The End of a Primitive (2 page)

Now, in the recollection of it, of all those great things he had been to her during her first year at the university—he’d been a great man on the campus in those days, one who was going great places; he hadn’t seen her, a little country girl—of all those “bright, shining years” of which he’d been a part, nothing was real any longer. It was this moment she feared the most. The unreality. The years of dust. The blubbering self-pity of men…Ronny crying in her room at the Commodore Hotel that winter when she’d divorced him and come to New York to marry Ted…“Don’t marry a nigger, Kriss…Don’t kill me, Kriss…I know I’ve been a bastard, but don’t break me…I’m from Mississippi….” Herself replying with sensual cruelty, “Go back to Mississippi then, you son of a bitch.

and sleep with all those black women you’re always boasting of having grown up on. You don’t know how to have a white woman….” His tears wetting her new nylons. “Please don’t, Kriss! I’ll get analyzed. I’ll give you a baby….” Her final stab, “Give yourself a baby, you louse; you’ve tried hard enough!”

“What an awful rotten life!” she thought. “I’m a good girl, really.” In some manner the strange thought brought a sharp vivid memory of Willard, the year he was such a star on the football team, and the two abortions at sixteen which had prevented her from ever bearing children.

“I must call mother tonight,” she told herself firmly, groping blindly for this one last hold to reality.

She glanced at the luminous dial of the clock. It was ten after eight. Abruptly she sat up, her bare feet groping for her golden mules. Absently she cupped her breasts in her hands, gently squeezing them, relieved by the slight pain. Her nude body, heavy with years, was Buddhistic in vague dejection. Her mind was flat, stale, stupid, but she didn’t have a hangover. Tim, her doctor, had advised her to drink only the best of whisky because it contained less fossil oil. She paid six dollars and forty-two cents a fifth for her Scotch, and averaged six bottles weekly. But no matter how much she drank, she never suffered from hangovers. On the physical side, she was disgustingly healthy.

It was just these awful depressions on awakening.

Now she stood up and went into the breakfast nook and switched on the lights of the sitting room. The entrance hall of her small, three-room apartment angled like a short-handled crank, encasing two deep storage closets in the angle at front, and widening beyond the kitchen door into the breakfast nook containing a blond oak table shaped like a heart, on which reposed two watery highball glasses on silver coasters and a flat silver ashtray with several squashed butts. Here the hall angled once more, ending at the full length mirror on the closet door, across which faced the doors of the bedroom and the bath. The far corner of the breakfast nook was cut diagonally by an archway opening onto the sunken sitting room, one step lower than the rest of the compact, well-designed flat.

It was a modern room with a stunning decor, the facing walls done in soft pastel shades of gray and pink, the floor in rose coloured carpet, and the far wall with its two windows looking down on a concrete well completely covered by floor-length drapes of a deep maroon colour.

Along the gray wall ran a waist-high, handsome, highly polished blond oak storage cabinet, above which hung a large, rectangular charcoal drawing of three antelopes in flight. Centred against the maroon drapes was a blond television set on a three-legged stand, atop which stood a slender female nude carved from caramel coloured wood. The pink wall held a small blond oak writing desk with a tubular chair padded in foam rubber and covered by removable terry cloth slips of dove gray. On that wall were three paintings, a large oil of a small Indian girl sitting disconsolately on a curb, vaguely reminiscent of the famous painting of the papoose by Diego Rivera; a smaller water colour in abstract design, which might have been a portrait of the inflamed lungs of an alligator that died of pneumonia in the upper reaches of the Nile one cold and stormy winter; and a dark somewhat menacing drawing in pastel of a Polynesian woman with large bare breasts and large round eyes. The sofa set against the bedroom wall as if in ill repute, its upholstery a somewhat faded grayish-green, like an elderly but undefeated matron among a bevy of cover girls, gone but not forgetting. Beside it stood a set of glass-top coffee stands that fitted one atop another, on which sat another watery highball glass in a silver coaster and a large, lovely foam-glass ashtray filled with lipsticked cigarette butts. Just inside the archway, at the corner of the storage cabinet, was Kriss’s favourite chair, a wrought-iron, three-legged straight-backed thing with a large opening between the seat and the high small back ostensibly to trap the behinds of well-cushioned females, as was once suggested in a
New Yorker
magazine cartoon.

Sometimes this room gave Kriss pleasure, and she loved to show it off. The paintings had been done by artists who’d received fellowships from the Chicago Foundation, and were adjudged good and valuable by those who knew such things. But now, as she crossed to switch on the television set, it had a morning-after look which fed her general depression.

She had a strong body, revealed sympathetically by the table lamp. It was fantastically well-preserved for her age and the abuses to which she had subjected it. Her full breasts had fallen but slightly and were still firm, and she had handsome shoulders, peppered with tiny red pimples, but voluptuous as a Botticelli painting. Her legs were long and gorgeously shaped with beautiful knees, but her stomach was bloated and those old demon rubber tires had begun forming above her hips. Her skin was very fair, the faint hairs on her arms and at the base of her spine golden in the slanting light, the longer hair on her mound and that on her head, cut short in the modern businesswoman’s fashion, was of a light translucent brown, verging on gold. Her face had the high cheekbones and flat planes of Mongolian ancestry, contradicted by a short, straight, tiny nose, and huge, light blue, slightly glassy, almost bulging eyes, slanting upward at the outer edges. A famous writer and critic of New York City, an old man famous for flowery phrases, once described her as handsome as four peacocks. But he had seen her only when she was dressed. Now as she bent over the set in the somewhat awkward and unflattering position of a can-can dancer
sans costume
stooping to peer through the monocle of an inebriated Englishman, the thirty-seven year accumulation of
derrière
belonging to the one hundred and thirty-six pound body commanding fullest attention, she looked extremely naked and shockingly obscene.

Just at that moment the light appeared on the twenty-inch screen and the close-up of a man’s face, blooming with the bright wide smile of a bleached skull, and wreathed in that dreadful early morning cheerfulness of this telatomic age which inspires old-fashioned diehards suffering from old-fashioned hangovers to rush into their kitchens and cut their throats. The happy, smiling eyes, crinkled about the comers with inner joy and healthy living, stared knowingly at her anatomy, causing her to feel suddenly indecent and very unhealthy.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, involuntarily shielding herself with her hands.

She had turned the volume too high and a booming jovial voice issued from the smiling lips of the happy face: “
Are you overweight? Are you overwrought? Do you suffer from morning depression? Do you have a stale brown taste of biliousness on arising?
”

This boisterous catechism bursting upon her mood of morbid introspection rattled her. She did what she always did when rattled; she giggled.

“THEN THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED!” the loud voice informed her.

“What?” she asked the happy face, her quick, spontaneous wit coming to her rescue.

The face instantly disappeared and in its place appeared a giant’s hand holding a giant bottle with the label forward. “THIS!”

“Oh, shit!” she said disgustedly.

The face disappeared. “
Yes! This enervating laxative, charged with vitamins, also contains chlorophyll. Not only does it urge nature about its business, but it also provides a pickup after a sleepless night. It sends you cheerfully to work with a clean body, an alert mind, and a sweet breath!
”

Kriss turned the volume down, her giggle turning to a chuckle. There was a corny humour in the situation—she’d have to tell Dorothy about it—but she was still a little disconcerted. It was the first time she’d ever tuned in during the commercial and caught Gloucester’s close-up almost nesting in her thighs. She knew it was foolish but she felt embarrassed, which inspired the impulse to do something naughty, some kind of striptease dance or shake her behind. However, she mustered her respectability and began to walk away from the set with becoming dignity. But she felt Gloucester’s appraising eyes on her bare rear, and looked over her shoulder, wondering the while how many broad beams and rare nudes paraded each morning before his amused, straightforward television gaze. The laughing face of a pet chimpanzee now appeared on the screen, the little beastie jumping up and down in such glee that impulsively she hastened from its view and stumbled over the three-cornered chair, falling against the glass-topped coffee tables, and upsetting the glass ashtray over her prized pink carpet.

She had to laugh. Mattie, her black cleaning woman who came in three days each week, would swear that she’d been drunk. Now she felt a little drunk. Briskly she set herself to her morning routine.

She got her copy of the
New York Herald-Tribune
from the mat outside her door, first peeping through the Judas window to make certain the coast was clear; put on water to boil for coffee; lingered for a moment to watch the antics on the television screen; then devoted the customary five minutes to bodily functions, glancing at the lead stories the while. Vaguely the television voice penetrated her consciousness, “casting” the morning news, which, in modern usage is the province of the “newscaster”. The headlines from both sources were the same: TRUMAN SEIZES STEEL INDUSTRY; the same names cropped up: John L. Lewis, Dean Acheson, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mayor William O’Dwyer, Queen Juliana and Prince Bernard; NATO was praised with faint damning; the State Department was damned with faint praise; the Soviet Union was damned outright; nothing was praised outright; McCarthy had found two thousand communists hiding among the President’s bright print sport shirts; all five-star generals had decided to run for President, but MacArthur, who had become a six-star general since his recall from Korea, had the jump on the others, due no doubt to the extra star which the Truman Democrats hinted he had pinned on his tunic himself without the proper authority; everyone had agreed “It was time for a change”, but no one was clear as to what was to be changed from what to what other than Republicans who were insistent that Democrats be changed to Republicans; Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas urged a “peasants’ revolution” to end economic slavery in backward areas; a Harvard professor suggested that it was a “peasants’ revolution” that had started all the trouble in the first place, but he had been quickly convicted as a communist spy by McCarthy and when last seen was rapidly disappearing beneath the ledge of a twelfth storey window from which he had recently jumped; the U.N. forces in Korea had killed seven thousand Chinese communists the day before, but the war still dragged on, due no doubt to the fact, as a Columbia University professor pointed out, that seventeen thousand Chinese communists had been born during the night.

After digesting this news, Kriss showered, brushed her teeth, put on a fresh girdle, taking the stocking fasteners from the soiled one in the garment bag inside her closet door where she put her soiled underwear and stockings for the maid to wash, the soiled linen in the hamper in the bath going out to the laundry. Now she felt sufficiently presentable to brave the television eyes. From the middle drawer of her storage cabinet she selected a pair of nylons from a loose pile, first inspecting them for runs. Then she went to the kitchen, poured the boiling water into the drip coffee pot, inserted two slices of expensive white bread into the automatic toaster, and returned to her dressing, pausing for a moment before the closet mirror. In the nylons her legs were slim and svelte, nowadays the only pleasure derived from her reflection. Her hips were held reasonably flat and hard by the girdle but, to her infinite disgust, that old demon bicycle tire went leering around her middle. She’d have to begin dieting, she resolved for the thousandth time. Although it really wasn’t her food, she amended; it was too much drinking. Well, she could stop that too. It was time she stopped, before she became one of those big baywindowed mannish women whom she so despised. But she shouldn’t complain too much about her weight: now, when she became slim, her breasts drooped. She’d never had to wear a brassiere; it was one of her great prides. Her slips sufficed to hold her full firm breasts somewhat steady, which was all that was necessary.

She selected a red dress from the two racks of dresses in the closet, one third of which were red. She liked herself in red; it went with her fair skin, blue eyes and tawny hair. Besides which, it made her feel daring. She couldn’t get along in the world without feeling daring.

From alongside a bottle of red and yellow capsules of barbiturates in her medicine cabinet, she took down a bottle of bluish-gray tablets, a patented drug relatively new on the market. They were made from a combination of dexedrine and amylobarbitone, and the directions on the label stated: “Indicated in states of mental and emotional distress”. The first time she had read that statement she had told herself, “That’s me. That’s me all the time.” Now, after swallowing one with a little water, she shook a couple of dozen into a lacquered snuffbox to take to the office; her store there had run out.

Then, bringing her toast and coffee, she sat on a stool at the end of the table so she could see the television, ate one half of a piece of toast and drank two cups of coffee sweetened with saccharine tablets. On the television screen, Gloucester was interviewing the chimpanzee.

“Who do you think will get the Republican nomination for President?” he asked.