Plexus (2 page)

It was the life in the streets that I remember best and enjoyed most. Al's friends seemed to belong to another species of boys from the ones I knew. A greater warmth, a greater freedom, a greater hospitality reigned in Sackett Street. Though they were about the same age as myself, his friends gave me the impression of being more mature, as well as more independent. Parting from them I always had the feeling of being enriched. The fact that they were from the waterfront, that their families had lived here for generations, that they were a more homogenous group than ours, may have had something to do with the qualities which endeared them to me. There was one among them I still remember vividly, though he is long dead. Frank Schofield. At the time we met, Frank was only seventeen, but already man-size. There wasn't anything at all that we had in common, as I look back on our strange friendship. What drew me to him was his easy, relaxed, jovial manner, his utter flexibility, his unequivocal acceptance of whatever was offered him, whether it was a cold frankfurter, a warm handclasp, an old penknife, or a promise to see him again next week. He grew up into a great hulking figure, tremendously overweight, and capable in some queer, instinctive way, enough so to become the right-hand man of a very prominent newspaperman with whom he traveled far and wide and for whom he performed all manner of thankless tasks. I probably never saw him more than three or four times after the good old days in Sackett Street. But I had him always in mind. It used to do me good just to revive his image, so warm he was, so goodnatured, so thoroughly trusting and believing. All he ever wrote were postcards. You could hardly read his scrawl.
Just a line to say he was feeling fine, the world was grand, and how the hell were you?

Whenever Ulric came to visit us, which was usually on a Saturday or Sunday, I would take him for long walks through these old neighborhoods. He too was familiar with them from childhood. Usually he brought a sketch pad along with him, “to make a few notes,” as he put it. I used to marvel then at his facility with pencil and brush. It never once occurred to me that I might be doing the same myself one day. He was a painter and I was a writer—or at least I
hoped
to be one someday. The world of paint appeared to me to be a realm of pure magic, one utterly beyond my reach.

Though he was never, in the intervening years, to become a celebrated painter, Ulric nevertheless had a marvelous acquaintance with the world of art. About the painters he loved no man could talk with more feeling and understanding. To this day I can hear the reverberations of his long, felicitous phrases concerning such men as Cimabue, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Vermeer and others. Sometimes we would sit and look at a book of reproductions—always of the great masters, to be sure. We could sit and talk for hours—
he
could, at least—about a single painting. It was undoubtedly because he himself was so utterly humble and reverent, humble and reverent in the true sense, that Ulric could talk so discerningly and penetratingly about “the master.” In spirit he
was
a master himself. I thank God that he never lost this ability to revere and adore. Rare indeed are the born worshipers.

Like O'Rourke, the detective, he had the same tendency to become, at the most unexpected moments, absorbed and enrapt. Often during our walks along the waterfronts he would stop to point out some particularly decrepit façade or broken-down wall, expatiating on its beauty in relation to the background of skyscrapers on the other shore or to the huge hulls and masts of the ships lying at anchor in their cradles. It might be zero weather and
an icy gale blowing, but Ulric seemed not to mind. At such moments he would shamefacedly extract a faded little envelope from his pocket and, with the stub of what had been once a pencil, endeavor to make “a few more notes.” Little ever came of these note takings, I must say. Not in those days, at least. The men who doled out commissions—to make bananas, tomato cans, lamp shades, etc.—were always hard on his heels.

Between “jobs” he would get his friends, more especially his women friends, to pose for him. He worked furiously during these intervals, as if preparing for an exhibition at the Salon. Before the easel he had all the gestures and mannerisms of the “maestro.” It was almost terrifying to witness the frenzy of his attack. The results, strange to say, were always disheartening. “Damn it all,” he would say, “I'm nothing but an illustrator.” I can see him now standing over one of his abortions, sighing, wheezing, spluttering, tearing his hair. I can see him reach for an album of Cézanne, turn to one of his favorite paintings, then look with a sick grin at his own work. “Look at this, will you?” he would say, pointing to some particularly successful area of the Cézanne. “Why in hell can't I capture something like that—
just once?
What's wrong with me, do you suppose? Oh well…” And he'd heave a deep sigh, sometimes a veritable groan. “Let's have a snifter, what say? Why try to be a Cézanne? I know, Henry, what it is that's wrong. It's not just
this
painting, or the one before, it's my whole life that's wrong. A man's work reflects what he is, what he's thinking the livelong day, isn't that it? Looking at it in that light, I'm just a piece of stale cheese, eh what? Well, here's how!
Down the hatch!”
Here he would raise his glass with a queer, wry twist of the mouth which was painfully, too painfully, eloquent.

If I adored Ulric because of his emulation of the masters, I believe I really revered him for playing the role of “the failure.” The man knew how to make music of his failings and failures. In fact, he had the wit and the
grace to make it seem as though, next to success, the best thing in life is to be a total failure.

Which is probably the truth. What redeemed Ulric was a complete lack of ambition. He wasn't hankering to be recognized: he wanted to be a good painter for the sheer joy of exceling. He loved all the good things of life, and only the good things. He was a sensualist through and through. In playing chess he preferred to play with Chinese pieces, no matter how poor his game might be. It gave him the keenest pleasure merely to handle the ivory pieces. I remember the visits we made to museums in search of old chess boards. Could Ulric have played on a board that once adorned the wall of a medieval castle he would have been in seventh heaven, nor would he have cared ever again whether he won or lost. He chose everything he used with great care—clothes, valises, slippers, lamps, everything. When he picked up an object he caressed it. Whatever could be salvaged was patched or mended or glued together again. He talked about his belongings as some people do about their cats; he gave them his full admiration, even when alone with them. Sometimes I have caught him speaking to them, addressing them, as if they were old friends. What a contrast to Kronski, when I think of it. Kronski, poor, wretched devil, seemed to be living with the discarded bric-a-brac of his ancestors. Nothing was precious to him, nothing had meaning or significance for him. Everything went to pieces in his hands, or became ragged, torn, splotched and sullied. Yet one day—how it came about I never learned—this same Kronski began to paint. He began brilliantly, too. Most brilliantly. I could scarcely believe my eyes. Bold, brilliant colors he used, as if he had just come from Russia. Nor were his subjects lacking in daring and originality. He went at it for eight and ten hours at a stretch, gorging himself before and after, and always singing, whistling, jiggling from one foot to another, always applauding himself. Unfortunately it was just a flash in the pan. Petered out after a few months.
After that never a word about painting. Forgot, apparently, that he had ever touched a brush.…

It was during the period when things were going serenely with us that I made the acquaintance of a rum bird at the Montague Street Library. They knew me well there because I was giving them all kinds of trouble asking for books they didn't have, urging them to borrow rare or expensive books from other libraries, complaining about the poverty of their stock, the inadequacy of their service, and in general making a nuisance of myself. To make it worse I was always paying huge fines for books overdue or for books lost (which I had appropriated for my own shelves), or for missing pages. Now and then I received a public reprimand, as if I were still a schoolboy, for underlining passages in red ink or for writing comments in the margins. And then one day, searching for some rare books on the circus—
why
, God knows—I fell into conversation with a scholarly looking man who turned out to be one of the staff. In the course of conversation I learned that he had been to some of the fancy circuses of Europe. The word
Médrano
escaped his lips. It was virtually Greek to me, but I remembered it. Anyway, I took such a liking to the fellow that there and then I invited him to visit us the next evening. As soon as I got out of the library I called Ulric and begged him to join us. “Did you ever hear of the Cirque Médrano?” I asked.

To make it short, the next evening was given over almost exclusively to the Cirque Médrano. I was in a daze when the librarian left. “So that's Europe!” I muttered aloud, over and over. Couldn't get over it. “And that guy was there… he saw it all.
Christ!”

The librarian came quite frequently, always with some rare books under his arm which he thought I would like to glance at. Usually he brought a bottle along too. Sometimes he would play chess with us, seldom leaving before two or three in the morning. Each time he came I made
him talk about Europe: it was his “admission fee.” In fact, I was getting drunk on the subject; I could talk about Europe almost as if I had been there myself. (My father was the same. Though he had never set foot outside of New York, he could talk about London, Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Rome as if he had lived abroad all his life.)

One night Ulric brought over his large map of Paris (the Métro map) and we all got down on hands and knees to wander through the streets of Paris, visiting the libraries, museums, cathedrals, flower stalls, slaughterhouses, cemeteries, whorehouses, railway stations, bals musettes,
les magasins
and so on. The next day I was so full up, so full of Europe, I mean, that I couldn't go to work. It was an old habit of mine to take a day off when I felt like it. I always enjoyed stolen holidays best. It meant getting up at any old hour, loafing about in pajamas, playing records, dipping into books, strolling to the wharf and, after a hearty lunch, going to a matinee. A good vaudeville show was what I liked best, an afternoon in which I would burst my sides laughing. Sometimes, after one of these holidays, it was still more difficult to return to work. In fact, impossible. Mona would conveniently call the boss to inform him that my cold had gotten worse. And he would always say: “Tell him to stay in bed another few days. Take good care of him!”

“I should think they would be on to you by this time,” Mona would say.

“They are, honey. Only I'm too good. They can't do without me.”

“Some day they'll send someone over here to see if you're really ill.”

“Never answer the doorbell, that's all. Or tell them I've gone to see the doctor.”

Wonderful while it lasted.
Just ducky
. I had lost all interest in my job. All I thought of was to begin writing. At the office I did less and less, grew more and more slack. The only applicants I bothered to interview were the suspects.
My assistant did the rest. As often as possible I would clear out of the office on the pretext of inspecting the branch offices. I would call on one or two in the heart of town—just to establish an alibi—then duck into a movie. After the movie I would drop in on another branch manager, report to headquarters, and then home. Sometimes I spent the afternoon in an art gallery or at the 42nd Street Library. Sometimes I called on Ulric or else visited a dance hall. I got ill more and more often, and for longer stretches at a time. Things were definitely riding to a fall.

Mona encouraged my delinquency. She had never liked me in the role of employment manager. “You should be writing,” she would say. “Fine,” I would retort, secretly pleased but putting up a battle to salve my conscience. “Fine! but what will we live on?”

“Leave that to
me!”

“But we can't go on swindling and bamboozling people forever.”

“Swindling?
Anybody I borrow from can well afford to lend the money. I'm doing them a favor.”

I couldn't see it her way but I would give in. After all, I had no better solution to offer. To wind up the argument I would always say: “Well, I'm not quitting
yet.”

Now and then, on one of these stolen holidays, we would end up on Second Avenue, New York. It was amazing the number of friends I had in this quarter. All Jews, of course, and most of them cracked. But lively company. After a bite at Papa Moskowitz's we would go to the Café Royal. Here you were sure to find anyone you were looking for.

One evening as we were strolling along the Avenue, just as I was about to peer into a bookshop window to have another look at Dostoevski—his photo had been hanging in this same window for years—who should greet us but an old friend of Arthur Raymond. Nahoum Yood, no less. Nahoum Yood was a short, fiery man who wrote in Yiddish. He had a face like a sledgehammer.
Once you saw it you never forgot it. When he spoke it was always a rush and a babble; the words literally tripped over one another. He not only sputtered like a firecracker but he dribbled and drooled at the same time. His accent, that of the “Litvak,” was atrocious. But his smile was golden—like Jack Johnson's. It gave his face a sort of Jack-o'-Lantern twist.

I never saw him in any other condition but effervescent. He had always just discovered something wonderful, something marvelous, something unheard of. In unloading himself he always gave you a spritz bath,
gratis
. But it was worth it. This fine spray which he emitted between his front teeth had the same stimulating effect that a needle bath has. Sometimes with the spritz bath came a few caraway seeds.