Dhalgren (48 page)

"Yeah, yeah, I…" Against her flesh, he giggled. "I can still screw."

"Well, a lot, and I love it. But even that's sort of… sometimes like instead of talking."

"In my head, words are going on all the time, you know?"

"What are they? Tell me what they say."

He nodded and swallowed. He had tried to tell her everything important, about the Richards, about Newboy. He said, "That scratch…"

"What?" she asked his lingering silence.

"Did I say anything?"

"You said, 'The scratch.'"

"I couldn't tell…" He began to shake his head. "I couldn't tell if I said it out loud."

"Go on," she said. "What scratch?"

"John, he cut Milly's leg."

"Huh?"

"Tak's got an orchid, a real fancy one, out of brass. John got hold of it, and just for kicks, he cut her leg. It was…" He took another breath. "Awful. She had a cut there before. I don't know, I guess he gets his rocks off that way. I can understand that. But he cut—"

"Go on."

"Shit, it doesn't make any sense when I talk about it.

"Go on."

"Your legs, you don't have any cut on them." He let the breath out; and could feel her frowning down in her chest. "But he cut her."

"This was something you saw?"

"She was standing up. And he was sitting down. And suddenly he reached over and just slashed down her leg. Probably it wasn't a very big cut. He'd done it before. Maybe to someone else. Do you think he ever did it to anyone else—?"

"I don't know. Why did it upset you?"

"Yes… no, I mean. I was already upset. I mean because…" He shook his head. "I don't know. It's like there's something very important I can't remember."

"Your name?"

"I don't even… know if that's it. It's just—very confusing."

She kept rubbing till he reached up and stopped her hand.

She said: "I don't know what to do. I wish I did. Something's happening to you. It's not pretty to watch. I don't know who you are, and I like you a lot. That doesn't make it easier. You've stopped working for the Richards; I'd hoped that would take
some
pressure off. Maybe you should just go away; I mean you should leave…"

In the leaves, the wind walked up loudly. But it was his shaking head that stopped her. Loudly wind walked away.

"What were they… why were they all there? Why did you take me there?"

"Huh? When?"

"Why did you take me there tonight?"

"To the commune?"

"But you see, you had a reason, only I can't understand what it was. It wouldn't even matter." He rubbed her cheek until she caught his thumb between her lips. "It wouldn't matter." Diffused anxiety hardened him and he began to press and press again at her thigh.

"Look, I only took you there because—" and the loud wind and his own mind's tumbling blotted it. When he shook his head and could hear again, she was stroking his thick hair and mumbling, "Shhhhh… Try and relax. Try and rest now, just a little…" With her other hand, she pulled the rough blanket up. The ground was hard under shoulder and elbow.

He propped himself on them while they numbed, and tried out memory.

Suddenly he turned to face her. "Look, you keep trying to help, but what do you…" He felt all language sunder on silence.

"But what do I really feel about all this?" she saved him. "I don't know—no, I do." She sighed. "Lots of it isn't too nice. Maybe you're in really bad shape, and since I've only known you for a little while, I should get out now. Then I think, Hey, I'm into a really good thing; if I worked just a little harder I might be able to do something that would help. Sometimes, I just feel that you've made
me
feel very good—that one hurts most. Because I look at you and I see how much you hurt and I can't think of anything to do."

"He…" he dredged from flooded ruins, "I… don't know." He wished she would ask what he meant by "he," but she only sighed on his shoulder. He said, "I don't want to scare you."

She said, "I think you do. I mean, it's hard not to think you're just trying to get back at me for something somebody else did to you. And that's awful."

"Am I?"

"Kidd, when you're off someplace, working, or wandering around, what
do
you remember when you remember me?"

He shrugged. "A lot of this. A lot of holding each other, and talking."

"Yeah," and he heard a smile shape her voice, "which is a lot of the most beautiful part. But we do other things. Remember those too. That's cruel of me to ask when you're going through this, isn't it? But there's so much you don't see. You walk around in a world with holes in it; you stumble into them; and get hurt. That's cruel to say, but it's hard to watch."

"No." He frowned at the long dawn. "When we went up to see Newboy, did you like—" and remembered her ruined dress while he said:

"At Calkins'—did you have fun?"

She laughed. "You didn't?" Her laugh died.

Still, he felt her smile pressed on his shoulder. "It was strange. For me. It's easy sometimes to forget I've got anything to do other than… well, this."

"You talked about an art teacher once. I remember that. And the tape editing and the teaching. You paint too?"

"Years ago," she countered. "When I was seventeen I had a scholarship to the Art Students' League in New York, five, six years back. I don't paint now. I don't want to."

"Why'd you stop?"

"Would you like to hear the story? Basically, because I'm very lazy." She shrugged in his arms. "I just drifted away from it. When I was drifting, I was very worried for a while. My parents hated the idea of my living in New York—I had just left Sarah Lawrence, again, and they wanted me to stay with a family. But I was sharing an awful apartment on Twenty-Second Street with two other girls and going part time to the League. My parents thought I was quite mad and were very happy when I wanted to go to a psychiatrist about my 'painting block'. They thought he would keep me from doing anything really foolish." She barked a one-syllable laugh. "After a while, he said what I should do is set myself a project. I was to make myself paint three hours each day—paint anything, it didn't matter. I was to keep track of the time in a little twenty-five cent pad. And for every minute under three hours I didn't paint, I had to spend six times that amount of time doing something I didn't like—it was washing dishes, yes. We had decided that I had a phobia against painting, and my shrink was behaviorist. He was going to set up a counter unpleasantness—"

"You had a phobia about dishwashing too?"

"Anyway." She frowned at him in the near dark. "I left his office in the morning and got started that afternoon. I was very excited. I felt I might get into all sorts of areas of my unconscious in my painting that way… whatever that meant. I didn't fall behind until the third day. And then only twenty minutes. But I couldn't bring myself to do two hours of dish washing."

"How many dishes did you have?"

"I was supposed to wash clean ones if I ran out of dirty ones. The next day I was okay. Only I didn't like the painting that was coming out. The day after that I don't think I painted at all. That's right, somebody came over and we went up to Poe's Cottage."

"Ever been to Robert Louis Stevenson's house in Monterey?"

"No."

"He only rented a room in it for a couple of months and finally got thrown out because he couldn't pay the rent. Now they call it
Stevenson's House
and it's a museum all about him."

She laughed.
"Anyway,
I was supposed to see the doctor the next day. And report on how it was going. That night I started looking at the paintings—I took them out because I thought I might make up some work time. Then I began to see how awful they were. Suddenly I got absolutely furious. And tore them up—two big ones, a little one, and about a dozen drawings I'd done. Into lots of pieces. And threw them away. Then I washed every dish in the house."

"Shit…" He frowned at the top of her head.

"I think I did some drawing after that, but that's more or less when I really stopped painting. I realized something though—"

"You shouldn't have done that," he interrupted. "That was awful."

"It was years ago," she said. "It was sort of childish. But I—"

"It frightens me."

She looked at him. "It was years ago." Her face was greyed in the grey dawn. "It was." She turned away, and continued. "But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All
three
of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience becomes just a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry top, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all."

"You like washing dishes?"

"I haven't had to in a long, long time." She shrugged again. "And when I have to now, actually I find it rather relaxing."

He laughed. "I guess I do too." Then: "But you shouldn't have torn up those paintings. I mean, suppose you changed your mind. Or maybe there was something good in them that you could have used later—"

"It was bad if I wanted to be an artist. But I wasn't an artist. I didn't want to be."

"You got a scholarship."

"So did a lot of other people. Their paintings were terrible, mostly. By the laws of chance, mine were probably terrible too. No, it wasn't bad if I didn't want to paint at all."

But he was still shaking his head.

"That really upsets you, doesn't it? Why?"

He took a breath and moved his arm from under her. "It's like everything you—anybody says to me… it's like they're trying to tell me a hundred and fifty other things as well. Besides what they're saying direct."

"Oh, perhaps I am, just a bit."

"I mean, here I am, half nuts and trying to write poems, and you're trying to tell me I shouldn't put my faith in art or psychiatry."

"Oh
no!"
She folded her hands on his chest, and put her chin there. "I'm saying I decided not to. But I wasn't nuts. I was just lazy. There is a difference, I hope. And I
wasn't
an artist. A tape editor, a teacher, a harmonica player, but not an artist." He folded his arms across her neck and pushed her head flat to its cheek. "I suppose the problem," she went on, muffled in his armpit, "is that we have an inside and an outside. We've got problems both places, but it's so hard to tell where the one stops and other takes up." She paused a moment, moving her head. "My blue dress…"

"That reminds you of the problems with the outside?"

"That, and going up to Calkins'. I don't mind living like that—every once in a while. When I've had the chance, I've always done it rather well."

"We could have a place like Calkins'. You can have anything you want in this city. Maybe it wouldn't be as big, but we could find a nice house; and I could get stuff like everybody else does. Tak's got an electric stove that cooks a roast beef in ten minutes. With microwaves. We could have anything—"

"That—" she was shaking her head—"however, is when the inside problems start. Or start to become problems, anyway. Sometimes, I don't think I have any inside problems at all. I think I'm just giving myself something to worry about. I'm not scared of half the things half the people I know are. I've gone lots of places, met lots of people, had lots of fun. Maybe it is all a matter of getting the outside problems solved. Another not nice thing: When I look at you, sometimes I don't think I have a right to think I have any problems, inside or out."

"Don't you want to
do
anything? Change anything; preserve anything; find any…" He stopped because he felt distinctly uncomfortable.

"No." She said it very firmly.

"I mean, maybe that would make it easier to solve some of the outside problems, anyway. You know, maybe you'd feel happier if you could get another dress."

"No," she repeated. "I want wonderful and fascinating and marvelous things to happen to me and I don't want to do anything to make them happen. Nothing at all. I suppose that makes you think I'm a superficial person… no, you're too intelligent. But a lot of people would."

He was confused. "You're a marvelous, deep, fascinating person," he said, "and therefore you should be world-famous this instant."

"For twenty-three, I'm famous enough, considering I haven't done anything. But you're right."

"How are you famous?"

"Oh, not really famous. I just have lots of famous friends." She rolled her head once more to her chin. "It said in that article that Newboy had been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize. I know three people who've actually won it."

"Huh?"

"Two in the sciences, and Lester Pearson was a good friend of my uncle and would come spend weeks with us at my uncle's summer place in Nova Scotia. The one in chemistry was very pleasant—he was only twenty-nine—and connected with the university. We were very close for a while."

"You went out on dates and things. With all your famous friends?"

"No, I hate that. I never go on dates. These are people I met and I talked to and I liked talking to, so I talked to again. That's all."

"I'm not famous. Would you be happy in a place like Calkins', living with me?"

"No."

"Why not? Just because I'm not famous?"