Moise and the World of Reason (16 page)

He had now moved to the other end of the bed so I sat down.

“Get your smart ass off my pillow, please.”

He put the pillow behind him and leaned back.

“I went back to my hotel but I couldn't go in alone. I've tried to return alone to a lot of hotels at night lately and it's more and more dreadful. I've taken to asking bellhops and elevator boys when they get off duty, and if it's before daybreak I beg them to come to my room and I wait up till I'm sure they're not going to show before I try to sleep. Oh. Something funny. A few nights ago one of them did show before daybreak, enticed by the promise of a large compensation for his service which is only to hold me till the Nembutal works, just to hold me, I swear. Oh, preferably unclothed but not necessarily so. Well, this one did show. I was in one of my two Sulka robes and asked him to put on the other but he declined, just sat in a straight-back chair by the bed and said, ‘Drop it, the Nembie, I ain't got all day.' So I dropped it and washed it down with a glass of wine and all at once as my sight blurred with sedation I saw him as the film actor Dalessandro. I gasped and said to him, ‘Hold me, hold me.' I had my arms extended. And what he did was to take hold of one of my hands in a gingerly fashion as if he suspected I had some awful contagion communicable by touch. Isn't that funny?”

“No, I don't find it any more amusing than did the bellhop or”

“Elevator boy,” he prompted. “But, you see, that same evening when he'd let me off at the tenth floor, he had the impertinence to say to me, ‘Watch your step, Miss.'”

“You should be flattered that he didn't say ‘Madam.'”

“You're being a little bitchy, but I don't mind. I believe it's indigenous to this part of the city.”

“It's what you get for slumming.”

“Baby, I'm not slumming even on Boogie Street in Singapore where cockroaches fly in your face after midnight but they've got the most beautiful transvestites in the world, more feminine than women, I swear it's true.”

“I didn't question the fact but I wish you'd stop messing around with my manuscripts like I'd submitted them to you.”

“Sorry. I'm not quite conscious. Are you at all interested in foreign travel?”

“You asked me that before. The answer was negative and it's still the same, maybe more so.”

“It wouldn't involve more than occupying an adjoining room, answering phones and helping me with carry-on plane luggage. Oh, and sitting with me at lunch and dinner. You see, I can stand sleeping alone but not eating and drinking alone.”

“I should think by your age you'd have learned that you have to stand a lot of things you can't stand.”

“Yes, including myself. I remember once the host on a TV talk show said to me, ‘Do you like yourself?' to which I responded with a blank look and a silence and then he said, ‘Do you
adore
yourself?' and I said, finally, ‘Well, I am stuck with myself and have to put up with it as best I can.' So you don't like foreign travel?”

I could see that he was no longer listening even to himself.

When he wasn't talking he was almost, I mean he would have been almost, a bearable presence. But how long does a creature like this stop talking while still partially living? I realized he was right when he had called me bitchy, partially right as he was now partially conscious. After all, his effrontery was enormous. But on the other hand perhaps his loneliness corresponded to it in size. I was now able to observe him more objectively. I saw that he was about my height and, Christ, yes, the Cyclops eye was about the same color as my eyes were and I had always regarded them as my best facial feature, a sort of light lettuce green. In his case, however, there was chronic inflammation and the lightness might be symptomatic of a cataract developing on the good eye, too. And the mouth hung open slightly in an unpleasant way. The nose was regular but the nostrils slightly distended and veined. He had unbuttoned but not removed the fur coat. Probably once he'd had a neat build but that was once, not now, he was now a pretty good model for a painter with a hang-up on spheres. And how could I be sure, intentions false or true, that under the influence of two bottles of wine and perhaps a barbiturate he mightn't come through that door to the adjoining room, unclothed or in a Sulka robe, and cry out, “Hold me, hold me!” Did I like foreign travel that much? Was I that much of a hustler, which I had never been in my life? No, I remarked emphatically, and I must have said it out loud since his eye focused on me again and he blinked it so that a streak of liquid rolled down the cheek on that side.

“No what?”

“I don't like foreign travel.”

“Oh, but you might acquire a taste for it, especially by first class, jumbo jet, there's really a lot to be said for coming out of the clouds over Hong Kong at night, all of that gorgeously tacky neon in ideograms you can't read, so you can imagine they're advertisements of the sensual allurements and satisfactions of the whole Orient, if you have yellow fever and a taste for buttocks that are smooth as breasts, and there are still several old hotels in the traditional style that haven't gone to seed such as the Royal Hawaiian, very high ceilings and revolving fans, and the Hotel Mena in Cairo is in sight of the pyramids, a very short ride by camel, and in Bangkok you can occupy the suite that was occupied by Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward or you can move to the modern high-rise annex that's air-conditioned, sometimes comfort has to take precedence over esthetics in the Far East. Tokyo's out for me because of the air pollution but I had an unforgettable cab ride with a Japanese youth like a pale yellow rose after I'd collapsed at his feet somewhere along the Ginza, all the way to Yokohama, I recovered halfway there and to distract myself from the warning of mortality on the Ginza, I'd placed a hand on his thigh and he had actually moved it like a chess piece to his crotch and put his hand on mine. . . .”

“Well, somebody was overplaying his hand.”

“Somebody always does that. I don't know if it's the human comedy or tragedy, but sometimes there's a bit of humanity in it. Do you like foreign travel, I mean could you bear it with me?”

“Maybe five years from now if we're alive.”

(I nearly added, “and you're immobilized and finally speechless.”)

I was rather shocked by the cruelty of my attitude toward this derelict who had stumbled into my life some hours before,
shouting—
what was it he'd shouted as he crashed out of the Truck and Warehouse lobby? Something about it being too dreadful to believe? He wasn't speaking to me then and so it wasn't a pitch for sympathy at that point. What troubled me was my lack of sympathy now that I'd come to know him. To lack sympathy for the unknown, reported on a newscast as having been burned alive in a nursing home fire, well, that's inaccurate, you feel sympathy, you may even feel a vicarious horror, but the next minute you're laughing at a close-up of Nixon and Brezhnev at a banquet in a fifteenth-century palace in the Kremlin, but this icy revulsion I felt for the man who only had the enticements of luxurious foreign travel to offer me in exchange for his intrusion on what was an existence almost as derelict as his own, a difference only in years, wasn't it an ominous sign in someone who wanted to write? Couldn't it mean that I was already too old for my chosen vocation? Jet-aged by Charlie's defection? Or could the revulsion be
for—

There are some sentences that a distinguished failed writer must be ashamed to complete, as if telling a secret which has been publicly published in yesterday's paper. I drew a long and loud breath which reminded me of the respirations of the Queen of Tragedy while reading the Psalms at that long-ago posh party uptown, it was breath enough to have lifted a black kite toward the sky, but all it produced was the terribly ordinary and suspect statement that follows.

“You're trying to buy me and I'm not for sale.”

I looked at him once more and, oh, God, saw again that portrait of myself which had aged like St. Oscar's boy Dorian.

Enough self-loathing, sometimes a form of self-pity: I knew by this time that he would not be frustrated even by double doors locked between adjoining rooms, no, he would phone the bell captain and request, in a husky whisper, that the doors be unlocked between us, and I, well, in a world so full of whores too hungry to refuse any offer, why should he pick on me?

Then he resumed our dialogue with a single word of one letter, he said
“I,”
and that seemed to bring into instantly sharp focus the reason for my revulsion, and I took instant advantage of it by saying, “Yes, you, you, you, interminably
you
, isn't that your problem?”

“Isn't it yours, too?”

“No, I'm concerned with some others.”

“And you think I'm not? Do you think it was easy getting back here in another cab with a very impatient cabbie and no address to give him but West Eleventh and the smell of the river?”

“But your motive in making this effort was not at all limited to? Oh, yesterday I encountered a word I'd never heard before. It was ‘solipsism.' I looked it up in Webster's Unabridged at the library and it said something to the effect that it meant to live exclusively in and for yourself. Want me to write it down for you? Give me a slip of paper from your wallet.”

“I know the word as well as I know my name.”

Now both of us were staring straight ahead and breathing like spent runners. I felt that I was already out of his presence though still bodily in it. I only needed a few words more which he supplied, along with a light touch on my knee.

“Oh, my dear boy.”

“Excuse me while I check the other room.”

(I sprang up.)

“I think maybe my lover has returned by the back entrance.”

“If he'd returned and hadn't bothered to come in to kiss you good night or explain his long absence, isn't he a mistake?”

“He might be ashamed to face me or to interrupt this intense dialogue between us, and anyway, I prefer him to foreign travel.”

“I remember. Designed by Praxiteles, or cunningly copied from the master by an apprentice. I know what people say, salacious, decadent, prurient, shameless, I've had the whole crock thrown at me but still keep going, and as for your preference, I accept it, very reluctantly but with understanding. Yesterday I was checking through my address books and had to cross out a lot of names and numbers that were victims of time, so many that I'm inconsolable and nearly scared to death, and
that
is
solipsism.”

“I think you'd better accept it.”

“It's unacceptable.”

“That's another misapprehension of yours, the solipsism of your life is going to contain the solipsism of your death, and if you're not out of this room when I come back, I will somehow manage to get you an ambulance to Bellevue.”

I was on my feet but not moving and for some reason which I don't know, or prefer not to know, I was quivering as if a fierce electric current was circuited through my nerves, yes, I believe it was the equivalent of EST on the island in the East River.

Then fantasy really took over. I didn't turn my head toward him to look at him again but my head pivoted that way and so did my eyes and what I saw was an old man smiling, a very old child smiling at me wisely.

He nodded at me, then moved back to the position on the bed that faced
BON AMI
and began to write on a piece of hotel stationery and I don't think he noticed it when I went back through the crevice in the rectangle as if there actually were another humanly habitable room in the warehouse where Charlie might be waiting.

Oh, I suspect that when I read this over I will scrap the whole bit about the derelict's return to the derelict. . . .

How strange to find myself up here at this uncertain hour, on the roof of the abandoned warehouse, six empty floors above that little improvised human shelter I have occupied with an implausible sense of security, persisting against all reason, through fifteen years and two loves. I do not use exclamation marks as I think that they are probably the most dispensable piece of punctuation to which a writer can descend unless he is writing for dumb actors and actresses like that unfortunate playwright whom I encountered before the Truck and Warehouse Theater. I suppose it may be necessary to indicate to the less gifted members of the acting profession that a line is to be shouted or spoken in a tone of shock or fury by following it with that despicable bit of punctuation. As for a distinguished failed prose writer, surely he can content himself with the comma and the period and the marks for quotation of speech between persons and also, in my peculiar case, with the neat spaces which indicate the division of section from following section as a slight variation indicates the progression of a fugue in the world of music.

Now how did I manage to get up here on the roof of the warehouse since there is no means of elevation but wings, if I had them, or such mechanical contrivances for moving upward as the escalator or the elevator, neither of which exists in operative condition in the building's vast darkness.