Plexus (51 page)

I looked at him blankly. Then I said: “Don't tell me! For Christ's sake, let's turn around. I'll have to tear off a piece before we sit down to eat.”

He blinked his eyes like an owl. He was just going to open his mouth again, when I said: “By the way, have you tackled Marjorie yet? She's dying for it, you know.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Ulric. “Do you suppose we can manage it… er…
circumspectly?”

“Leave it to me!”

We hastened our steps. By the time we reached the door we were almost on the double trot.

I took Mona aside and broached the idea.

“Why don't you wait till after dinner?” she suggested. “I mean, for Marjorie and Ulric.” We closed the door after us and had a quick one while Ulric and Marjorie talked it
over. When we joined them Marjorie was sitting on Ulric's lap, her skirt up over her knees.

“Why don't you get into something comfortable?” said Mona. “Something like this,” and so saying, she opened her kimono and revealed her naked flesh.

Marjorie lost no time in following suit. Ulric and I had to don pajamas. In this fashion we sat down to eat dinner.

A meal which is going to culminate in a sexual orgy has a way of traveling direct to the parts which need nourishment, as if directed by the little switchman who regulates the traffic throughout the autonomic system. It began with oysters on the half shell and caviar, followed by a delicious oxtail soup, porterhouse steak, mashed potatoes, French peas, cheese, sliced peaches and cream, all to the tune of a genuine Pommard which Marjorie had unearthed. With the coffee and liqueurs we had a second dessert—a French ice cream swimming in benedictine and whisky. Between courses Marjorie fiddled with Ulric's pecker. The kimonos were now wide open, the breasts exposed, the belly buttons gently rising and falling. Inadvertently one of Marjorie's nipples fell into the whipped cream, giving me the opportunity to suckle her breast for a brief moment or two. Ulric tried to balance a saucer on his pecker but unsuccessfully. Everything was proceeding merrily.

Still nibbling at the tarts, cream puffs, napoleons and what not which the women had provided, we fell into an easy conversation about the good old days. The women had shifted position and were now ensconced in our laps. It took quite a bit of wriggling and jiggling before they could get themselves properly adjusted. Now and then one of us had an orgasm, fell silent for a while, then recovered with the aid of ice cream, benedictine and whisky.

After a time we moved from the table to the divans and, between cat winks, kept up a running conversation about the most diverse subjects. It was easy, natural talk, and no one felt embarrassed if he dropped off into a snooze in the midst of a sentence. The lights had been dimmed, there
was a warm, fragrant breeze sifting through the open windows, and we were all so thoroughly sated that it didn't matter in the least what was said or what answer was given.

Ulric had dropped off to sleep during a conversation with Marjorie. He hadn't been asleep more than five minutes when he awoke with a jerk, exclaiming as if to himself: “Golly, I thought so!” Then, realizing that he was not alone, he mumbled something inaudible and raised himself on one elbow.

“Was I asleep long?” he asked.

“About five minutes,” said Marjorie.

“That's funny. It seemed to me like hours. I had one of those dreams again.” He turned to me. “You know, Henry, those dreams in which you try to prove to yourself that you are only dreaming.”

I had to confess that I had never had one.

Ulric could always describe his dreams in great detail. They terrified him somewhat because, to his mind, they indicated that he never really fell into a state of complete unconsciousness. In the dream his mind was even more active than in the waking state. It was his logical mind which came to the fore when asleep. It was that which disquieted him. He went on to describe the endless pains he took, when dreaming, to prove to himself that he was not awake but dreaming. He would take a heavy armchair, for example, and lift it high in the air with two fingers, sometimes with his brother seated in the chair. And in the dream he would say to himself: “There, nobody can do that if he's awake—it's impossible!” And then he would perform other impossible feats, some of them quite extraordinary, such as flying through a partially opened window and returning the same way, without disarranging his clothes or mussing his hair. Everything he did led to a suspected Q. E. D. which proved nothing, so he averred, because—“Well, I'll put it this way, Henry: to prove to yourself that you are dreaming you would have to be
awake, and if you are awake you can't be dreaming, can you?”

Suddenly he recalled that what had started him dreaming was the sight of a copy of “Transition” lying on the dresser. He reminded me that I had once loaned him a copy in which there was a wonderful passage on the interpretation of dreams. “You know the man I mean,” he said, snapping his fingers.

“Gottfried Benn?”

“Yes, that's the fellow. A rum one, that bird. I wish I could read more of him.… By the way, you don't have that issue here, do you?”

“Yes, I do, Ulric me lad. Would you like to see it?”

“I tell you what,” he said, “I wish you would read that passage aloud to us—that is, if the others don't mind.”

I found the copy of “Transition” and turned to the page.

“ ‘Let us now turn to psychological facts. “At night all leaping fountains speak with a louder tone; my soul, too, is a leaping fountain,” says Zarathustra.… “Into the night life seems to be exiled”—these are the famous words from Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams
—“into the night life seems to be exiled what once ruled during the day.”
This sentence contains the entire modern psychology
. Its great idea is the stratification of the psyche, the geological principle. The soul has its origin and is built in strata, and what we learned before in the organic field apropos of the construction of the big brain from the anatomic-evolutionary standpoint of vanished aeons, is revealed by the dream, revealed by the child, revealed by psychosis as a still-existing reality. We carry the ancient…'”

“Hear, hear!” exclaimed Ulric.

“ ‘We carry the ancient peoples in our souls and when the later acquired reason is relaxed, as in the dream or in drunkenness, they emerge with their rites, their prelogical mentality, and grant us an hour of mystic participation. When the…'”

“Excuse me,” said Ulric, interrupting again, “but I wonder if we could have that passage once again?”

“Sure, why not?” I reread it slowly, allowing each phrase to sink in.

“The next sentence is a honey, too,” said Ulric. “I almost know the damned thing by heart.”

I continued: “‘When the logical superstructure is loosened, when the scalp, tired of the onslaught of the prelunar states…'”

“Golly! What language! Excuse me, Henry, I didn't mean to interrupt again.”

“ ‘When the scalp, tired of the onslaught of the prelunar states, opens the frontiers of consciousness about which there is always a struggle, then there appears the old, the unconscious, in the magical transmutation and identification of the “I,” in the early experience of the everywhere and the eternal. The hereditary patrimony.…'”

“ ‘Of the middle brain!'
exclaimed Ulric. “Jesus, Henry, what a line, that! I wish you would explain that to me a little more fully. No, not now … afterwards, perhaps. Excuse me.”

“ ‘The hereditary patrimony of the middle brain',” I continued, ‘lies still deeper and is eager for expression: if the covering is destroyed in the psychosis there emerges, driven upward by the primal instincts, from out the primitive-schizoid substructure, the gigantic archaic instinctive “I,” unfolding itself limitlessly through the tattered psychological subject.'”

“ ‘The tattered psychological subject!'
Wow!” exclaimed Ulric. “Thanks, Henry, that was a treat.” He turned to the others. “Do you wonder sometimes why I'm so fond of this guy? (He beamed in my direction.) There isn't a soul who comes to my studio capable of bringing me that sort of pabulum. I don't know where he gets these things—certainly
I
never stumble on them by myself. Which only goes to show, no doubt, how differently we're geared.”

He paused a moment to fill his glass. “You know,
Henry, if you don't mind my saying so, a passage like that could have been written by you, don't you think? Maybe that's why I like Gottfried Benn so much. And that Hugo Ball is another guy—he's got something on the ball, too,
what?
The curious thing, though, is this—all this stuff, which means so much to me, I'd never have known about it if it weren't for you. How I wish sometimes that you were with me when I'm with that Virginia bunch! You know they're really not unintelligent, but somehow this sort of thing seems to repel them. They look upon it as unhealthy.” He gave a wry smile. Then he looked at Marjorie and Mona. “Forgive me for dwelling on these things, won't you? I know it's not the moment to indulge in windy discussions. I was going to ask Henry something about the hereditary patrimony of the middle brain, but I guess we could leave it until some more suitable occasion. How about a stirrup cup?—and then I'll be off.”

He filled our glasses, then went over to the mantelpiece and leaned against it.

“I suppose it will always be a thing of wonder and mystery to me,” he said slowly, caressing his words, “how we ran into each other that day on Sixth Avenue after a lapse of so many years. What a lucky day it was for me! You may not believe it, but often when I was in some weird place—like the middle of the Sahara—I would say to myself: ‘I wonder what Henry would have to say if he were here with me.' Yes, you were often in my thoughts, even though we had lost all touch with one another. I didn't know that you had become a writer. No, but I always knew that you would become
something
or
somebody
. Even as a kid you gave off something which was different, something unique. You always made the atmosphere more intense, more sparkling. You were a challenge to all of us. Maybe you never realized that. Even now, people who met you only once continue to ask me—'How is that Henry Miller?'
That Henry Miller!
You see what I mean? They don't say that about anyone else I know.
Oh well… you've heard this a dozen times or more, I know.”

“Why don't you get a good rest and stay the night?” said Mona.

“I'd like nothing better, but…” He cocked the left eyebrow and twisted his lips. “The scalp, tired of the onslaught of the prelunar states.… Some day we'll have to go into all this more thoroughly. Right now the gigantic archaic instinctive I is struggling upward through the schizoid substructure.” He left off and began shaking hands with us. “You know,” he went on, “I'm sure to have a fantastic dream tonight. Not
a
dream but dozens of them! I'll be slithering in the primal ooze, trying to prove to myself that I'm living the Pleiocene epoch. I'll probably meet up with dragons and dinosaurs—unless the covering has been entirely destroyed by previous psychoses.” He smacked his lips, as if he had just swallowed a dozen succulent bivalves. He was on the threshold now. “By the way, I wonder if it would be imposing on you too much to borrow that Forel book from you again? There's a passage on amorous tyranny that I'd like to reread.”

As I was going to bed I opened “Transition” at random. My eye fell on this sentence: “Our human biological presence carries in its body two hundred rudiments: how many the soul carries is unknown.”

How many the soul carries!
With this phrase on my tongue I plunged into a profound trance. In my sleep I reenact a scene out of life.… I am with Stanley again. We are walking rapidly in the dark towards the house where Maude and the little one live. Stanley is saying that it is a silly, futile thing to do, but since I wish it he will go through with it. He has the key to the front door; he keeps reassuring me that no one will be home. What I want is to see what the child's room looks like. It is ages since I have seen her and I am afraid that when I next meet her
—when?
—she won't recognize me any more. I keep asking Stanley how big she is, what she wears, how she talks,
and so on. Stanley answers gruffly and brusquely, as usual. He sees no point to this expedition.

We enter the house and I explore the room minutely. Her toys intrigue me—they are lying everywhere. I begin to weep silently, as I examine her toys. Suddenly I perceive a battered old stuffed doll lying on a shelf in a corner. I tuck it under my arm and motion to Stanley to clear out. I can't utter a word, I'm shaking and sputtering.

When I awake next day the dream is still vivid with me. Out of habit I get into my old clothes, a pair of faded corduroys, a torn, frayed denim shirt, a pair of busted shoes. I haven't had a shave for two days, my head is heavy, I feel restless. The weather has changed overnight; a cold, fall wind is blowing and it threatens to rain. In listless fashion I kill the morning. After lunch I don an old cardigan jacket out at the elbows, slap my wilted hat over my ear, and set out. I've become obsessed with the idea that I must see the child again, at any cost.

I emerge from the subway a few blocks from the house and with eyes peeled I edge into the danger zone. I creep nearer and nearer to the house, until I am at the corner, only half a block away. I stand there a long while, my eyes riveted to the gate, hoping to see the little one appear any moment. It's getting chilly. I put my collar up and pull my hat down over my ears. I pace back and forth, back and forth, opposite the lugubrious Catholic church made of moss-green stone.

Still no sign of her. Keeping to the opposite side of the street, I walk rapidly past the house, hoping that I may detect a sign of life indoors. But the curtains have been pulled to. At the corner I stop and begin pacing to and fro again. This goes on for fifteen, twenty minutes, perhaps longer. I feel lousy, itchy, crummy. Like a spy. And guilty, guilty as hell.