Set This House on Fire (44 page)

“I almost queered myself then. Even back then I loved painting; I didn’t know a damn thing about it, but the earth seemed to move whenever I saw, say, a Leonardo drawing in a book, and this terrible crap of Vernelle’s almost turned my stomach, so when she asked me what I thought of her pictures I allowed as how they seemed to me long enough on religion but powerfully short on art. Her pretty little face got all flushed and angry and she said I didn’t know anything about painting. I was a gentleman, maybe, but a gentleman without any eye, and my poor heart plummeted again, and I thought surely that that was that. But she recovered after a bit, and said she was hungry—up in my old neck of the woods they say
hongry
—and so I went out to a little stand and got a bagful of hot dogs and a couple of Pepsi-Colas and brought them back and we sat there on this rump-sprung couch munching away, and Vernelle got on religion again—
got
on it! she was always on it—and asked me who my favorite apostle was. Then I said something—I wasn’t thinking—and came out with a prophet instead, Ezekiel or someone like that, and she gave a tinkly little laugh at my ignorance, and I could feel a chill rise up between us like a sheet of glass. I thought it was a chill, anyway. Ah God, I was suffering! Every capillary in me from head to toe was absolutely tumescent with desire, raging, and I couldn’t do anything but sit there and chomp away at the hot dogs and plot and connive and plan hopeless stratagems, and sweat and suffer. There’s no misery more acute on earth than the plain ordinary
horniness
of a boy of seventeen. It got awfully late finally and I was so full of religion I was close to tears. I was scared as hell, really, but determined, and ready to try anything short of rape, and even that, to enter this pure undefiled vessel of the Lord. Miserable transgressor, half-drowned even then in original sin!

“At last, just as I thought I was at the final insupportable bursting point, she got up, and with a sort of mincing pristine swaying motion of her behind she walked over to this old Victrola and put on a record—some hillbilly record, I remember, I can hear it right now as clear as a bell—she put on this Roy Acuff and turned around and said just as calmly and blandly and sweetly as you can imagine: ‘Would you at all care to dance?’ I can see her now: this mellow, unblemished, plum-ripe little virgin with a smear of mustard on her lips, one hand outstretched graciously—so—just like she’d seen it in the movies. And I was flabbergasted. Would I at all care to dance, my God! At that moment I would have danced with her barefoot on broken glass, or under the sea, or straight into the maw of hell. But I didn’t understand, I didn’t believe it! Dance with this dove of Jehovah? And I said: ‘But ain’t it against your religion?’ And she said, real calmly, without a flicker: ‘That’s one thing you’ll find out about us Witnesses. We’re right liberal as concerns social contacts.’

“And by God, do you know that that did it! Me and my wretched suffering! Why, do you know that she’d been just waiting for me to make a move as soon as we stepped into that house. As quick as I got my arm around her she was all belly and thigh and groin and mustard-smeared mouth wide open, groaning ‘Lover boy’ and all in this swooning movieland passion, saying over and over, ‘Dawling, what took you so long?’ And in a fake Stork Club accent, at that. Vernelle Satterfield! A Messalina in the guise of a vestal virgin! Not a treasure of the Lord, but a junior-sized harlot! Why she was no more of a virgin than one of those little trulls of fat King Louis! And she kept saying, ‘Dawling, what took you so long?’—in this real clickety-clack godawful phony voice, as if she wished my name were Rodney. And then, well, what man can’t remember the first girl he ever touched, the smell of perfume—gardenias, you know—and the elastic, and the pitiless garters, and the simple feel of young
flesh
beneath your fingers, which is so hopelessly sublime, I suppose, because at that age it’s beyond your power to conceive of it as anything but immortal.

“Yet I was a failure. A hopeless, flat-assed failure. Who wouldn’t have been, in my condition? I was like a great gorged mosquito. But it didn’t matter. It just didn’t matter one bit at all. The mood remains in time, it lingers, and that’s the important thing. My God, Vernelle Satterfield! I can still see her as the lust consumed all the simple piety in her eyes, and as she screwed up her face and still in this elegant huskiness moaned: ‘Come on, Lover boy! Hurry! Hurry! Aunt Lucille might be coming!’ And with my hair standing on end and every arm and leg atremble, she dragged me like some big limp reluctant half-grown hound dog into the bedroom and onto the sagging springs. And there I had her, in the dim light beneath the eye of three dozen proliferating, suffering Christs, and with Roy Acuff howling like a spook possessed about the great speckled bird, and the Bible, so envied by the swan. No, I
didn’t
have her, as I say. I was a failure, because one single caress of her hand brought me down against her blubbering in delirium. And spent. But it doesn’t matter. The other things remain—the guitars, the gardenias, and the sweat and the hurry, and Aunt Lucille coming, and far off outside the sound of soldiers singing, and war, and the Lamb of God with great oval merciful eyes peering down at me over the billowing bedclothes. And Lord, her words! I’ll never forget her words! I’ll never forget her words as she sat up in bed and put my weak trembling hand to her young breast and said: ‘Why, you
pore silly.
Look down there! Look what you done! Why the divine spirit just flowed right on out of you.’”

He ceased talking for a bit and took off his glasses, as he sometimes did, in order to press his fingers thoughtfully against his closed eyelids. Then after a spell of silence he made a small noise which was partly a laugh, but even more a sigh, and then he said: “Well, as I say, all this was somehow tied up with that day in Paris. And I’ve never gotten it quite straight. I’ve never really gotten it quite fulfilled in my mind. I remember not too long ago you seemed to be trying to get at something important. You were talking about that strange moment sometimes just before you fall asleep, which is so inexplicable and indescribable and mysterious, when you’re in a state that is neither sleeping nor waking but something miraculously in between, where the antennae of the subconscious are all alive and aquiver yet drowsy, deliriously drowsy, and all sorts of random memories come flooding back with this really heart-stopping and heart-rending immediacy, as if it were not simple memory you were conjuring up but the beauty and sadness and joy of all things real that had ever happened to you. Well, there in Paris that afternoon I was telling you about, after that spell or seizure at the window, after I blacked out and recovered myself, I remember that the first thing I wanted to do was to go to sleep. Most of it was the booze, I guess, but something else had happened, too. I was baffled by what I had seen from the window, and confused, and a tiny bit scared, too, I reckon. I just didn’t know what the hell was going on. But the funny thing was that with all of this I felt wonderfully serene and composed, for the first time in as long as I could remember, and I had this boozy calm drowsiness in all my bones—the troubled and trembly and creepy feeling I’d had at first wore off in about half a minute—and so I turned away from the window and went over to the couch and lay down there. But I couldn’t sleep. Or rather, I could only doze partly off and half-listen to
The Magic Flute
and find myself in that miserable poetical borderland where a thousand memories began to crowd in on me and twist my heart without mercy. And I thought, without lust at all but only with this hopeless wild desire, about Vernelle Satterfield and all that lost and lovely pink-hued flesh. And that in turn made me think of home and the dusty roads and the marshes with the long-necked water birds flapping high above at dawn, and a bunch of Dr. Pepper signs hung out on a rickety little crossroads store, and how that store would look at noontime on a hot summer day when I was a boy, with the sun burning down around it on the blazing tobacco fields and buzzards roaming in the sky and a solitary nigger coming down the road with a kerosene can or with a pig under his arm, or with a croker sack dragging in the dust, and the nigger humming. And then I began to think about other things—random, you know, and without order, and drowsy, but each one piercing my heart like a bleeding skewer —about the jungles and the beach at Cape Gloucester and how misty and spooky they looked at dawn, and the smell of the sea when we went in, and the palm trees uprooted on the shore like dead giants. And then home again and the water birds and the nigger shacks at dusk. And then when I went to New York and the way Third Avenue looked on a summer night, beneath the El, and the sound of passing trains and barges on the river, and being young in the city, and alone and full of glory on a summer night. Then home again and Vernelle Satterfield, and the way it was when my aunt took me to the circus and the merry-go-round wheeling, and my aunt holding my hand and saying,
‘son,
don’t stand too close.’ Then … But it doesn’t matter. I just lay there for a while and twisted and turned, neither awake nor asleep, and dozed off, then caught myself, and all the while these memories swarmed in my mind like great birds, so real that they were not like memories at all but fragments of life touched again, and heard and seen and breathed. I don’t know how much time passed—maybe a half-hour, maybe less. Anyway, I finally got up. I couldn’t take it any more. The joy, serenity, the calm—they were all still on me, like a spell, you see, as if that feeling of wonder I’d had at the window were something I couldn’t shake out of my bones. As if whatever insight, whatever knowledge or revelation I’d been informed with there still persisted, still dogged and haunted and consumed me with its simple immaculate truth. So that again, as I got up from that couch with these memories still flapping around madly and fabulously in my brain, I was aware, just as I had been aware of the beauty in that shabby little Paris street below, of the—well, of the beauty, the beauty and the
decency
in my own life which was continuing and indestructible in time, the beauty which was the water birds at home and the merry-go-round and the nigger shuffling down this dusty road in summer and, God knows, Vernelle Satterfield, and which, since it existed not just in the past but now and for all time, could surely conquer over my own momentary sordidness and selfishness and meanness, if I only gave it half a chance… .” He got up and walked to the window.

“Anyway, as I say, the joy was on me, the joy and the calm. It was a real euphoria. And, God, how stupid I was not to realize that the whole thing was a fraud! That I was in real danger. That I was sick, really, sick from booze and abuse of the flesh and semistarvation. That all this—this vision and insight was the purest hokum, pleasant maybe, pleasant as hell, really, but phony nonetheless, chemically induced, and no more permanent or real than—well, than a dream. But I didn’t know that then; I didn’t know that the higher you kite upward like that the harder you hit the ground when you fall.

“Well, here’s what happened then. I got up off that couch, feeling like I could chew nails. Drunk as a hoot owl still, but bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to take on a whole crowd of giants. You remember I told you how I’d been unable to work for so long. Well, right then in the midst of all this phony euphoria I felt I could even give a lesson to Piero della Francesca. I had truth and beauty right squarely by the nuts, see, and I was raring to go. I staggered around the joint for a while with this big fat smug smile on my mouth, listening to
The Magic Flute
and getting together all my equipment: you know, sketch pad, virginal all these many months, and charcoal, and bottle—I had to have that bottle. I reckon I’d forgotten all about Poppy and the kids. I plunged outside, out into this Paris afternoon. I don’t know exactly when I started to fall, when this cloud I was riding on began to dissolve underneath me. As I recollect it, though, I don’t think it was too long after I left the house. But first I was still all electricity and bubbles and vitamins and piss-and-vinegar. I can remember walking down the little street which had seemed so beautiful, marveling at its lines and colors, really marveling, and ravished by its perfection. Then I remember walking—rolling, rather, thinking that I had the suave gait of a boulevardier but in reality about as graceful as some swab-jockey on liberty—staggering down the rue Delambre toward the Dome with this great big grin on my face and my heart like an open door to Paris in the spring. And what is Paris in the spring? You know what it is. All pollinated air and gold and leaf and shadow and cotton dresses and the coquetry of behinds and—what else? Ah—

“The come-down began gradually enough. I remember the first sign, though, the first warning. I was heading in the general direction of the Luxembourg Gardens; there was a certain corner there that I’d seen and I had this fuzzy idea that that would be a good place to sit down and sketch. On the way I stopped by at the Dome and got a couple of cigars, and on my way out of the place I ran into this whore I knew—on Sunday patrol, I guess, working overtime. There’s no point in going into that particular relationship. It wasn’t much of one. Her name was Yvonne or Loulou or something. About the only thing I can recall about her was that she was from Lille and that she wasn’t particularly good-looking but splendidly built. I’d spent a night with her once—a black, carnivorous, exhausting night after a drunk argument with Poppy which had left me feeling miserable and guilty as all hell. The night, I mean. You know, the old Anglo-Saxon hellfire which we just can’t ever get rid of. I felt goddam guilty over the lapse and even guiltier, I reckon, over the fact that that month I’d spent my disability check on booze, so that the ten bucks or so that I’d paid to this floozy was actually Poppy’s money. My God, what con tortions we go through! Anyway, as I say, I bumped into this broad coming out of the Dome. Somehow or other I’d managed to avoid her ever since that night of catastrophe. I’d put her out of my mind, so that when I blundered into her it was like a great big black cloud passing across my sunny day. She was a nice friendly girl, actually, not like most whores who in spite of the myth don’t have hearts of gold but are mean bitchy hornets, or just plain stupid, or bull dykes at heart. I remember that for a moment she tried to put the touch on me again, but then this strange stark solemn look came over her face as she stood there talking to me, and finally she just stopped talking and twisted her neck to one side and said in this throaty somber voice:
‘Cass, tu es malade!’
And she put her hand up to my brow and stroked it and said that it felt like the belly of a trout, all wet and cold. Then she told me I should go home and call the doctor, because I looked sick, very sick, and she was concerned for me. And she wasn’t kidding, either.