Marjorie Morningstar (57 page)

“Well, I’ve got my reputation to think about now, you know, being an old married woman
with a kid, and all. Though I must say, now that I’m back, it all seems like a dream.
Well—” She opened the door. “Nice meeting you, Margie. ’Bye, Noel, hope you enjoy
your whiskey and oysters. You might shave, at least, seeing you’ve got company, you
bum. See you tonight, maybe. Let’s see, have I got the key? Yes. ’Bye.”

The door closed. Noel and Marjorie confronted each other across the familiar room.
The scent of Imogene’s hyacinth perfume drifted in the air between them. Noel leaned
in the doorway of the bathroom with a yawn and a smile. “Well, how are you? Can I
offer you a matzo?”

“Don’t be so clever.”

“I mean it. I have them.” He brought a box of matzos from behind the screen, and rattled
it at her. “I’ve been eating ’em, fried with eggs and sausages, all week. Developed
a great yen for them at your house. How about some more coffee and a matzo? Damn kid
never did come with the butter.”

“No, thanks. I see what you meant about Imogene. She’s really beautiful.”

“You should have seen her when she was eighteen. Three years in Oklahoma have made
her pretty leathery, to my taste, and duller than ever. But she’s a good kid.” He
yawned again, and slumped on the bed. “I’m really falling apart. Even a cold shower
does nothing to me, just makes my lips blue and leaves me sleepy.”

“Haven’t you had enough sleep?”

“Very little, past four days. Been on a reading and writing jag. These things happen
to me.”

“Is that why you haven’t been at Paramount? I thought you must be sick.”

He looked amused. “Has Sam been after you?”

“I’ve just come from lunch with him.”

“Gad! The Save-Noel-from-Himself Club in emergency session. Well, what’s the diagnosis?
Rigor mortis of the conscience? I’m hungry as hell. Come on, let’s go out and eat.
Oh, you just had lunch. Well, watch me eat, then.” He got up, put on the threadbare
brown overcoat, and regarded himself wryly in the mirror. “Are you sure you want to
be seen with such a tramp?”

“You’ve looked better, I’ll say that—”

The telephone buzzed at that moment, a faint frustrated noise. They glanced at each
other. It buzzed again and again. Marjorie, putting on her coat, said, “Aren’t you
going to answer it?”

“There’s nobody I want to hear from—now that you’re with me, my love. Who can it be?
Sam, or my folks. Let it ring.”

“Funny,” she said, staring at the buzzing phone.

“What now?”

“If Imogene’s using the apartment, what’s the point of muffling the bell?”

His wide-eyed blank look lasted only a second. He burst out laughing. “Skip it, will
you? If Imogene and I were living in sin, she’d tell you or I would, it means nothing
to either of us. She’s out all day and half the night on her rounds, or whatever queer
things she does. I still work down here. I’ve been working like a dog, eighteen hours
a day.”

“Doing what?”

“Writing something that will shake the world. Come along, I’ll tell you about it.”

Marjorie felt absurdly like a movie character snooping for clues at a murder scene.
There were ashtrays on the night tables at either side of the bed. They had not recently
been emptied. In the ashtray on the side near the window, the butts were all red with
lipstick. In the other ashtray the butts were white. Both trays were equally full.

“Do you know you’re standing there like a sleepwalker?” Noel said. “Come on, I’m starving.”

It was impossible to ask him about the ashtrays. It was too low, too humiliating;
it was comical. She could grin, thinking about it. And yet she was in such pain she
could hardly breathe. She followed him out, and down the stairs.

“Gad, smell this air!” Noel stood at the top of the street steps, breathing deeply.
“Who’s growing jonquils on Eleventh Street? Why didn’t you tell me it was so warm?
I don’t need a coat.”

“I don’t think it’s warm,” Marjorie said. “I’m cold.”

“Another April,” Noel said. He took her arm and they walked down the steps. “You know,
there’s nothing to do in New York, really, when the year turns like this. People just
let it happen, and go about their business, in and out of the turnstiles. In Paris,
or even in Mexico City, it would be a kind of holiday. Everybody’d be out strolling,
young couples kissing on street corners, pushcarts with flowers everywhere—”

“I think I prefer the New York style,” Marjorie said. “I like to do my kissing in
private.”

“You don’t much like the whole process, public or private,” Noel said. “If you could
back God into an argument in a restaurant—as you’re about to back me—you’d want to
know why He couldn’t think of a less messy way to keep the race going.”

“I’m not eager for any arguments, Noel. In fact why don’t you just have breakfast
somewhere by yourself? I’ll go home. I came down here because I thought you might
be sick.”

“Okay, you go on home. That’s a good idea. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

“About us?”

“No, indeed. About my work.”

“What are you working on, more songs?”

“No, something else.”

“Look, whatever it is, if it’s so important that you have to take time off from work,
don’t you think out of common courtesy you ought to let Sam Rothmore know?”

“I’m uncommonly uncourteous, sweetie. That’s an old story.” He paused in front of
a little French restaurant in the cellar of a brownstone house. “They make fine onion
omelets, and the bread is real bread… But I want those oysters. Come on.”

She said after walking in silence, “You should know better than anybody in the world
that I don’t regard sex as something messy. That’s a vile thing to say to me.”

“Don’t let it rankle. It was just a bum joke.”

“You’re being very strange.”

“Am I? I wasn’t aware of it. This breeze, this April breeze… it has the edge of a
scythe in it. Time’s passing, baby, did you know that? You’re a big girl. Little Marjorie’s
all gone. Dr. Shapiro, where art thou? Here’s where I’m having breakfast. Are you
going home?”

“Why—it’s just a saloon. What can you eat in a saloon?”

“They have very good oysters.” The wan sunlight on his face showed a few gray bristles
in the blond stubble on his cheek. She had never noticed them before. He needed a
haircut. He grinned at her scrutiny, stoop-shouldered, his thick long hair stirring
in the breeze. “Debating whether to sit down in public with this panhandler, hey?”

“Maybe I’ll come in for a little while.”

“Well, what a pleasant surprise.” He led her through the saloon, where a couple of
morose men in overalls were drinking beer, to a back room, and sat on a bench under
the window at a little table covered by a soiled red and white checked cloth. “Couldn’t
ask for more privacy, could you, for giving me a going-over?”

“What is this place?” Marjorie looked around with distaste at the bare brown-painted
walls, the disorderly tables and chairs, the naked lamps, and the cardboard beer advertisements
in the window. The sour smell of beer was very strong. “I thought I knew all your
haunts—”

An old fat woman came from the barroom, wiping her hands on her apron. Noel ordered
oysters and a double Canadian whiskey, and the woman waddled out.

“Good Lord, I thought you were fooling. You can’t have that for breakfast,” Marjorie
said. “You’ll kill yourself. Have some cornflakes or something.”

“Best breakfast in the world,” Noel said. “Cornflakes, if you want to know, are what’s
poisoning America, and causing the rise in mental disorders. You know what cornflakes
are, don’t you? Didn’t I ever tell you how cornflakes got started?”

She was not in the mood for one of his crazy improvisations, though usually she found
them very funny. “No, but I wish you’d order some cornflakes right now, if you can
get them in this hole, instead of whiskey and oysters.”

“Well, dear, it was a cold March evening in 1899 in Chicago, outside one of the big
flour mills. There was this pile of refuse big as a mountain in the yard of that mill,
the waste products of years, and years, and
years
, of milling. Well, there came a knock on the door of the president of this mill’s
office. When he went to open it, there was this little ragged old man outside. He
had a long bushy beard stained with tobacco juice, and a tattered old burlap sack
over his shoulder. And this old man whined, all scrunched over, ‘Mister, can I please
have some of that junk off that pile in your back yard?’ The president said, ‘I don’t
know what you want it for. Hogs refuse to eat it. But sure, you’re welcome to it,
all you want.’ The old man said, ‘Okay, mister, I sure thank you. That’s all I wanted
to hear.’ He straightened up and walked into the yard, tearing off the beard as he
went—he was really only eighteen years old—and he took out a whistle and blew it.
In about five seconds a fleet of a hundred and forty-seven wagons drawn by dray horses
came galloping into that yard. Margie, they cleared away that mountain of rubbish
before you could have smoked a cigarette. They didn’t leave a grain. That eighteen-year-old
boy became the cornflakes king. When he died he owned that flour mill and four more
besides. He left seven billion dollars in cash to his wife. In fact, he was the finest
example of the hard-fisted young American industrialist anybody has ever seen. We
all ought to be more like him, especially me, instead of coming late to work, and
eating whiskey and oysters for breakfast. Nevertheless, and you can stand me up against
a wall and shoot me if you want, I don’t give a good goddamn for cornflakes, and I
never will.” The woman had returned and was setting the whiskey and oysters in front
of him. “Ah, these look fine, Mrs. Kleinschmidt. Well, Margie, that’s how it happened
that Imogene Normand opened my door this morning, instead of me. I feel you’re entitled
to this explanation.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Marjorie said. Noel was drinking the rye neat. “I’m
beginning to think that isn’t your first drink today.”

“No indeed,” Noel said, “but I trust I’m coherent.”

“Well, yes, very much so, only a little too gay or something, all things considered.”

Noel dipped two oysters at once in horseradish and tomato sauce, and ate them. “Exquisite.
I was dying for these.”

“Lord, you must be hungry.” He was cramming a handful of oyster crackers into his
mouth. “That cornflakes story is very interesting, dear, but I don’t quite see how
it explains everything about Imogene.”

“Don’t you?”

“No. Not that it matters. I think it’s nice of you to give her the room and put yourself
out like that, but I’m not surprised. You’re always painting yourself blacker than
you are.”

He stopped wolfing the oysters, and looked narrowly at her. “You know, you’re always
saying I’m a mystery, but you’re twice as mysterious to me. You absolutely baffle
me. I’ve known you intimately for a year, and I’m still not sure whether you’re incredibly
naïve or as smart as a snake.”

“What have you been working on, Noel? Or don’t you want to talk about it?”

He lit a cigarette and idly picked up a greasy box from the bench. It was full of
chess pieces. He pulled out a black knight and the white king, and placed them in
the red and white squares on the tablecloth so that the knight was attacking the king.
“I like this place. Most evenings and some afternoons you can pick up a chess game
with one Village character or another—a boozed-up poet, a communist, a book critic,
a painter, or just a plain precious nobody with an avant-garde magazine under his
arm. The talk is more interesting than the chess. I bait them. You’d swear I was all
worked up over Kafka, or John Strachey, or Alfred Adler, or whatever, and all the
time I’m fighting to keep from rolling off the bench laughing. It’s a great diversion
when you’re dull.”

“You enjoy that kind of thing because you’re such a horrible intellectual snob,” Marjorie
said. “You like to see the little creatures crawling at your feet.”

“Do you really want to know what I’ve been working on?”

“I’m dying to know.”

He put his hand on the back of her neck, and caressed her briefly. His eyes were very
bright. “I wish—well, no use wishing, is there?” He picked up the whiskey. “You’re
responsible for the whole thing, you know, this tangent I’m off on. Next time you
talk to Sam Rothmore admit your guilt, at least. You touched it all off by dragging
me to that seder.” He drank off the contents of the glass. Marjorie had never seen
him drink this way. It appalled her to watch raw spirits disappear into him like water.
He did not cough or even blink. His speech was quite precise, if anything, slightly
more so than when he was sober, and he was holding himself very erect. He was silent,
moving the white king idly from square to square in the tablecloth, and pursuing it
with the black horse. Then he said with sudden gloom, “I don’t know, this involves
considerable baring of the soul, which offends the only modesty I have. But, what
the hell! We’ll all be dead in a few years. I don’t know why I take myself so seriously.”

“Noel, what’s it all about?” He had worked Marjorie into a fever of inquisitiveness.

“If you laugh I’ll sock you. I came away from that evening at your home—you know,
the seder—with the perfectly sober idea that I might become a rabbi.” He grinned at
her amazed look. “It’s true. That is, I didn’t have the idea when I left your house.
I walked the streets all night, going from one bar to another, drinking and walking
on. I walked down to the Village from your house. It’s about five miles, you know.
Working from saloon to saloon, it took me until dawn. Kid, it was a nerve crisis the
like of which I’ve never known. Something exploded in my subconscious. It’ll be a
long time before I hoot down the idea of ancestral memory again, and all that—You’re
looking at me like a fish. Does all this strike you as insane?”