Moise and the World of Reason (18 page)

“Yes, it did.”

“Well, please let her know I can reach him through Celebrity Service and will start on it today. I know both Jane and Tony, have known them since my Hollywood days with Franz, and I know that they will respond to her appeal, but meanwhile will you please give Moise this twenty?”

“Yes. Of course. I will.”

“Thanks. Now tell me, where on earth do you think I can find Lot?”

“You could find him wherever I would find Charlie if I knew where.”

“That's a bitch of an answer.”

“Ain't it just?”

“You understand, don't you?”

“I don't understand and don't know.”

Just at that moment, a cat streaked out of the warehouse with a squealing thing in its jaws.

“My God,” she said, “this is worse than the Dakota!”

The scene then became scrambled by a tall and dark human figure crossing the street toward the cab and the cab starting off and the actress crying out, “Lot.”

When the scene unscrambled, the actress was confronting the tall figure which she had hysterically mistaken for Lot and was shrilling at him, “Do you suppose I'd be on this corner at this hour without a revolver on me!”

The man crossed away, much smaller.

“Would you like to come in and wait with me till later?”

I don't think she heard me.

She stalked away in her heroic black cloak as if she had never heard of danger at a wolf's hour in her life, and as I went back up the stairs I said to myself, “Well, now I know that love is demolition.”

But having returned to the hooked rectangle, I correct that facile and small definition of the only thing that is larger than life by the following bit of rhetoric.

“Among the things love includes, unlimited as life and perhaps as death, there is demolition of self and possibly also of the object of the love! Which led me back to that long-ago whisper of Moise's, ‘It isn't good but it's God.'”

Without at first being aware of what it was in the room that was no longer there, that was very disturbingly missing (and I don't mean Charlie), I sat before
BON AMI
, pencil clutched, watching, listening, alert as, say, an aged and crippled villager of some distant embattled country would watch and listen skyward at the sound or sight of approaching enemy planes. I don't believe that I knew, at first, whether it was the sound or sight of something that had ceased to be present in the hooked rectangle number one to infinity of my existence. I was, of course, stupefied, much as I was while sitting in tense silence (which was my own only) in a corner of the violent ward on the island in the River East.

(Forgive these scrambled images, my hands shake like my thoughts as I now continue to attempt to write in very small but legible script on laundry cardboard #2.)

What had stopped was that hitherto faithful sound of the one-legged clock which I had removed to the furthest possible corner within the rectangle's confines but which, though muted by that distance, had still been audible to me and so reassuring to me as a familiar presence. Yes.
It—
it had now stopped dead, and the fact that I had simply not wound it up that night did not improve the omen of its suddenly noticed cessation. I suppose I felt as an old man must feel who has lived his whole life, or the important half of it, beside a mountain cataract, and one day or night, half-emerging from the dream that time has gently drawn him into, notices that the eternity of that waterfall's murmur has been stilled without warning.

Clock-beat, heartbeat: you don't want to hear either, but you always trust their going on with you, for otherwise you'd stop, too.

Stopping, stopping, who wants it, even from an old travesty of a clock or a heart worn out at thirty.

Now there will be no future way of knowing if it is still night or into morning without periodic ventures into the cat-and-rat battleground of the loft outside.

After it did become clear to me that it was the clock's sound which had stopped, I went once again into that no-man's-land and saw through its windows that time was indeed into morning, dimmed by the dust of the windows and by dockside fog. I stood there, paralyzed by bereavement, for time enough to accept a totally new condition of life.

And then I sneezed, once, twice, repeatedly. I touched my forehead and found it burning as his body had burned, and whispered to myself, “I won't survive it.”

(I won't read back through this passage for the embarrassing footprints of self-pity, that most despicable emotion of humankind still living, for it would stop me dead on cardboard #2 like the clock.)

Then, then, then.

Behind me I heard sounds, not the clock's, not mine, within the hooked rectangle, and I turned that way and moved toward the narrow opening of the plywooded section that would admit you thinly.

And there was Charlie back from his all-night excursions, not greeting me but looking down at my army-store boots as he unlaced them.

It was I that broke the silence.

“Charlie, I think I'm dead.”

“But still at work on
BON AMI
.”

“Naturally, what else?”

“Shit.”

“Probably, since I've spent the night alone, obsessed with”

“Huh?”

“A positive frenzy of lascivious”

“Thoughts of me and your spade that cracked through the ice?”

“I have arrived at something.”

“Such as?”

“Recognition of you.”

“Never now or ever.”

“No, I think at last I know you, Charlie.”

“Bully for you, old sport. Now why'nt you go out and look at that green light on Daisy's dock and eat your heart out in private?”

“It's the truth, like Scott and Jack Clayton told it.”

“Well, go and skate on it, I'm dog tired and I intend to sleep.”

“Alone.”

“Hope so.”

Now he was removing his clothes with the leisure of a stripteaser, instinctively provocative even now, but the provocation was not of the kind to which he was accustomed when unclothing.

It wasn't loathing or hatred on a conscious level, but it was building to something that could crack thick ice with the ease of a toothpick through a pitted olive.

I looked at him as he slowly stripped himself bare and crawled into bed; then he spoke and what he said was like a quotation from something.

“Infidelities are not confined to the present.”

He meant that I had loved the ice skater for those thirteen years until he, Charlie, had come into my life, one week after the ice skater had cracked the goddam ice forever, meaning retired into the silent ice world forever and no more skating on it, through a possibly accidental or deliberate OD
on—
you name it, I never knew, all that I knew was that he alternated continually between big highs and lows and was constant only to beauty. And I
don't
mean me. . . .

“Well, Charlie, tell me about it, what was it and how did it go?”

“Don't start that shit.”

“What shit?”

“The questions bit, I don't need it.”

“I know you don't need it any more than I do but I suspect that you'd like to tell me something about it.”

“I don't much care if I tell you but I will. After the thing at Moise's, Big Lot said that you were going to stay with her and he said, ‘Let's drop by the Factory,' and we did and LaLanga was there. All right, he was there, and this thing happened between us. You know, Big Lot and I had run out with the bottle of red Gallo and we drank it on the way to the Factory and I saw LaLanga as a living poem which I know that he is and I also know that what he put in my body was a poem, too!”

“Oh. So.”

“Yes.”

I knew that I had lost Charlie to the living poems of poets and what remained of what I had thought was a poem between us was now expiring like that warm aromatic bit of a candle last evening at Moise's.

Isn't it always like that, in the world, gay or straight?

My answer to that is yes. It simply takes longer in some cases than others for ice skaters to stop skating on the ice but to enter it for the silence of forever.

“Going out?”

“That's right. Goodbye, Charlie.”

“Where you think you're going, man, at this hour?”

“I'm going back to Moise's.”

“I don't think you'll get in there.”

“What gives you that impression?”

“Refugees from the party say that when the candle burnt out there was a sort of riot. A pregnant girl was trampled kind of bad and somebody hollered police and Moise bolted the door and Big Lot says it'll never be opened again unless the great red-bearded father in South Orange gets the message and breaks down the door.”

“Goodbye,” I said again. Then with that touch of bitchiness that can never be quite excluded from lovers parting, I said, “Watch out for the sudden subway, that's all, Charlie.”

“Huh?”

(Perfunctorily spoken.)

“Goodbye.”

“Oh, are you really going back to Moise's?”

“Naturally.”

“Why?”

“Okay, I'll tell you. If I got in bed with you I would profane the poem LaLanga and I don't want to do that.”

“I wouldn't allow you to.”

“No. So. Goodbye.”

“You say goodbye instead of good night to me.”

“That's right.”

“Why?”

I didn't answer that till after I had put on the army coat and muffler which he'd thrown off, and then, as I started toward the door, removing the ice skater's photo from its hook on the dingy wall, I said to Charlie, “I'm going to Moise's and although to go there now is to return there sooner than expected and certainly sooner than I'd be welcome, it would be much more appropriate
than—”

I started out the door and Charlie said, “That was an incomplete sentence but what else is life made of?”

“Well, in Ethiopia the nomadic tribes who live by their cattle have lost ninety-eight percent of their cattle in a big drought there and I saw a picture today of vultures sitting on a long line of telegraph poles along the road to the sea, waiting for anything that might come along there.”

“Yes, that's life, too,” said Charlie, his voice still perfunctory.

Now I had this last door almost closed between us and he said one more thing.

“Skates said she'd killed Moise.”

“I hardly think so, Charlie.”

But I hesitated a few moments longer at the door.

“What gave Skates that impression?”

“Its been going on a long time,” said Charlie with an indifferent yawn, not even turning to give me a glance as I lingered one last moment.

“Yes, I know that the malice of Skates is practically inexhaustible as the lecheries that you mistake for a love life.”

“How's that so, lover boy?”

Then he did turn to look at me and I would not have believed it possible that he could look at me in such a different way than I had known, well, either known or imagined, for nearly two years. That was a thing that had to be turned away from and not carried with me from the makeshift partitions of our section of the dockside loft, no, it would not go with me like the photo of the lover I'd removed from the wall.

He seemed to be looking with real contempt at me now, no, it wasn't possible, it wasn't part of the world of reason, and yet there it was, the cold knife of his look hurled at me as I waited.

“You hardly think so, you hardly think anything but that creatures like you and Moise can survive on nothing. Are you a couple of air plants, is this the tropics? Why, Christ, you pitiful son of a bitch, you won't live through the flu at Moise's or on the streets of this city. Moise has packed it with Skates's assistance, she knows it's finished with her, but you, ho, man, you think that old photo of a spade which thank God you're taking out of here with you and your demented pieces of writing will suffice to keep you going, well, man, the truth is nothing to what you're going to face.”