The Old Man and Me (21 page)

That I’m going to fill, I promised myself as we sat quietly together in the night-club, that distinguished old man and me. I was happy. I really love him, I thought. I really love this bad old man, though of course, I checked myself, remembering the money, I wish him dead as well. For there it was: C. D. stood in the way of my getting my money but—and here was the catch—my money stood eternally in the way of my getting C. D. For sooner or later he must find out who I was and then—And then what?

A girl began to sing. It was the same girl who’d been standing in front of us with her Negro boy-friend outside the Hitchcock film. Her voice was cool and pleasant and sexy. She was Jinkie Dallas I realized, that’s who. I’d heard her half a dozen times in various clubs around New York. We were seated on a banquette one table away from the band. At the table next to us there suddenly materialized her boy-friend, alone and elegant in Italian silk. Now that too clicked. He was what’s-his-name—the jazz musician. Blew a beautiful sax.

He looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. When the set was over he said as though merely continuing our conversation, “So how did you like it?”

“Wonderful. I think she’s wonderful.”

His grin broadened. “I meant that movie.”

“Scared me to death. I had to leave.”

“Yeah, it was a gas.”

“Well, it knocked
me
out.”

“How about all that blood draining slowly out of the tub?”

I shuddered. “I can’t bear to watch the water running out of my bath any more.”

“Hell, I won’t even go into the bathroom alone.”

“Thank God for somebody else,” I exclaimed gratefully. “I thought it was only me being neurotic.”

Flash of white teeth. Mask of Comedy. “When it comes to that, lady, you are looking at Exhibit A.”

“I’m Honey Flood,” I said. “Exhibit Z.”

“Jimbo Jarvis,” he said and we shook hands.

“You going to be playing over here?”

“Nope. I’m taking a year off. Like about a month ago all of a sudden I stopped going to my analyst. I mean he was all right but he was getting too personal, you know?”

“Too personal?”

“Well, yeah. Like, he thought I should only take my break when he took his. You know? Like he’s so involved in my life we can’t make a move without each other. See what I mean?”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” said C. D. suddenly. “I see exactly what you mean.”

“I mean that could be a bad hang-up—fixing my life to suit his. So I thought I’d cut out on my own and see how things looked. So I came over here.”

“Yes quite. I think you’re absolutely right.” C. D.’s manner
towards him was extraordinarily different from his usual starchy one. “And what have you seen of our country since you’ve been here, Mr. Jarvis?”

“Not much. Guess I don’t like to look at places I’ve already read about.” This last was delivered in a slow soul-searching tone without a trace of arrogance. “You going to be here for another five minutes?” he asked, suddenly materializing on his feet. “I’m going to hustle up Jinkie and maybe we can all have a drink together. O.K.?”

“Thank you very much,” said C. D. as he left. “We’d like
that.”

“Will you never stop surprising me?” I asked, rather annoyed. “Why are you being so nice to him? Why aren’t you prejudiced? After all he’s coloured and you’re supposed to be a snob.”

“Why? I can’t think on what grounds to discriminate against him. His aspect is beautiful, his manners are his own, and his bearing is that of a king. I’m a real snob. I only dislike people who are trying to be like me”—C. D. caught himself and gave the faintest hiss-hiss of his giggle—“trying to be like I was trying to be. I only dislike in others what I dislike in myself,” he finished austerely.

Jimbo returned with Jinkie, a neat black contrast to her larger-than-life technicolor, and we had a drink together—except for C. D., still stubbornly sticking to mineral water.

“They’re letting me off early tonight,” said Jinkie in her husky rusty voice, “so let’s split, huh, and make the...make the...”

“You want to come along make the scene with us?” asked Jimbo.

“Can it be done?” I asked. “We’ve had six tries and this is the first decent place we’ve hit.”

“It ain’t easy but it can be done.”

“Anyway, let’s...let’s...” said Jinkie.

“Finish your sentences, baby. Come on, now. Try. She won’t finish her sentences. You know what the man said. Like it’s an act of unconscious aggression.”

“Bullshit to that, baby,” said Jinkie.

“And so is that.”

“So what about you? You hate us aufays, don’t you. Yes he hates us spooks. He puts down anything white so hard it’s a joke. Awhile back they asked him on television what he thought of the Beat Generation and he said it was a lot of white shit. They went crazy in the control room.”

“Yeah, but at least I’m aware of it, baby. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not kidding myself.”

“O.K., lamb. You got me coming and going.”

“So let’s go.”

And out we went. They took us to a small jazz club with a very good quartet and I observed with pleasure that it was not only small and crowded but very hot which meant good pneumonia possibilities. I made a note of its name.

“I’m hungry,” said Jinkie finally. “Let’s go back to our pad and I’ll...I’ll...
cook
us something to eat,” she finished with a slow smile at Jimbo.

They lived off Notting Hill Gate. You went down a dark alley and up two narrow flights of stone stairs and along a dark passageway, pushed open a door and there it was—Fairyland: a large studio with a balcony running around inside it and leading off the balcony a bedroom whose windows overlooked a lush and secret garden. I left my coat in the bedroom and by the time I’d fixed my face and come down a rich aroma of cooking was wafting through the Studio. We sat down to a dish called Dead Horse, a savoury stew of minced meat and onions and kidney beans and several million kinds of delicious secret ingredients over which greedy Seedy made a lip-smacking pig of himself. Then the telephone began jingling and slowly the room filled with musicians in from their work. Marijuana was produced, rolled into cigarettes and silently passed around. The floral pattern of the oriental carpet made pekinese faces back at me. There were no chairs, only a few low divans and lots of cushions. “Throw me a pillow,” said the musicians to each other by way of greeting. The gramophone played steadily. Dizzy, Miles, Jimbo, Ornette, J. J., and K. Jinkie appeared proudly with the newest model Mixmaster, plugged it in, and began mixmastering carrots into carrot juice. The carrot shreds flew all over the floor.

“You want a vacuum cleaner attachment to go along with that machine to suck it all back in again.”

“I can’t understand. It never did...it never did...”

Somebody lying flat on his back was flipping an elastic band trying to hit the overhanging ceiling of the balcony.

“You makin’ it, man?”

“I’m working on it. He-ay, it just went
through
. Won’t Jinkie be surprised when she finds a rubber band in bed with her in the morning?”

“Where’d you last come from?”

Pause. “Venus.”

The gramophone kept playing, the marijuana smoke filled the room with a smell of autumn leaves and bonfires. I looked over to see how C. D. was taking all this. Yes, he was taking it. He was Dad and Daddyo for a while and once even Gramps but he was never less than charming, patting his silver lock, bubbling with interest, drawing them out in exactly the right tone: Kafka, Gide, Camus, Mexico, mescalin. It was extraordinary—this squarish, middle-aged upper-classy Englishman in the middle of a bunch of jazz hipsters; a sitting pigeon amongst the cats. They could have torn him to shreds with their ridicule but if there was any danger of this there was nothing in his manner that betrayed his awareness of it. They subsided into admiration and easy friendship; they dug his jokes.

“What do you do, Dad?”

“Do? I do nothing. I’m far too distinguished to do any-thing.”

“That’s cool man.”

“Cool? The English invented cool.”

I’d been having some difficulty talking. Everything I said sounded like a Thurber cartoon. “But music is your
life
,” I heard myself earnestly entreating Jimbo.

Jinkie by now had gotten the mixmaster to work properly and was mixmastering celery. Everyone turned out to be some kind of a health nut and they all began putting forward their pet health theories. “Brewer’s yeast—but it’s got to be straight from the brewers, gal, you send away for it. Kent.” “Honey and vinegar...” “Skimmed milk.” “Kelp.” “Throw some spinach in with that celery, Jinkie. It’s the greatest.”

“I used to drink too much,” one of them was telling me. “Got all hung up on the sauce. Stopped showing up for my recording dates and that can be a drag. So they’ve got this pill, see, it’s called Antabuse, you take one and it lasts four days. You try out even one beer during that time and you are
out
but bad. First sip and you turn bright red and it’s like your ears are exploding, then palpitations, vomiting and a blackout. They give you this card to carry around with you, see, it tells the hospital how to bring you round in case you’re crazy enough to try to booze in that time. I always have some on me”—he produced a pill box—“just in case I feel tempted. I’m smart, see. I don’t think I’m God.”

I reached for the pill box and took one out. “Can I keep it, please?” I asked. “I’ve been hitting the bottle pretty hard myself. I could use four days to get straightened out. Please. You’d be saving a life.”

“Well okay, but you gotta follow the rules. Take it first thing tomorrow morning and then absolutely no booze nowhere nohow for four days. You promise?”

“My solemn oath.”

“Remember what I said, gal. It’s for real.”

C. D. had wandered off to a corner and was lying on one of the low divans. I went over and sat by him.

“It’s beginning to take its toll,” he said dreamily. “I ate too much and this jazz music is far too exciting. My heart keeps pounding. Or is it you? What are you doing to an old man like me...Shall we go?”

I stretched out beside him in a marijuana haze. “No. I’m enjoying myself for the first time in ages. After all, I stuck through all those dreary parties you took me to.”

“I’m falling asleep,” he said petulantly. “I wish I could have some coffee.”

There. He’d
said it. “I’ll make you some,” I replied, my mouth dry with excitement.

As in a dream I went into the kitchen and heated up the coffee and dissolved the Antabuse tablet I’d been given into it. Then, as in a nightmare, I watched C. D. drink it. Now the thing was to give him some booze so the stuff would work. I took a couple of puffs on a stick of pot that was going the rounds for courage and poured out a glass of wine. I started over to C. D.’s divan but found I’d finished drinking the wine by the time I got there. I went back and filled the glass again but the same thing happened—I’d finished it before I reached C. D.—and then suddenly I was bolt awake in my bedroom in Dody’s flat and it was four a.m. in the morning. I got up and looked out of the window at the still, silent moon shining on the pavement some thirty, forty feet below.
And let go
, I thought. Let go. Let him go, let go of this dangerous and disgusting situation. Splash, splosh, splatter. Train wreck, as we used to call that stewed tomato and rice slop we had at school. I opened the window wide and climbed on to the window-sill and sat there dangling my feet over the ledge. I stared down into the darkness at the pavement. Head first...or should I jump? And if I jumped maybe I should put shoes on so it wouldn’t hurt so much when I landed on my feet. Well, it didn’t matter. I’d heard you usually died from fright in mid-air. I closed my eyes and leaned forward and in that split second my heart began roaring up into my ears and the whole feel of falling filled every corner of my body. It was so complete a sensation it was almost as good as the reality but I gripped the sill and clung with all my might and it passed. I climbed quietly back into the room and when I got in bed I was sweating hot and cold in turns. Supposing anyone had seen me—how to explain that I was only kidding?

I rang C. D. early the next morning. “Listen, don’t touch a drop but not a
drop
of alcohol for the next few days. Someone at the party told me it was death to drink on top of marijuana for at least four days.”

“I never heard that.”

“Well but apparently this was a special kind of marijuana. No, I mean it. The man there told me and it was his stuff. That’s probably why I passed out.”

“You certainly become drunk very suddenly these days. Actually all that talk about health has started me thinking. I’m going to take a nature cure for about ten days. There’s a health farm in Kent that I occasionally go to. I thought of leaving this afternoon. What with one thing and another I’ve been feeling a bit seedy of late.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” I forced myself to say.

“I shall miss you, my dear. Look after yourself.” He gave me the telephone number of the place and I promised to ring him if I felt lonely and he hung up leaving me with that desperate (I first wrote “disparate”), violent (and that “vilent”),
awful
mixture of relief and chagrin I was becoming so familiar with.

Get away from the scene then. Break up my morbid pattern of death thinking. Straighten out. Jimbo and Jinkie were going to Paris—Jimbo had changed his mind about not playing for a year—he was doing a guest spot for a week at one of the boîtes and they said why didn’t I come along. The plane fare wasn’t much; I figured that if I economized on things like washing my hair myself for a while and getting all my shoes repaired instead of buying the new ones I’d planned to, my budget could stand it. We could all stay at the house of some friends of theirs. But of course, getting my passport out and staring into the unsmiling eyes of the girl in the photograph called Betsy Lou Saegessor, I suddenly realized I wasn’t going to be able to travel with them! The secret was too loaded to share with anyone. So I said I had things to do and joined them a day later.

Straighten out. But it wasn’t any good. Every time I had a little too much to drink—which was every night as I listened to Jimbo blowing his beautiful sax, or went back to the house on the rue de la Seine where we balled it until morning (and where, incidentally, I was first turned on to deximyls, those peerless hangover cures), bad, killing thoughts of C. D. would rise again gripping me in their vice of iron. Because he deserved to die. Because he’d killed Pauly. Poor naïve, straight-forward little American—how that bloody Englishman had driven her to suicide just as if he himself had put her in that car and locked all the doors and closed all the windows in that rented garage of that rented house on Long Island to which she’d escaped that summer hoping to recover from the suffering he’d inflicted upon her with his fake superiority—and he himself had turned on the engine. Well just let him try—let him
once
try coming on superior with
me
. And it was odd too because only the weekend before Pauly had surprised me by ringing me up after all these years and inviting me out to stay with her—I couldn’t make it—but now, here was this damn Englishman, all his sins rewarded; in full criminal possession of
American
money, American money made by a hard-working decent self-respecting American to be squandered on all his evil English greeds—it was not to be borne! Knife him, poison him, sandbag him, the gentle pressure of two fingers at the base of his throat while he’s asleep...