Barbary Shore (25 page)

“I’m
his
wife,” Guinevere concluded breathlessly, and pushed him away. “Come on, let’s get going. Let’s
go
.”

Dizzied, distraught, she must have tripped upon the bag. “No, wait. No, wait,” she called out in a hoarsened voice, “one second, love, let me get rid of this, just one second, honest.”

And while he waited at the door, she carried the bag to my corner and thrust it in at my feet, her eyes meeting mine for one instant in a hurly-burly of triumph and terror, as though she were an infant thrown into the air with its laughter this side of panic.

“Leroy,” she called out from where she stood, “nothing will happen to him, will it?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” Hollingsworth droned. “I know he’ll co-operate.”

“I thought so. He’ll come to no harm,” she declared, and turning her back to me, she left the house with Hollingsworth, explaining with her last question why she had wanted me there, setting out of her unalterable contradiction a course with one hand the more to tip the wheel with the other, and, rigging fouled, could be the glutton only when she was blown by guilt.

B
EFORE
I left the apartment I went into the bedroom. McLeod was sleeping, curled up like a bug as Guinevere would have it, but the description was less than adequate. He slumbered heavily, limbs jammed against his body, hands over his eyes, his knees at his chest much as though he would usurp the smallest volume possible. His breath was drawn through clenched teeth, tensing his face tight as a fist. There was something infamous in watching him helpless; I had the idea he would be furious if he knew he were observed.

Beside him, Monina slept with her head next his, her arm curled upon his shoulder in unconscious trust. She breathed quietly and prettily, a flush on her child’s face, her golden hair strewn upon the pillow. They were father and daughter and shared a bed, but little more; the interval from her baby skin to the gaunt stubble of McLeod’s jaw was very great. I had never seen him look so old. His beard sprouted gray, and was black in all the wrinkles about his mouth. Even as I watched, the tight lips parted and a painful grunt came from his belly. He muttered something, he was protesting, and then his arms hugged his body more tightly.

I left them like that, passed back through the living room where I had eavesdropped and quit the apartment. Lannie was waiting on the other side of the door.

How long I could not know, but with what impatience I could estimate by the way she caught my arm. Her thin fingers pinched into my bicep. “I want to talk to you,” she said huskily. “Come up to my room.” Charged with emotion, she shook almost visibly.

As I followed on the stairs, I could see that her violet suit was freshly pressed, and that the back of her hair had been squeezed into tight anchovy curls. “What is it about?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

She waited until I had entered her room, then locked the door. When she turned around I was able to see her clearly. She was well-groomed this once, but like new paint upon old, there was small hope it would last. Already a few wrinkles cut across the worn shiny fabric of her suit, one of the hair curls had begun to unwind, and upon her sallow skin, white face powder applied in two quick strokes, overlapped on the point of her nose and exaggerated the deep circles about her eyes.

Reaching into the breast pocket of her jacket, she took out several bills and handed them to me. “This is what I owe you.”

I covered my surprise by counting the money. It was actually several dollars less than I had given her, but I could hardly believe she remembered the amount, and probably the sum was chosen by caprice. “Where did you get this?” I asked her.

Lannie was silent for several seconds and then burst into a tirade. “When you gave the money it was charity for the crippled and the drunk.” Her eyes burned. “I took it as the insult you intended, and knew I could not despise you so and not pay it back.” She was shaking with anger and something more perhaps; the hand which had given me the money twitched uncontrollably until she jammed it in a pocket.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

She moved away without replying and rummaged in her closet to come forth with a new bottle of whiskey. Her poor fingers
worked all around the seal, pinching and tearing at the celluloid with blunt motions which opened nothing. “Here, let me help you,” I offered quietly.

She answered by digging her teeth into the cork and pulling it free, with what damage to her mouth I hated to calculate. Then, irresolutely, staring at the neck of the bottle, she tried to put it in her mouth, and gagged in reaction.

“I’ll get you a glass,” I told her.

I found a few dusty tumblers on the shelf of the closet and with it her booty. A case of liquor was resting on the floor. She came up behind me in a panic at being discovered, and pulled the glass out of my hand. “Where have you gotten all this money?” I was about to ask again, but the answer was obvious. I took the bills she had given me, and put them on the table. “I don’t need it after all,” I said.

Lannie almost shrieked at me. “What right …? What right …?”

“I knew you followed after him,” I said furiously, “I knew you wouldn’t take a breath for fear you’d miss one of his”—so much I had left unsaid was finally to be declared—“but I didn’t know he paid you. To take money …”

“You’re an idiot,” she cried, and into her throat went a half-inch of whiskey from the glass. “To take money, money which is so pure, and reflects the purity of our world. But someone must have told you of the circulation of money in all its metamorphoses like the frog, until all one can say is that money carries the average rate of blood. And what a pity the great man isn’t alive today so that he might tell of the manufacture of guilt, and the falling rate of love.” Odd timbers of a shipwrecked culture floated in her mind. “It’s all lost in blood, and that is the law of money which is a commodity.” She swallowed the rest of her drink, and said almost dreamily, “But you would take money from the other one.”

“I think I would.”

Perhaps the liquor had given her ballast. She made a concerted effort to convince me. “No one ever told you that to be sentimental is to commit a crime. Do you know what he’s done?”

I shook my head.

“In the end, you think, it will all be explained away, and he never touched a fly. Well, you’re wrong.” Her voice was filled with hate. “He destroyed the world, do you understand? He’s a murderer of the best and thus he gives an impression of being one of the best, just as my friend is a murderer of the worst, and so you do not like him. One after another, through the years,
he
picked them off, all of the best, and each night he would come home and prostrate himself before the picture of the man with the pipe, and say, ‘Oh, my Lord, in my thoughts I have transgressed against Thee,’ and then he would spit at the picture with all the force of his puny neck, and say, ‘What crimes have I committed in Thy Name,’ and spit again, spit, spit, until he could only weep, and the picture of the man with the pipe never taking his eyes off him because he is waiting and it comes. ‘Forgive me, my Lord,’ he cries, ‘for I know not what I do.’ ”

I did not answer her.

“You don’t believe me?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think of him.”

Even as we had been talking, her hair had come undone and the oiled waxed curls were broken by her fingers one by one. Cigarette ash was dirtying her suit again, and the first of a new series of liquor stains spread over her shirtwaist.

“I don’t know why I am in this,” I said to her. “It makes things worse. I want to avoid everything … and yet I can’t. So why do you talk to me?” I begged her. “Of what do you try to convince me?… That he should have nobody with him. Is it so painful to you that the man has one friend?” I looked at her. “You don’t want to convince me.”

“I do,” she said.

“You want to convince yourself.”

The remark had its effect. She burst into laughter. “Convince myself? Oh, Mikey, I’m convinced. It’s only you who is still the fool as I was once the fool, and you will not recognize that all these years, ever since the great man sat on his piles in the British Museum and let us think there was a world we could make, when all the time he was wrong, and we’ve been wrong, and there’s no world to make for the world devours.”

“We still don’t know,” I muttered.

“Don’t know!” Her mouth was passionate with the idea. “Listen to me. We never understood anything. There is a world, and this is what it is like: It is a tremendous prison, and sometimes the walls are opened and sometimes they are closed, but as time goes on they have to be closed more and more. Have you forgotten? Do you remember how the poorest of the poor used to be driven to the room where they were given death by gas? How was it done, and with what nobility do we all die? Let me tell you. The guards were chosen from a list, so they would come from the kitchen or standing before the gate with their gun at present arms, and they would all assemble in a room and an officer would give them orders, and each of them would rate an extra cup, and they would drink it and go to collect the prisoners who had been selected already by other men. And the prisoners would march along, and if one of them weighed a hundred pounds, he was a giant to the rest, and they would shuffle and smile and try to catch the guard’s eye. And the guards were drunk, and you would be amazed how happy a man may feel at such a moment. For the comedy is about to begin. They come to the antechamber, a room with gray walls and without windows, and it’s men to the right and women to the left and strip your clothes, but only a moment. The clothes off, the guards are driving them into the other room, and smack their hands on skinny flesh and bony flesh, it’s bag a tittie and snatch a twot, and they can smell them stinking all those naked people, while in the heart of their own pants it’s sweet with brandy so
slap an ass and laugh like mad while the naked go stumbling, screaming into the last room of them all. And there one might suppose they prepare to die. For, mark you, this has been a long road, and each step of the way they have been deceived.

“Yet my story is not done,” she said, holding up a hand, her eyes clear, her speech distinct as though she were reciting before a mirror. “The guards have one more resource. As they are about to close the door to the last room, an announcement is made. The State in its infinite mercy will allow one of them to be saved, the strongest. The one who can beat the others will be given a reprieve. This declaration, although it is worthy of the State, is due actually to the genius of a single guard who has conceived it at the very moment. And so through a window the guards may watch while one naked pygmy tears the hair of another, and blood runs where one thought no blood was left, and half of them are dead and scream like pigs with the head down and waiting for the knife, and as they scratch and sob and bite each other’s rind, the guards turn on the gas and roar like mad for the fools thought one would be saved and so ate each other.

“This is the world, Mikey. If there had been one who said, ‘Let us die with dignity,’ but they went choking into the gas with the blood of a friend in their mouth.”

“It was too late then,” I murmured.

“Listen, my friend,” she said softly, “the grass waves, and we are lost again in childhood souvenir. It is too late now. Do you understand? There are no solutions, there are only exceptions, and therefore we are without good and without evil.”

“If that were so, you would not have told me your story.”

Her mouth turned bitter. “You still do not know why I told you. Oh, you have not begun to look at the world. You would call the guards evil, and so you have avoided everything. But I tell you they were humane.”

“Humane?”

“They allowed the inmates to die in all the fever of small passions, and that is so much better than to die together. For dying together in such a way one may feel only the sense of failure, and that is how most of us die this year. No, Mikey, the guards committed a crime, and yet it is not what you think. There is neither guilt nor innocence, but there is vigor in what we do or the lack of it, and the guard’s crime was that they needed the brandy, and so were empty creatures. They were shoe clerks before and shoe clerks today, and now they probably tell themselves that they repent. And that is the crime—to drink and repent.”

“I should say it’s the hope.”

She was furious at how I denied her. “You wanted to know,” she said with an effort to restrain herself, “why I have taken money from him.”

“Yes, why him?”

“Because he is with them, and they allow you a corner for small rent charged, and there I may sing my little song. And that is what I tell myself when I am convinced I shall always be Ugly.”

“And who is ‘them’?”

“The guards, of course.” She sat rigidly in the chair, as if to hold the structure of the argument for so long were an insupportable pain. “They are the guards of the country we live in, even as your friend is a guard from the other. And sooner or later, they will all meet, and one or the other will win. Then, how they will be terrified. For, you see, they are so devoted to winning they have no equipment for victory, and I am the one who will nurse their terror. They will turn to me.” At the smile which must have crossed my face, she read my thought. “Or, if not me, then another. But someone must bind their wounds, someone must tell them that they don’t need brandy. I’m the only one who really wants people to keep on living, I’m the only one who understands.”

I had begun to pace back and forth. “And what if I don’t want to choose my prison?”

“You must, and gladly. That is the secret.”

“No one will win,” I told her. “They’ll destroy each other. And that’s what you really want to see.”

Her expression had become remote. “Who knows what we do want? Perhaps all that is left is to love the fire.” She lay her head back against the chair. “Come with me, Mikey,” she said, and she was almost pleading, “for if there is a future, it is with him.”

“Yes, and you’re so miserable you must draw everyone after you.”