Deadeye Dick (14 page)

“Then how can I believe I’m in Shangri-La?” he said.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“Another thing I say all through the play,” he said, “is that nobody dies in Shangri-La. But here I’m dying, so how can I be in Shangri-La?”

“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.

“You mean this is the first time you’ve thought about it?” he said.

And on and on like that.

“Seventeen times,” he said.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“Seventeen times I say that nobody dies in Shangri-La.”

•   •   •

So, with opening night only a few hours away, I dawdled from the theater to my brother’s duplex apartment, three blocks away. The snowflakes were few, and they melted when they landed. I had given up reading or listening to news since I had come to New York, and so did not know that the Ice Age was reclaiming southwestern Ohio with the most terrible blizzard in history there.

At just about the time the curtain went up on
Katmandu
, that blizzard would come busting in the back door
of the old carriage house back home, and then it would fling open the great front portals from the inside, just as Father had done for Celia Hildreth so long ago.

People talk a lot about all the homosexuals there are to see in Greenwich Village, but it was all the neuters that caught my eye that day. These were my people—as used as I was to wanting love from nowhere, as certain as I was that almost anything desirable was likely to be booby-trapped.

I had a fairly funny idea. Someday all we neuters would come out of our closets and form a parade. I even decided what banner our front rank should carry, as wide as Fifth Avenue. A single word would be printed on it in letters four feet high:

Most people think that word means terrible or unheard of or unforgivable. It has a much more interesting story than that to tell. It means “outside the herd.”

Imagine that—thousands of people, outside the herd.

•   •   •

I let myself into Felix’s duplex. The place was faintly reminiscent of our childhood home, since the master bedroom was upstairs, and opened onto a balcony that overhung the living-dining room. Felix and I had already rearranged some of the furniture—to better accommodate the party we would be giving after the show. Caterers
would bring the food. As I say, I didn’t give a damn about food anymore.

And nobody in his right mind was going to come to the party anyway.

It wasn’t my party anyway, any more than it was my stupid play. I had regressed to being the boy I used to be— before I shot Mrs. Metzger. I was barely twelve years old.

I supposed that I would have the place to myself all afternoon. Felix and his wife Geneviève, “Anyface,” were at radio station WOR, I thought. She still had her job as a receptionist there, and Felix was cleaning out his desk there, preparing to move on to bigger things at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn.

They, in turn, had every reason to assume that I would be at the theater, making last-minute changes in the play. I had not told them that I had been barred from there.

So I wandered up on the balcony, and I sat on a hard-backed chair there. It must have been something I used to do in the carriage house when I was genuinely innocent and twelve years old—to sit very still on the balcony, and to appreciate every sound that floated up to me. It wasn’t eavesdropping. It was music appreciation.

And thus it was that I overheard the final dissolution of my brother’s second marriage, and some unkind character sketches of Felix and myself and our parents and Geneviève, and some others I did not know. Geneviève came bursting into the apartment first, so angry that she was spitting like a cat, and then, half a minute later, Felix entered. She had come in one cab, and he had chased her in
another. And down below me, and out of my line of sight, an acrimonious, atonal duet for viola and string bass was improvised. They both had such noble voices. She was the viola, and he was the bass.

Or maybe it was a comedy. Maybe it is amusing when physically attractive, well-to-do great apes in an urban setting hate each other so much:

The curtain rises on a Greenwich Village duplex, severely modern, expensive, white. There are fresh flowers. There is fresh fruit. There is impressive electronic apparatus for reproducing music
. G
ENEVIEVE
W
ALTZ
,
a beautiful young woman whose features must be painted on like those of a China doll, enters through the front door, terminally furious. Her young and successful husband
, F
ELIX
,
wearing clothes made in London, follows almost at once. He is just as mad. On the balcony sits
R
UDY
W
ALTZ
,
a neutered pharmacist from Ohio
, F
ELIX’S
kid brother. He is large and good-looking, but is so sexless and shy that he might as well be made out of canned tuna fish. Incredibly, he has written a play which is going to open in a few hours. He knows it is no good. He considers himself a big mistake. He considers life a big mistake. It probably shouldn’t be going on. It is all he can do to give life the benefit of the doubt. There is a frightful secret in his past, which he and his brother have withheld from
G
ENEVIEVE
, that he is a murderer.
All three are products of public school systems in the
Middle West, although
G
ENEVIEVE
now sounds vaguely British, and
F
ELIX
sounds like a Harvard-educated secretary of state. Only
R
UDY
is still a twanging hick
.

G
ENEVIEVE
: Leave me alone. Go back to work.

F
ELIX
: I’ll help you pack.

G
ENEVIEVE
: I can pack all right.

F
ELIX
: Can you kick your own butt as you go out the door?

G
ENEVIEVE
: You’re sick. You’re from a very sick family. Thank God we never had a child.

F
ELIX
: There was a young man from Dundee, Who buggered an ape in a tree. The results were most horrid, All ass and no forehead, Three balls and a purple goatee.

G
ENEVIEVE
: I didn’t know your father was from Dundee.
(She opens a closet)
Look at all the pretty suitcases in here.

F
ELIX
: Fill ’em up. I want every trace of you out of here.

G
ENEVIEVE
: Some of my perfume may have gotten into the draperies. You should probably burn them in the fireplace.

F
ELIX
: Just pack, baby. Just pack.

G
ENEVIEVE
: It’s my house as much as it’s your house. That’s just a theory, of course.

F
ELIX
: I’ll pay you off. I’ll buy you out.

G
ENEVIEVE
: And I’ll give your brother my clothes. He can have all my stuff here. I don’t even have to pack. I’ll just walk out of here, and start out new.

F
ELIX
: What is that supposed to mean?

G
ENEVIEVE
: Starting out new? Well, you go to Bendel’s or Saks or Bloomingdale’s, naked except for a credit card—

F
ELIX
: My brother and your clothes.

G
ENEVIEVE
: I think he would enjoy being a woman. I think that’s what he was meant to be. That would be nice for you, too, since then you could marry him. I want you to be happy, as hard as that may be for you to believe.

F
ELIX
: That is the end.

G
ENEVIEVE
: We passed that long ago.

F
ELIX
: That is the
very
end.

G
ENEVIEVE
: And the very, very end is coming up. Just get out of here and let me pack.

F
ELIX
: I am to have no feelings of loyalty toward members of my own family?

G
ENEVIEVE
: I was part of your family. Don’t you remember that ceremony we went through at City Hall? You probably thought it was an opera, where you were supposed to sing, “I do.” If you’re from such a close-knit family, why weren’t any of its members there?

F
ELIX
: YOU were in such a hurry to get married.

G
ENEVIEVE
: Was I? I guess I was. I was glad to get married. There was going to be so much happiness. And there was happiness, too, wasn’t there?

F
ELIX
: Some. Sure.

G
ENEVIEVE
: Until your brother came along.

F
ELIX
: It’s not his fault.

G
ENEVIEVE
: It’s your fault.

F
ELIX
: Tell me how.

G
ENEVIEVE
: The very, very end is coming up now. Are you sure you want to hear it?

F
ELIX
: HOW is it my fault?

G
ENEVIEVE
: YOU are so ashamed of him. You must be ashamed of your parents, too. Otherwise, why have I never met them?

F
ELIX
: They’re too sick to leave home.

G
ENEVIEVE
: And we, with an income of over one hundred thousand dollars a year, have been too poor to visit them. Are they dead?

F
ELIX
: NO.

G
ENEVIEVE
: Are they in a crazy house?

F
ELIX
: NO.

G
ENEVIEVE
: I’m very good at visiting people in crazy houses. My own mother was in a crazy house when I was in high school, and I visited her. She was wonderful. I was wonderful. I told you my mother was in the crazy house for a while.

F
ELIX
: Yes.

G
ENEVIEVE
: I thought you should know—in case we wanted a baby. It isn’t anything to be ashamed of, anyway. Or is it?

F
ELIX
: Nothing to be ashamed of.

G
ENEVIEVE
: SO tell me the worst about your parents.

F
ELIX
: Nothing.

G
ENEVIEVE
: Then I’ll tell you what’s wrong with them. They’re not good enough for you. You deserve something far more classy. What a snob you are.

F
ELIX
: It’s more complicated.

G
ENEVIEVE
: I doubt it. I can’t remember anything about you that was the least bit complicated. Making a good impression at all costs—that accounted for everything.

F
ELIX
: There’s a little more to me than that, thank you.

G
ENEVIEVE
: No. There was nothing to you but urbane perfection, until your brother arrived—and turned out to be a circus freak.

F
ELIX
: Don’t you call him that.

G
ENEVIEVE
: I’m telling you what you think of him. And what was my duty as a wife? To protect your perfection as much as possible: To pretend that there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. At least I never cringed. You did all the cringing.

F
ELIX
: Cringing?

G
ENEVIEVE
: With your head in your hands, whenever he’s around. You could die of shame. You think he hasn’t noticed that? You think he hasn’t noticed that we’re all set up for entertaining, but we somehow never have people in?

F
ELIX
: I’ve been protecting him.

G
ENEVIEVE
: Protecting you, you mean. This lovely fight we’ve had—it wasn’t about anything I said to him. I’ve been very nice to him. It was what I said to you that you couldn’t stand.

F
ELIX
: With a million people listening.

G
ENEVIEVE
: Five other people in the reception room. And not one heard what I said—because I whispered it to you. But people as far as Chicago must have heard what you yelled back at me. I was actually happily married this morning—for a few seconds—before you yelled at me. I was feeling very pretty and cherished as I sat at the reception desk. We had made love this morning, as you may remember. You had better burn the bottom sheet—along with the draperies. There were five strangers in the reception room, imagining, I think, what sort of life and lover I must have to be so impish and gay—so early in the morning. Into the reception room comes a young broadcasting executive, flawlessly groomed, urbane and sexy. What marvelous New York bullshit! He is the lover! He stops and kisses her, and then she whispers in his ear. It was almost as though New York City were true. A couple of spunky kids from the Middle West, making it big in Gotham.

F
ELIX
: YOU shouldn’t have whispered what you did.

G
ENEVIEVE
: I’ll say it again: “Tell your brother to take a bath.”

F
ELIX
: What a time to say a thing like that.

G
ENEVIEVE
: His play is opening tonight, and he stinks to high heaven. He hasn’t taken a bath since he’s been here.

F
ELIX
: You call a remark like that romantic?

G
ENEVIEVE
: I call it family life. I call it intimacy. That’s all
over now.
(She hauls a suitcase from the closet, opens it, flops it gaping on the couch)
Look how hungry that suitcase is.

F
ELIX
: I’m sorry I said what I said.

G
ENEVIEVE
: YOU yelled. You yelled, “Shut the fuck up!” You yelled, “If you don’t like my relatives, get the hell out of my life!”

F
ELIX
: It was over in a minute.

G
ENEVIEVE
: YOU bet your English boots it was. And I walked out of that office, never to return. I’m gone, old friend. What a bore and a boor you were to follow me. What a hick.

(The closet contains mostly sporting goods, ski parkas, wetsuits, warm-up jackets, and so on
. G
ENEVIEVE
sorts through these, throwing what she wants on the couch, near the open suitcase
. F
ELIX’S
manly bumptiousness decays as he watches. He is a person of weak character, an actor who can’t bear to be ignored. He elects to recapture
G
ENEVIEVE’S
attention by becoming pitiful and harrowingly frank.)