furious. I’m not exceedingly furious now, Colin. So keep your mouth shut. I suppose you haven’t shaved, have you? I won’t hear you
r apologies. I won’t hear your voice.”

  She clapped the brush down. Her legs lashed by my face, negligee flying, to the bed. Books and papers were knocked off the bed. I stood. She flung onto the bed, twisted onto her back, eyes shut, forehead writhing with contradiction. She gave a blind, shrill order to the ceiling:

  “Go on, Colin, you know what I want.”

  Lest he’d forgotten, her legs struck out, stiff, isoscelean. I saw voluted conch in wire tangle, the picture of her mind. The Colin in me rose, perked up like a rat, snout quivering, pointing at the answer to a question never asked. Life is this epitome. Red, tidal maw. Yawn. Aching exfoliant. Hole. I flicked light, shut door, three steps, and I straddled her neck. “Smells,” she cried, and muddy flux dragged me, gripping my head, churning circles into the circles of her need, the cherished head which she recognized—“Who you?”—as not the right head. A good one nonetheless, already thinking how to apologize. She screeched and kicked. I pressed on to suggest the suction of feeling, but, thinking, thinking, I felt only ideas, tones, and tropes rise upon one another like waves, curling, crashing, failing to hold, sliding faster, faster down the beach to the seething, shapeless inane. Remember the job, I thought, and a hairy hemp ripped from my liver to my throat. I came at both ends simultaneously. Apology was impossible. I opted for vigor. “Fantastic,” I cried, hoping thus to distract her with vigor. Also oblique flattery She said, “Eeee,” scrambling to one end of the bed, and me to the other, pleading, “Don’t scream. I’m turning on the light.” It discovered her biting the sheet. “Woo woo woo,” she said. I bent, pleading in the harmless posture of a dog at stool. “Didn’t you like it?” She twisted about to slap the night table. I expected a gun. She twisted back, glasses on her face, big eyes, the tigerish mother apparent. “Say, you’re Nell Stanger’s kid, aren’t you?” My voice was eager, genial. She screamed. I fled.

  Streaming chair, rug, jug, I whipped into the last hall, kicked into high for the heart-bursting straightaway, and a person — shortish, bald, bow tie, drink in chubby grip — was there, like the eternal child who plays in the road before the speeding Ferrari, or the peasant lifting slow, clotted, laborious face to a thunder of horses and hounds, but this particular incarnation of the common denominator leaned toward a painting, touching, smelling, wallowing in the color and texture of converging neural streams which filled the airy delta between himself and better life on the wall, and was unaware of me, running, whole man running, legs, arms, head running, stomach, knees, balls running, and he still savored the painted dream as he looked up into the oncoming real, the drink warm in his forgotten fist, all of him big, bigger in my eyes, looking up with no intention, no expectation, and before his eyebrows fully elevated, eyes fully opened, and pulpy sluggish lip curled fully away from stained teeth, my hands struck his neck. Behind me was a faint thud. Empty rumble of a rolling glass.

  I reentered the drawing room with expanded lungs. Heat in my eyes. Couples were still dancing, others sprawled. Nobody watched Swoon and the other man, lugubrious with exhaustion, flailing in slow arcs, rarely hitting. Rancid breath lay in the torpid, festering air. Screams came from the distance. No cigarette was put out or drink lowered. Between me and the couch, where Stanger and Mildred sat necking, there was a forest of shifting fashions, the black tuxedos and the clothing of the guests, pinks, greens, blues, and yellows crying out for pleasures of middle age. It hummed everywhere, omnivorous conversation of a dying party that insisted on living. Nell stepped out of it. “Let’s dance.” Her voice was grim, as if dancing were war, but it had an undercurrent of something more particular. Instantly, I became a dancing fool. She danced me off to the zoo and said it.

  “Undress.”

  Her clothes were a heap of white, pink, and gold. She sprawled on the bear, its fangs encrusted, shining blood. Her limbs cast out in the languid shape of her mood, suggesting nets. Her voice was soft, yet coarse in tone. “Get it, Phillip. On the shelf in the closet.”

  Still in my shirt and tie I trotted to the closet to get it, whatever it was. On a shelf about chest high lay three hundred sausages, coiled in convoluted complications, a monster brain. A long gray iron chain. The prospect of such appetite suffused me with feelings of poverty, no education, and moral shock, but in one clean movement of self — disgust I laid on hands like he who knows. The chain chuckled as my fingers pierced its holes. I pulled. It came slowly, heavily, as each link stirred from sleep, and then too heavily, gaining speed, personal will, clamor, a raging snake of cannonballs pouring through my hands to bury my feet, shins, knees. Writhing, arms out, I was half man, half bonsai tree with impoverished roots, strangled in its springs, sucking denial. “I hate pain,” I screamed. Nell bobbled up off the bear. She seized the chain, tugged. I pummeled the top of her head. For real, not in a sexual way. She said, “Quit that.” I shouted sincerely, “I hate pain. I’ll beat your head off,” pummeling. She lugged; steady, patient strength; the motion of serious, honest work. In different conditions, I’d have considered it beautiful; her naked, multidimpled back, rippling, heaving spine against iron. I beat the measure of her lugging into her head and shouted my refrain. At last I fell free and could properly convulse. She rolled onto me, tried to soothe me with mothery tongue, breasts, and holes, but something had happened to make me unreceptive, inconsolable, as if my body, in trauma, had shaken free of my mind, and now my eyes, my flesh in every place retreated, fleeing toward the murdered buffalo, gazelle, and giraffe. “That,” I gasped, “rub with that.” She, too, seemed unselved, brained. She rose, stumbling across the room to grab the giraffe by the nostrils and tear it off the wall. She returned, kneeled, rubbed its eyes and great slop of lip carefully, gently, against my face and neck, then back and forth between my legs until I felt better. I dressed rapidly. She stared, sitting on the floor beside the giraffe, a limp, naked, stupid woman. I let myself think of her that way. “Get dressed, woman.” She crawled to the heap of clothing and clawed out her underpants. I left for the drawing room. Not once had I struck her in a deliberate and evil way. I thought of that as I limped down the hall. I felt myself ringing like a bell that calls men from this world. For the first time that evening, if not in my life, doing nothing, I’d done tremendously. Though nothing definite had been said, I knew the job was mine. It was inconceivable that it wasn’t mine. I hadn’t hit her. I hadn’t even wanted to. In the force of not wanting, I’d made the job mine. This wasn’t magical thinking. This was true; or the world was chaos and less than hell. Nevertheless, I was prepared to accept a word, a strong hint. I didn’t need legal forms, a ten-page contract, sixteen carbons. I would approach Stanger now. The confrontation would be his chance to talk, not mine. I had the job. He had only, for his salvation, to confirm it, suggest an idea of wages per annum. My limp deepened. I deepened it. Hard, good lunge. Dragging foot. An arm hooked back for balance, for the feel of bad damage swinging itself, dragging, lunging down the hall. What rough beast? What rough beast, indeed.

  Suddenly the hallway didn’t look familiar. I’d taken a wrong turn, perhaps two, but there was a door. It had no knob, a swinging door. I shoved it wide. Something registered. Just as quickly, it was gone, wiped out, retrogressively unseen. I was back in the hall again, the door was shut. I was about to continue lunging on to the next door, the next turn, when I realized I’d fallen into my old ways, protecting myself, letting myself believe there were things one mustn’t see. I’d been through that, I’d seen, transcended. I could see anything now, see it squarely, name it with exactitude and indifference. I shoved the door again. It opened on a brilliant kitchen, a long counter with a tall, steel coffee urn. I’d seen that. The black servant stood on the counter beside the urn. That, too. Pissing into the urn. Yes, yes; that, too. He wore sunglasses as if to shield his eyes against the glare of his yam. “That’s offensive,” I said, naming it. He shook his last drops into the urn, hopped off the counter, zipped up, and began putting cups and saucers on a tray. When he finished he turned to me and said, “
We’re born offensive, brother.” He stepped toward me, hand extended, palm up. “Give me some skin, brother.” The flat, gleaming opacity of his sunglasses seemed menacing, but I lunged to meet him and drew my palm down his. We locked thumbs, pressed forearms and elbows together. He was all right, but boiling in me now was a phrase for Mildred: “Don’t drink the coffee.” I returned to the drawing room with it, and in the weariness of this crowd, I felt it dissolve into the quiet voice of a Britisher, like head boy at a school for supersadists, fashioning managerial scum for the colonies: “Mildred, get your coat.” Terribly mild, yet the pitch of majestic will. She and Stanger were locked, pretzeled together, still necking, his hand was plunged beneath her dress, but she wiggled hard, slapped knees together, sprang up. Suddenly my wife! He sprang up behind her. There were people everywhere, some standing behind their couch, others sprawled at their feet, and yet only I could invade their privacy, only I had the power of invasion attributed ordinarily to voyeurs and God. The power against which society makes laws, or out of which it claims to draw them. Now there was stir all about the room. My power had spread, initiating small spasms, like a wind seen in the motion of trees. And Nell appeared, the hostess again, cooing good-nights and so-good-yous. She smiled at me in a frowning, quizzical, sad, not miserable way. I read her lips: “Coffee?” Thus encouraging me to stay a bit after the others. I smiled regrets and waved lyrical goodbye. From the depths, dimly, mechanically, came “Eeee.” Some of the guests who seemed to hear it tried to look worried.