Barbary Shore (17 page)

“Oh, you can’t leave me yet.” She said this casually, but for an instant I had a glimpse into the hours she anticipated alone and the bare walls which weighed upon her.

“I’ve got to. I’m exhausted,” I said.

Lannie led me to the door, and then halted before it, barring my exit. Her head was at the level of my chin, and I kissed her forehead almost automatically. With a quick motion she came into my arms, thrust her mouth upward, and kissed me. Her lips were feverish, and her slender body bore against mine, hugging me in a wiry embrace. Intoxicated with fatigue we clung to each other, swayed across the room to sprawl upon her bed.

Her body arched against mine, rigid to the touch, her mouth tight as though she must repel even as she would accept. I held her in my arms, gave her my body to which she could cling, and remotely without tenderness or desire or even incapacity I performed,
riding through the darkness of my closed eyes while she sobbed beneath me in fathomless desperation.

If it were love, it was also fear, and we might have huddled behind a rock while the night wind devoured the plain.

“Save me,” I heard her cry.

O
NCE
, McLeod had said to me, “You know, m’bucko”—his voice relishing the outrageous brogue he would affect whenever he said anything which he had considered for some time—“it’s onanists the world is forever shaping, and if you have a taste for dialectics, it demands little more to see that it is only by onanism at last one can receive the world.” He had vented the sound of his private mirth, and stared at me. “If this doesn’t ring a bell for you now, it’ll toll a mass someday, for ye’re in the archetype.”

I stayed with Lannie through the night, and it was almost dawn when I climbed the stairs to my room. Yet I did not fall asleep for over an hour, every nerve of my body protesting against the events of that long day which had just ended. I would dream, and then I would be awake again. And despite myself, deprived of the rest of afterlove, I exhumed the hours I had just spent, and twitched irritably in my bed.

I had not really wanted Lannie; I had driven myself, not once, but again and another. She had wept, she had … why recount the details? It was done, and I had my regrets. I would end it as soon as possible.

Unhappily, our decisions are more plastic than we would allow, and in the afternoon when I awoke, my night with Lannie
lost what had been without attraction. If it had been with the image of other women I had scoured my loins for her, it was now with the thought of Lannie that I lay comfortably in my bed, and her face in recollection seemed beautiful. I could have the desire to hold her, to embrace her gently.

McLeod’s words returned to me then, and more. Out of that long day and longer night, I could be troubled again by the talk we had had on the bridge and the memory which followed it. Where had I learned the words I said to him, and what remained of them now? I would force my mind to yield more, but nothing could be forced; from the effort I came up with no more than a question. What, I heard myself asking in the silence of the room, are the phenomena of the world today? And into that formal void my mind sent an answer, the tat to the tit; I could have been reciting from a catechism.

The history of the last twenty years may be divided into two decades: a decade of economic crisis, and a decade of war and the preparations for new war.

Hands at my forehead, I repeated this as though in rocking back and forth I might find momentum to carry me further, to provide, from that time when I had languished like a hand-maiden before a revolution which did not come, one face, one friend, one name which might present itself and offer a thread for the maze. But nothing followed. Nothing but the single answer: a decade of economic crisis and a decade of war and the preparations for new war. My mind had its own pleasure and I could force nothing. After a while, I wearied, went down to eat a meal, strolled afterward through a short walk.

When I returned I stopped on an impulse at Guinevere’s door and rang her bell, hearing it sound with such clarity that I could picture her apartment in all its confusion, the beds unmade, the bread crumbs upon the table, and somewhere on the floor a puddle of coffee. Would she be drowsing, or did she sit in the kitchen now, staring into space? I rang again and listened.
In one of the recesses I heard her footsteps, slow and listless, as she dragged toward the door. Then there was no sound at all, and I imagined her motionless in the hall, standing with her weight balanced, one foot to answer, and one to retreat. So I rang still again, and as if it were only a cumulative pressure which could summon her, the steps became heavier, and with a steady slovenly clumping of her slippers she approached the door, paused with her hand on the knob, and slowly opened it a crack.

We stared at each other. I was shocked. Face swollen, hair undone, her eyes stared emptily ahead as though I were not there. For two seconds, three, perhaps four, we stood looking at each other, a minim of recognition in her face, and then, her mouth pinched and small without make-up, she fluttered her lips in an attempt to speak, and instead, closed the door in my face.

I shrugged, and climbed the stairs to Lannie’s apartment. But the encounter with Guinevere, delayed in its reaction, fell upon me as I knocked on Lannie’s door. I was abruptly depressed. From inside her room, I could hear the sound of laughter, and though I continued to knock, I wanted to slip away.

The laughter ceased, and there was silence on the other side of the door. When she welcomed me, her eyes were without enthusiasm. She squeezed my hand, erected a smile, and that was all.

In the corner sat Hollingsworth. He had selected with his dependable instinct the only wooden chair in the room, and he sat upon it stiffly, his hands turned in upon his knees, his narrow backside biting no more than the last inch of seat, so that he might have been a cadet, his body frozen into an agony of immobility, his mind shrieking, “Brace! Brace before
they
make you brace.”

The muscles at the side of his mouth tensed, his teeth were revealed in a greeting. “Well, this is a surprise and a pleasant interruption,” he said.

Lannie dropped in a chair, her body twisted, her head lolling over the arm. Strewn about her upon the floor were a dozen cigarette butts. “Oh, Mikey, I’ve had so many visitors today,” she said. “I woke up this morning, and there was a mouse upon the bed, and we talked for a while, and he told me many things, although I found him pompous and a bore at last. And although he would not admit it I knew that he was Christ, and I wept for him because instead of dying, he’s come back, and now he’s lived too long. I told him he should go back to his cross, and without a word, he put on his hat, jumped off the bed, and left through a hole in the wall.” A wan smile passed her sallow mouth. “And then there was another visitor, come to bring a towel, and he was like the mouse too, only I hated him. He said his name was McLeod, and he was a friend of yours.”

“McLeod?”

“Yes.” Her yellow fingers fluttered a match at her unlit cigarette. “He sat, and he talk talk talked as if he thought that he could tell me something when I knew him immediately for what he was. And then he said as he was leaving that he was Guinevere’s husband, and I should have said that I was sorry for her.” Lannie’s face, to my surprise, was venomous.

“He told you that?”

She inhaled nervously and expelled the smoke with uncharacteristic force. “She’s so beautiful and alive, and he can say with that voice of his, in modesty no less, that he’s no better than she, when all the time I was with him I wanted to scream.”

Hollingsworth smiled. “And then it was yours truly who came to pay Miss Madison a visit.”

“Yes.” She beamed. “Oh, I don’t know what I would have done without him. When
your
friend left, I walked around, and I knew that if I didn’t have something to drink I’d be ill, for how long may a bee live without nectar?” Lannie hugged herself,
her thin arms protruding like stalks from the soiled cotton cuffs of her pajamas. And her voice suddenly hoarse, she said, “Lovett, you said you’d loan me some money.”

I handed her two ten-dollar bills.

“Mikey’s my banker,” she said to Hollingsworth with an ironic gesture.

The sum of many small frustrations exploded for me. “I’m not your banker, and if you think I don’t need that money, you’re mistaken.”

She danced out of her chair and over to where I sat on the sofa and pinched my cheek once. “He is a banker,” she said to Hollingsworth, “but he’s a charming one, and though he suffers through investment, and the black hand of money grips his heart in the middle of the night, he cannot escape his desire to be charming, and so he must always raise bond issues for Bohemia and resent his fate.” She whirled about with amusement. “Those are the worst bankers of all when they turn upon you.”

I recognized without much elation that this performance was for Hollingsworth, and not a word of her speech, not a gesture in the dance of her limbs was uninspired; she might have been a geisha tracing the ritual of the tea ceremony. And Hollingsworth sat and watched her, his buttocks seemingly suspended a millimeter above his seat, a polite look upon his face, an expression of mild curiosity in his eyes as if he would be the hick who has paid money and now watches the carnival girls strip their costumes. This is the magical evil of the big city, but he is wary of being taken in: “I come to see pussy,” he says to his neighbor, “and I ain’t seen pussy yet.” He will smash the carnival booths if he is cheated. Perhaps he has come to be cheated.

“I would say,” I offered, “that Ed Leroy here knows more about banking than I do.”

His eyes blinked at the interruption, and in a small severe voice, he said, “I don’t like to contradict a fellow, but you
know very well that my name is Hollingsworth, Leroy Hollingsworth.” He took out the silver and black cigarette lighter, and clicked forth the flame. “Naturally, a fellow who employs his brain power will use another name from time to time, but that’s only common sense.” He turned to Lannie. “Somehow I find it less of a confinement, if you know of what I’m speaking about, when there’s one name for such and such an occasion, and another for a situation that’s not exactly the same.” He smiled expansively. “I always feel as if I can take a deep breath upon such transfers, do you know?”

“Oh, of course I know,” Lannie said breathlessly, “you’re so wise”—an ecstatic look upon her face. She threw her head back carelessly. “That’s so important and no one understands it, everybody runs and nobody breathes, and when I wake up in the morning I’m choking so.” A nervous hand searching her pocketbook, she pulled forth a toothbrush, and held it up like a standard. “I never can get this in my mouth. I start to brush my teeth, and everything in me says no, no, spit it out.”

With an abrupt spasm of her fingers she snapped it in half, throwing the handle to one corner of the room, and the bristles to the other. She yawned and murmured contentedly, “Tomorrow, I’m going out to look for a job.”

I turned to Hollingsworth. “Why is it you’re not working today?”

He seemed to raise his buttocks another millimeter into the air. “Oh, my vacation has started.” For the first time since I had entered the room, he leaned backward, allowed his shoulders to touch the chair. “I suppose we’ll all be seeing a great deal of each other now.”

A small but apparent reaction was evident after this statement. His shoulders left the back of the chair, and he was sitting upright again, his eyes concentrating on something, some object, some motion in the wall behind me. I turned around and
saw the door handle move, first to the left and then to the right. This was done silently at first, but after several purposeless attempts, it was rattled violently, and then a second later, when this was without effect, a foot began to kick with steady application against the base of the door.

“Demme in, demme in,” a voice demanded.

It was Monina. She entered the room with a smile of delight and pranced over to me. Then she curtsied and extended a finger in an aristocratic gesture. “Kiss the boo-boo,” she told me, and I brushed my lips against her hand. Satisfied by this, she rose haughtily, moved toward Lannie, and unable to sustain herself as a queen a moment longer, climbed into her lap. “You kiss me,” she commanded.

Lannie obeyed, and framed the child’s face with her palms. “Oh, you’re beautiful,” she said to her.

In response Monina hugged her passionately.

Hollingsworth hawked his throat. “Hello, Monina,” he said to announce himself.

The child twisted in Lannie’s arms at the sound of his voice, and then buried her head. Unaccountably, she began to weep.

“Mommie frightened today.”

“Why?” Lannie asked.

“Mommie’s crying.” To say this upset Monina even more, and panting and hiccuping she delivered herself of a long story which I could barely comprehend. She had picked up the rug, or so I translated it, and there were insects beneath. She had gathered a few in her fist and put them into a glass and poured some of Mommie’s boiling coffee water upon them. Then she brought it to Mommie who was lying in bed and crying, and Mommie had thrown the glass to the floor, and screamed that she would get the strap. Monina began to bawl, and Guinevere clasped the child to her breast, and they wept together, and Mommie had cried, “I was afraid of him, but he was going to
change our lives; oh, my baby, it would have been all different.” In anguish, she had shrieked, “Oh, my lover’s deserted me.”

And Monina, her face wrinkled into a parody of Guinevere’s misery, repeated in a high piping voice, “Oh, dover’s durted me, my dover’s durted me.” Somehow, in saying the words she crossed the child’s boundary from real sorrow to the imitation of it so that her delight in herself became greater than the woe she would project, and she luxuriated upon the phrase as if it were a jelly bean of incomparable flavor. When she finished she could contain herself no longer, and giggles, malicious and childwise, tinkled from her mouth. She gave herself to Lannie’s arms, her small body shaken with mirth.