Moise and the World of Reason (3 page)

As he turned in the flickering candlelight, I noticed his ass in profile and exclaimed with astonishment to myself this histrionic thing: “What is life but a memory of asses and cunts you've been into?”

(That isn't at all true, you know, it was just an hysterical expletive of the libido.)

The announcement is continuing as before.

“I think I lived in something more like your world once, I mean a world of reason, but things became more and more untenable and I began to leave the room of that world and to retire into this one. I don't know how long ago.”

At this point most of the guests had begun to listen to the announcement but their facial expressions were curious beyond my failing power of description. I can only say there was nothing appropriate in their expressions with the single exception of the expression on the face of an actress named Invicta. Her face was attentive and comprehending: the faces of all the others
were—
I don't know how to describe it. It was rather like they were in one of those bars in the Village where they show old silent comedies of the Keystone era.

Moise was now mentioning things of a less abstract nature, relevant to her estrangement from the world of reason. She was saying, “My zinc white is exhausted and I have no more blue. I squeezed out my last bit of blue onto my last bit of canvas this last afternoon in my world. Also my black. Gone, too. My cup of turpentine could be mistaken for a cup of gumbo. My linseed oil, gone, gone, and as for my brushes, well, I can paint with my fingers but sometimes I think of my brushes as I
remember—
please, are you listening to me?
You look at me so strangely that I can't
tell—
I think of my dear canvas as of a gentleman who provided me with whatever means I had to continue subsistence. Gone, gone, too, eighty-seven at Bellevue.”

She paused, clutching my shoulder in a paroxysm of emotion.

“To have possessed a patron who was a pauper has been the presence of God in my life, but now, oh,
now—
lived on security, died in charity, where is the poem God now? And the hope of new white, new blue, new black, or one more stretch of canvas?”

I had now stopped repeating her whispers: there was no more breath in me, now, and nothing but, I am ashamed to admit this, but homesickness for the bed in the section of loft and Charlie's fever to warm me.

Much as I do love Moise, when someone you love departs altogether from the world of reason, dubitable as that world may be, you know, you are subject to such distractions from her condition, his condition, whatever, that you

“Moise, please stop now, they're all turning away and the Actress Invicta has collapsed to the floor!”

“What right has she got to give a theatrical performance during my announcement?” Moise demanded. “Get her up and out of here this instant.”

“But, Moise, she is genuinely affected by your announcement, in fact I believe she's the only one here who is at all interested in it besides you and me.”

“Hush! The announcement continues!”

And it did continue and I must say that despite the fact that I am accustomed to shocking revelations or confessions, having devoted half my life to them, I was embarrassed, yes, I was truly shocked by what she was now announcing.

“This gentleman, eighty-seven, lost at Bellevue, it is pitiable but not shameful for me to admit this, was, in a sense, my lover as well as my patron. It is probably more accurate to say that I performed for his sake certain little services such as a bit of prostatic massage along with a bit of fellatio and out of his loneliness, the terminal affliction of the old, he would call me his love, and I, well, I was in no position to decline his material assistances, on Saturdays in summer, Wednesdays too in winter, and in spring, yes, actually that season affects the elderly too, more frequent summonses to Apartment F, third floor right, appalling stairs, had to pause for breath on the second landing. And ladies not being allowed there, it was a bachelors' home supported by B'Nai B'Rrith, he had provided me with a tall black hat and a pair of trousers inherited from his father, a rabbi in New Rochelle, to wear when summoned. I received strange glances, caught on the run rushing through, but bus fare there and back was added to the remittance taken out of a padlocked metal box and handed me with whispers of devotion. I don't suppose this belongs in the world of reason. I only meant to tell you that he is gone, too, and I am bereft, I am left without further means to continue beyond this announcement, unless it reaches South Orange. . . .”

She stopped as if to inquire if it would or would not and during this pause in the announcement, which, needless to say, I was no longer repeating, a tall young man appeared directly before us and said, “Unreal, unreal.” I recognized this personable new arrival as Big Lot. And then I noticed that Charlie was crossing to him with a cup of Gallo. I caught him by the belt of my army coat which gave him a jolt that caused him to spill the Gallo on my coat and Big Lot.

“Charlie, the party is over,”

“Party, did you say party, and did you mean this one-joint smoke-in without a shot of vodka?”

I looked at Big Lot who said this with one of his impish smirks that enchant some people some of the time and simply seem to be cruelly appropriate to others, the way some people laughed when Candy would not, they say, take the chemotherapy treatment because it would make her hair fall out. But I had stopped interpreting the smiles of a winter night and I only said lamely, “If it wasn't a party, wouldn't you be in the bushes on Central Park West?”

“No, baby, in the trucks with some old trick of yours!”

It was not a scintillating exchange of bitcheries nor was it meant to be, and Big Lot's baby-brown eyes turned upon Charlie with a dreamily appraising up-down look.

“Why don't we go down to Phoebe's for some chow, it's a night for hot chili.”

He hardly returned his look to my direction as he ordered me imperiously to give Charlie some cab fare.

“What is a cab?”

“A four-wheeled conveyance used for urban transport by successful writers.”

Allusions to my calling always score painfully when made by faded friends and I never answer, but Moise had emerged from her moments of inner reflection. She said to Big Lot, “It's a distinction to be a master of anything, which includes the cunning of betrayal.”

Her ice-gray look removed the languidly supercilious smile of Big Lot as if his face had never worn it. Hurt and anger flashed there.

“Oh, for Chrissake, Moise, it's me that betrays himself to everybody, not anybody to me or by me, and whatever this fucking gig is I find it too unreal to believe it and personally not being into the theater of the ridiculous, I'm going to Phoebe's for vodka and hot chili and no shit about betrayals.”

“Watch out for the sudden subway,” Moise said softly as I've read that the
Titanic
first touched that submarine mountain of ice, so softly the dancers in the great ballroom didn't feel it.

(“The sudden subway” was Moise's term for all such disastrous inadvertencies as Big Lot is inclined to provoke, less for himself than others, or it may be the opposite way: in either case, it's a tightrope act to

Yes, that sentence is finished in its fashion.)

The image of ice recurs and whispers, too, and almost subliminally the wire announcing the death of the skater flashed into my mind, and then the night I slept with Moise for companionship's comfort only, our hands touching until daybreak when she placed her fingertips on my temple and said, “Just say to yourself”

Incomplete, there being nothing I could have said to myself except, “Overdosed on blackbirds, a super high, overdosed on a super high in Montreal, a spectacular leap and was dead still skating. ‘Didn't come out of the glide. Wanted it so. Audience didn't know I escorted him off the ice, tall smiling dead living.'”

What on earth did she mean by “wire instructions and love”?

A distinguished failed writer at thirty has suspended the climax as if it were a sentence that he had the audacity not to complete.

The Actress Invicta had risen and put on her heroic black cloak as if an imperative such as
“À nous le jouer”
swept her away

(Period omitted by intent since she stays on.)

An outraged lady once said to me, “How dare you compare him to?”

Each one has his love and comparisons exist in that fact only.

Now back to

Now at this instant the door down the corridor made a loud banging sound as if Moise's announcement party were being raided by the police, it banged the wall that loud, but it wasn't a police raid but something worse. It was the entrance of a certain distillation of venom in the form of a human (?) female called Miriam Skates. I knew it was she who had entered by that inimitable and indescribable shrillness of voice. I know it is a writer's business to describe whatever he sees, hears, feels or imagines but the circumstances under which I'm now writing this thing have made it impossible for me to arrest its present motion by a description of the voice of Skates when she entered the lightless hall: at best I can only remark that probably nothing like it has been heard outside the spectators' section of the old Roman Colosseum in the pre-Christian era when a fallen gladiator was about to be impaled by the victor's trident.