Sexus (45 page)

She slammed a dish down in front of me. Then she turned on her heel and went to the kitchen. I was left there with all the food heaped up in front of me.

“Come, come, don't take it like that!” I said, shoveling a forkful into my mouth. “You know I didn't mean anything personal.” (The word personal struck me as being highly incongruous, but I knew she'd like it.)

“Personal or not, I'm not joining you,” she retorted. “You can eat your fill and get out. I'll make you some coffee. I don't want to ever see you again. You're disgusting.”

I put the knife and fork down and went into the kitchen. The things were cold anyway, so it wouldn't matter if I did spend a few minutes soothing her feelings.

“I'm sorry, Julie,” I said, trying to put my arm around her. She brushed me away angrily. “You see,” and I began to put some feeling into my words, “Maude and I don't get along very well. We had a bad quarrel this morning. I must be out of sorts . . .”

“Is that any reason to take it out on
me?”

“No, it isn't. I don't know, I was desperate this morning. That's why I came to see
you.
And then, when I started in to work on you . . . to sell you the books . . . I felt ashamed of myself. I wouldn't have let you take the books even if you had pretended you wanted them . . .”

“I know what's the matter with you,” she said. “You were disappointed in my looks.
I've changed,
that's what's the matter. And you're a bad loser. You want to take it out on me—but it's your own fault. You've got a good-looking wife . . . why don't you stick to her? Everybody has quarrels—you're not the only two in the world. Do I run off to somebody else's husband when things go wrong? Where the hell would that get us? Mike's no angel to live with . . . nobody is, I guess. You act like a spoiled child. What do you think life is,
a wet dream?”

This speech couldn't be laughed off. I had to beg her to sit down and eat with me, give me a chance to explain myself. Reluctantly she consented.

It was a long-drawn-out story I unfolded, as I polished off one plate after another. She seemed so impressed by my sincerity that I began to toy with the idea of reintroducing the world's best literature. I had to skate very delicately because this time it would have to look as if I were doing
her
a favor. I was trying to jockey myself into the position of letting her help me. At the same time I was wondering if it were worth it, if perhaps it wouldn't be more pleasant to go to the matinee.

She was just getting back to normal, getting friendly and trusting. The coffee was excellent, and I had just finished the second cup when I felt a bowel movement coming on. I excused myself and went to the bathroom. There I enjoyed the luxury of a thorough evacuation. I pulled the chain and sat there a few moments, a bit dreamy and a bit lecherous too, when suddenly I realized that I was getting a sitz bath. I pulled the chain again. The water started to overflow between my legs on to the floor. I jumped up, dried my ass with a towel, buttoned my trousers and looked frantically up at the toilet box. I tried everything I could think of but the
water kept rising and flowing over—and with it came one or two healthy turds and a mess of toilet paper.

In a panic I called Julie. Through a crack in the door I begged her to tell me what to do.

“Let me in, I'll fix it,” said she.

“Tell
me,
”I begged. “I'll do it. You can't come in yet.”

“I can't explain,” said Julie. “You'll have to let me in.”

There was no help for it, I had to open the door. I was never more embarrassed in my life. The floor was one ungodly mess. Julie, however, went to work with dispatch, as though it were an everyday affair. In a jiffy the water had stopped running; it only remained to clean up the mess.

“Listen, you get out now,” I begged. “Let me handle this. Have you got a dustpan—and a mop?”

“You
get out!” said she. “I'll take care of it.” And with that she pushed me out and closed the door.

I waited on pins and needles for her to come out. Then a real funk took hold of me. There was only one thing to do—escape as fast as possible.

I fidgeted a few moments, listening first on one foot, then the other, not daring to make a peep. I knew I'd never be able to face her. I looked around, measured the distance to the door, listened intently for just a second, then grabbed my things and tiptoed out.

It was an elevator apartment, but I didn't wait for the elevator. I skipped down the stairs, three steps at a time, as though the devil himself were pursuing me.

The first thing I did was to go to a restaurant and wash my hands thoroughly. There was a machine which—by inserting a coin—squirted perfume over you. I helped myself to a few squirts and sallied out into the bright sunshine. I walked aimlessly for a while, contrasting the beautiful weather with my uncomfortable state of mind.

Soon I found myself walking near the river. A few yards ahead was a little park, or at least a strip of grass and some benches. I took a seat and began to ruminate. In less than no time my thoughts had reverted to Coleridge. It was a relief to let the mind dwell on problems purely aesthetic.

Absent-mindedly I opened the prospectus and began rereading
the fragment which had so absorbed me—prior to the horrible fiasco at Julie's. I skipped from one item to another. At the back of the prospectus there were maps and charts and reproductions of ancient writings found on tablets and monuments in various parts of the world. I came upon “the mysterious writing” of the Uigurs who had once overrun Europe from the overflowing well of Central Asia. I read of cities which had been lifted heavenward twelve and thirteen thousand feet when the mountain ranges began to form; I read about Solon's discourse with Plato and about the seventy-thousand-year-old glyphs found in Tibet which hinted all too clearly of the existence of now unknown continents. I came upon the sources of Pythagoras' conceptions and read with sadness of the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Certain Mayan tablets reminded me vividly of the canvases of Paul Klee. The writings of the ancients, their symbols, their patterns, their compositions, were strikingly like the things children invent in kindergartens. The insane, on the other hand, produced the most intellectual sort of compositions. I read about Laotse and Albertus Magnus and Cagliostro and Cornelius Agrippa and Iamblichus, each one a universe, each one a link in an invisible chain of now exploded worlds. I came to a chart arranged like parallel strips of banjo frets, telling off laterally the centuries “since the dawn of civilization” and vertically listing the literary figures of the epochs, their names and their works. The Dark Ages stood out like blind windows in the side of a skyscraper; here and there in the great blank wall there was a beam of light shed by the spirit of some intellectual giant who had managed to make his voice heard above the croaking of the submerged and dispirited denizens of the marshes. When it was dark in Europe it had been bright elsewhere: the spirit of man was like a veritable switchboard, revealing itself in signals and flashes, often across oceans of darkness. One thing stood out clearly—on that switchboard certain great spirits were still plugged in, still standing by for a call. When the epoch which had called them forth was drowned out they emerged from the darkness like the towering snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. And there was reason to believe, it
seemed to me, that not until another unspeakable catastrophe occurred would the light they shed be extinguished. As I shut off the current of reverie into which I had fallen a Sphinx-like image registered itself on the fallen curtain: it was the hoary visage of one of Europe's magi: Leonardo da Vinci. The mask which he wore to conceal his identity is one of the most baffling disguises ever assumed by an emissary from the depths. It made me shudder to think what those eyes which stare unflinchingly into the future had perceived. . . .

I looked across the river to the Jersey shore. It looked desolate to me, more desolate even than the boulder bed of a dried-up river. Nothing of any importance to the human race had ever happened here. Nothing would happen for thousands of years perhaps. The Pygmies were vastly more interesting, vastly more illuminating to study, than the inhabitants of New Jersey. I looked up and down the Hudson River, a river I have always detested, even from the time when I first read of Henry Hudson and his bloody
Half Moon.
I hated both sides of the river equally. I hated the legends woven about its name. The whole valley was like the empty dream of a beer-logged Dutchman. I never did give a fuck about Powhatan or Manhattan. I loathed Father Knickerbocker. I wished that there were ten thousand black-powder plants scattered on both sides of the river and that they might all blow up simultaneously. . . .

A sudden decision to clear out of Cockroach Hall. Why? Because I had met Rebecca. . . .

Rebecca was the second wife of my old friend Arthur Raymond. The two were now living in an enormous apartment on Riverside Drive; they wanted to let out rooms. It
was Kronski who told me about it; he said he was going to take one of the rooms.

“Why don't you come up and meet his wife—you'll like her. She could be Mona's sister.”

“What's her name?” I asked.

“Rebecca. Rebecca Valentine.”

The name Rebecca excited me. I had always wanted to meet a woman called Rebecca—and not Becky.

(Rebecca, Ruth, Roxane, Rosalind, Frederika, Ursula, Sheila, Norma, Guinevere, Leonora, Sabina, Malvina, Solange, Deirdre. What wonderful names women had! Like flowers, stars, constellations. . .)

Mona wasn't so keen about the move, but when we got to Arthur Raymond's place and she heard him practicing, she changed her tune.

It was Renée, the younger sister of Arthur Raymond, who opened the door. She was about nineteen, a spitfire with heavy curly locks full of vitality. Her voice was like a nightingale's—no matter what she said you felt like agreeing.

Finally Rebecca presented herself. She was right out of the Old Testament—dark and sunny clean through. Mona warmed to her immediately, as she would to a lost sister. They were both beautiful. Rebecca was more mature, more solid, more integrated. One felt instinctively that she always preferred the truth. I liked her firm handclasp, the direct flashing look with which she greeted one. She seemed to have none of the usual female pettinesses.

Soon Arthur joined us. He was short, muscular, with a hard, steely twang to his voice and frequently convulsed by explosive spasms of laughter. He laughed just as heartily over his own quips as over the other fellow's. He was inordinately healthy, vital, jolly, exuberant. He had always been that way and in the old days, when Maude and I first moved into his neighborhood, I was very fond of him. I used to burst in on him all hours of the day and night and give him three- and four-hour resumes of the books I had just read. I remember spending whole afternoons talking of Smerdyakov and Pavel Pavlovitch, or General Ivolgin, or those angelic sprites which surrounded the Idiot, or of the Filippovna woman. He was
married then to Irma, who later became one of my associates in the Cosmodemonic Telefloccus Company. In those early days, when I first knew Arthur Raymond, tremendous things occurred—in the mind, I should add. Our conversations were like passages out of
The Magic Mountain,
only more virulent, more exalted, more sustained, more provocative, more inflammable, more dangerous, more menacing—
and
much more, ever so much more, exhausting.

I was making a rapid throwback as I stood watching him talk. His sister Renée was trying to keep up a waning conversation with Kronski's wife. (The latter always went dead on you, no matter how absorbing the theme might be.) I wondered how we would get along, the lot of us, under one roof. Of the two vacant rooms Kronski had already pre-empted the larger one. The six of us were now huddled together in the other room, which was nothing more than a cubbyhole.

“Oh, it'll do,” Arthur Raymond was saying. “God, you don't need much room—there's the whole house. I want you to come. We're going to have a great time here. God!” He exploded with laughter again.

I knew he was desperate. Too proud, however, to admit that he needed money. Rebecca looked at me expectantly. I read very clearly what was written in her face. Mona spoke up suddenly: “Of course we'll take it.” Kronski rubbed his hands gleefully. “Sure you will! We're going to make a grand stew of it, you'll see.” And then he fell to haggling with them about the price. But Arthur Raymond wouldn't talk about money. “Make your own terms,” he said, wandering off to the big room where the piano stood. I heard him pounding the piano. I tried to listen but Rebecca stood in front of me and kept plying we with questions.

A few days later we were installed. The first thing we noticed about our new domicile was that everybody was trying to use the bathroom at once. You got to know who the last occupant was by the smell he left behind. The sink was always clogged up with long hairs and Arthur Raymond, who never owned a toothbrush, would use the first one that came to hand. There were too many females about, for another thing. The older sister, Jessica, who was an actress, came frequently
and often stayed the night. There was Rebecca's mother, too, who was always in and out of the place, always wreathed in sorrow, always dragging herself along like a corpse. And then there were Kronski's friends and Rebecca's friends and Arthur's friends and Renée's friends, to say nothing of the pupils who came at all hours of the day and night. At first it was charming to hear the piano going: snatches of Bach, Ravel, Debussy, Mozart and so on. Then it became exasperating, especially when Arthur Raymond himself was practicing. He went over and over a phrase with the tenacity and persistence of a madman. First with one hand, firmly and slowly; then with the other hand, firmly and slowly. Then two hands, very firmly, very slowly; then more and more rapidly, until he reached the normal tempo. Then twenty times, fifty times, a hundred times. He would advance a little—a few more measures. Ditto. Then back again, like a crab, from the very beginning. Then suddenly he'd scrap it, begin something new, something he liked. He'd play it with all his heart, as if he were giving a concert. But maybe a third of the way through he'd stumble. Silence. He'd go back a few measures, break it down, build it up, slow, fast, one hand, two hands, all together, hands, feet, elbows, knuckles, moving forward like a tank corps, sweeping everything before him, mowing down trees, fences, barns, hedges, walls. It was agonizing to follow him. He was not playing for enjoyment—he was playing to perfect his technique. He was wearing his fingertips off, rubbing his ass smooth. Always advancing, progressing, attacking, conquering, annihilating, mopping up, realigning his forces, throwing out sentries and sentinels, covering his rear, digging himself in, charging in prisoners, segregating the wounded, reconnoitering, ambushing his men, sending up flares, rockets, exploding ammunition plants, railway centers, inventing new torpedoes, dynamos, flame throwers, coding and decoding the messages that came in . . .