The Subterraneans (11 page)

Beginning as usual in the Mask.

Nights that begin so glitter clear with hope, let’s go see our friends, things, phones ring, people come and go, coats, hats, statements, bright reports, metropolitan excitements, a round of beers, another round of beers, the talk gets more beautiful, more excited, flushed, another round, the midnight hour, later, the flushed happy faces are now wild and soon there’s the swaying buddy da day oobab bab smash smoke drunken latenight goof leading finally to the bartender, like a seer in Eliot, TIME TO CLOSE UP—in this manner more or less arriving at the Mask where a kid called Harold Sand came in, a chance acquaintance of Mardou’s from a year ago, a young novelist looking like Leslie Howard who’d just had a manuscript accepted and so acquired a strange grace in my eyes I wanted to devour—interested in him for same reasons as Lavalina, literary avidity, envy—as usual paying less attention therefore to Mardou (at table) than Yuri whose continual presence with us now did not raise my suspicions, whose complaints “I don’t have a place to
stay—do you realize Percepied what it is not to even have a place to write? I have not girls, nothing, Carmody and Moorad won’t let me stay up there any more, they’re a couple of old sisters,” not sinking in, and already the only comment I’d made to Mardou about Yuri had been, after his leaving, “He’s just like that Mexican stud comes up here and grabs up your last cigarettes,” both of us laughing because whenever she was at her lowest financial ebb, bang, somebody who needed a “mooch” was there—not that I would call Yuri a mooch in the least (I’ll tread lightly on him on this point, for obvious reasons).—(Yuri and I’d had a long talk that week in a bar, over port wines, he claimed everything was poetry, I tried to make the common old distinction between verse and prose, he said, “Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?—then say what you want, it’s poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.”—“Yes” I said “but verse is verse and prose is prose.”—“No no” he yelled “it’s all poetry.”—“Okay,” I said, “I believe in you believing in freedom and maybe you’re right, have another wine.” And he read me his “best line” which was something to do with “seldom nocturne” that I said sounded like small magazine poetry and wasn’t his best—as already I’d seen some much better poetry by him concerning his tough boyhood, about cats, mothers in gutters, Jesus striding in the ashcan, appearing incarnate shining on the blowers of slum tenements or that is making great steps across the light—the sum of it something he could do, and did, well—“No, seldom nocturne isn’t your meat” but he claimed it was great, “I would say rather it was great if you’d written it suddenly on the spur of the moment.”—“But I did—right out of my mind it flowed and I threw it down, it sounds like it’s been planned but it wasn’t, it was bang! just like you say, spontaneous vision!”—Which I now doubt tho his saying “seldom nocturne” came to him spontaneously made me suddenly respect it more, some falsehood hiding beneath our wine yells in a saloon on Kearney.)
Yuri hanging out with Mardou and me every night almost—like a shadow—and knowing Sand himself from before, so he, Sand, walking into the Mask, flushed successful young author but “ironic” looking and with a big parkingticket sticking out of his coat lapel, was set upon by the three of us with avidity, made to sit at our table—made to talk.—Around the corner from Mask to 13 Pater thence the lot of us going, and en route (reminiscent now more strongly and now with hints of pain of the pushcart night and Mardou’s OH YOU) Yuri and Mardou start racing, pushing, shoving, wrestling on the sidewalk and finally she lofts a big empty cardboard box and throws it at him and he throws it back, they’re like kids again—I walk on ahead in serious tone conversation with Sand tho—he too has eyes for Mardou—somehow I’m not able (at least haven’t tried) to communicate to him that she is my love and I would prefer if he didn’t have eyes for her so obviously, just as Jimmy Lowell, a colored seaman who’d suddenly phoned in the midst of an Adam party, and came, with a Scandinavian shipmate, looking at Mardou and me wondering, asking me “Do you make it with her sex?” and I saying yes and the night after the Red Drum session where Art Blakey was whaling like mad and Thelonious Monk sweating leading the generation with his elbow chords, eying the band madly to lead them on,
the monk and saint of bop
I kept telling Yuri, smooth sharp hep Jimmy Lowell leans to me and says “I would like to make it with your chick,” (like in the old days Leroy and I always swapping so I’m not shocked), “would it be okay if I asked her?” and I saying “She’s not that kind of girl, I’m sure she believes in one at a time, if you ask her that’s what she’ll tell you man” (at that time still feeling no pain or jealousy, this incidentally the night before the Jealousy Dream)—not able to communicate to Lowell that’s—that I wanted her—to stay—to be stammer stammer be mine—not being able to come right out and say, “Lissen this is my girl, what are you talking about, if you want to try to make her you’ll
have to tangle with me, you understand that pops as well as I do.”—In that way with a stud, in another way with polite dignified Sand a very interesting young fellow, like, “Sand, Mardou is my girl and I would prefer, etc.”—but he has eyes for her and the reason he stays with us and goes around the corner to 13 Pater, but it’s Yuri starts wrestling with her and goofing in the streets—so when we leave 13 Pater later on (a dike bar slummish now and nothing to it, where a year ago there were angels in red shirts straight out of Genet and Djuna Barnes) I get in the front seat of Sand’s old car, he’s going at least to drive us home, I sit next to him at the clutch in front for purposes of talking better and in drunkenness again avoiding Mardou’s womanness, leaving room for her to sit beside me at front window—instead of which, no sooner plops her ass behind me, jumps over seat and dives into backseat with Yuri who is alone back there, to wrestle again and goof with him and now with such intensity I’m afraid to look back and see with my own eyes what’s happening and how the dream (the dream I announced to everyone and made big issues of and told even Yuri about) is coming true.

We pull up at Mardou’s door at Heavenly Lane and drunkly now she says (Sand and I having decided drunkenly to drive down to Los Altos the lot of us and crash in on old Austin Bromberg and have big further parties) “If you’re going down to Bromberg’s in Los Altos you two go out, Yuri and I’ll stay here”—my heart sank deep—it sank so I gloated to hear it for the first time and the confirmation of it crowned me and blessed me.

And I thought, “Well boy here’s your chance to get rid of her” (which I’d plotted for three weeks now) but the sound of this in my own ears sounded awfully false, I didn’t believe it, myself, any more.

But on the sidewalk going in flushed Yuri takes my arm as Mardou and Sand go on ahead up the fish head stairs, “Lissen,
Leo I don’t want to make Mardou at all, she’s all over me, I want you to know that I don’t want to make her, all I want to do if you’re going out there is go to sleep in your bed because I have an appointment tomorrow.”—But now I myself feel reluctant to stay in Heavenly Lane for the night because Yuri will be there, in fact now is already on the bed tacitly as if, one would have to say, “Get off the bed so we can get in, go to that uncomfortable chair for the night.”—So this more than anything else (in my tiredness and growing wisdom and patience) makes me agree with Sand (also reluctant) that we might as well drive down to Los Altos and wake up good old Bromberg, and I turn to Mardou with eyes saying or suggesting, “You can stay with Yuri you bitch” but she’s already got her little traveling basket or weekend bag and is putting my toothbrush hairbrush and her things in and the idea is we three drive out—which we do, leaving Yuri in the bed.—En route, at near Bayshore in the great highway roadlamp night, which is now nothing but a bleakness for me and the prospect of the “weekend” at Bromberg’s a horror of shame, I can’t stand it any more and look at Mardou as soon as Sand gets out to buy hamburgs in the diner, “You jumped in the backseat with Yuri why’d you do that? and why’d you say you wanted to stay with him?”—“It was silly of me, I was just high baby.” But I don’t darkly any more now want to believe her—art is short, life is long—now I’ve got in full dragon bloom the monster of jealousy as green as in any cliché cartoon rising in my being, “You and Yuri play together all the time, it’s just like the dream I told you about, that’s what’s horrible—O I’ll never believe in dreams come true again.”—“But baby it isn’t anything like that” but I don’t believe her—I can tell by looking at her she’s got eyes for the youth—you can’t fool an old hand who at the age of sixteen before even the juice was wiped off his heart by the Great Imperial World Wiper with Sadcloth fell in love with an impossible flirt and cheater, this is a boast—I feel so sick I can’t stand it, curl up in the back seat,
alone—they drive on, and Sand having anticipated a gay talkative weekend now finds himself with a couple of grim lover worriers, hears in fact the fragment “But I didn’t mean you to think that baby” so obviously harkening to his mind the Yuri incident—finds himself with this pair of bores and has to drive all the way down to Los Altos, and so with the same grit that made him write the half million words of his novel bends to it and pushes the car through the Peninsula night and on into the dawn.

Arriving at Bromberg’s house in Los Altos at gray dawn, parking, and ringing the doorbell the three of us sheepishly I most sheepish of all—and Bromberg comes right down, at once, with great roars of approval cries “Leo I didn’t know you knew each other” (meaning Sand, whom Bromberg admired very much) and in we go to rum and coffee in the crazy famous Bromberg kitchen.—You might say, Bromberg the most amazing guy in the world with small dark curly hair like the hip girl Roxanne making little garter snakes over his brow and his great really angelic eyes shining, rolling, a big burbling baby, a great genius of talk really, wrote research and essays and has (and is famous for) the greatest possible private library in the world, right there in that house, library due to his erudition and this no reflection also on his big income—the house inherited from father—was also the sudden new bosom friend of Carmody and about to go to Peru with him, they’d go dig Indian boys and talk about it and discuss art and visit literaries and things of that nature, all matters so much had been dinning in Mardou’s ear (queer, cultured matters) in her love affair with me that by now she was quite tired of cultured tones and fancy explicity, emphatic daintiness of expression, of which roll-eyed ecstatic almost spastic big Bromberg almost the pastmaster, “O my dear it’s such a charming thing and I think much MUCH better than the Gascoyne translation tho I do believe—” and Sand imitating him to a T, from some recent great meeting and mutual admiration—so
the two of them there in the once-to-me adventurous gray dawn of the Metropolitan Great-Rome Frisco talking of literary and musical and artistic matters, the kitchen littered, Bromberg rushing up (in pajamas) to fetch three-inch thick French editions of Genet or old editions of Chaucer or whatever he and Sand’d come to, Mardou darklashed and still thinking of Yuri (as I’m thinking to myself) sitting at the corner of the kitchen table, with her getting-cold rum and coffee—O I on a stool, hurt, broken, injured, about to get worse, drinking cup after cup and loading up on the great heavy brew—the birds beginning to sing finally at about eight and Bromberg’s great voice, one of the mightiest you can hear, making the walls of the kitchen throw back great shudders of deep ecstatic sound—turning on the phonograph, an expensive well-furnished completely appointed house, with French wine, refrigerators, three-speed machines with speakers, cellar, etc.—I want to look at Mardou I don’t know with what expression—I am afraid in fact to look only to find there the supplication in her eyes saying “Don’t worry baby, I told you, I confessed to you I was silly, I’m sorry sorry sorry—” that “I’m-sorry” look hurting me the most as I glance side eyes to see it. …

It won’t do when the very bluebirds are bleak, which I mention to Bromberg, he asking, “Whatsamatter with you this morning Leo?” (with burbling peek under eyebrows to see me better and make me laugh).—“Nothing, Austin, just that when I look out the window this morning the birds are bleak.”—(And earlier when Mardou went upstairs to toilet I did mention, bearded, gaunt, foolish drunkard, to these erudite gentlemen, something about ‘inconstancy,’ which must have surprised them tho)—O inconstancy!

So they try anyway to make the best of it in spite of my palpable unhappy brooding all over the place, while listening to Verdi and Puccini opera recordings in the great upstairs library (four walls from rug to ceiling with things like
The Explanation
of the Apocalypse
in three volumes, the complete works and poems of Chris Smart, the complete this and that, the apology of so-and-so written obscurely to you-know-who in 1839, in 1638—). I jump at the chance to say, “I’m going to sleep,” it’s now eleven, I have a right to be tired, been sitting on the floor and Mardou with dame-like majesty all this time in the easy chair in the corner of the library (where once I’d seen the famous one-armed Nick Spain sit when Bromberg on a happier early time in the year played for us the original recording of
The Rake’s Progress)
and looking so, herself, tragic, lost—hurt so much by my hurt—by my sorriness from her sorriness borrowing—I think sensitive—that at one point in a burst of forgiveness, need, I run and sit at her feet and lean head on her knee in front of the others who by now don’t care any more, that is Sand does not care about these things now, deeply engrossed in the music, the books, the brilliant conversation (the likes of which cannot be surpassed anywhere in the world, incidentally, and this too, tho now tiredly, crosses by my epic-wanting brain and I see the scheme of all my life, all acquaintances, loves, worries, travels rising again in a big symphonic mass but now I’m beginning not to care so much any more because of this 105 pounds of woman and brown at that whose little toenails, red in the thonged sandals, make my throat gulp)—“O dear Leo, you DO seem to be bored.”—“Not bored! how could I be bored here!”—I wish I had some sympathetic way to tell Bromberg, “Every time I come here there’s something wrong with me, it must seem like some awful comment on your house and hospitality and it isn’t at all, can’t you understand that this morning my heart is broken and out the window is bleak” (and how explain to him the other time I was a guest at his place, again uninvited but breaking in at gray dawn with Charley Krasner and the kids were there, and Mary, and the others came, gin and Schweppes, I became so drunk, disorderly, lost, I then too brooded and slept in fact on the floor in the middle of the room in front of everybody
in the height of day—and for reasons so far removed from now, tho still as tho an adverse comment on the quality of Bromberg’s weekend)—“No Austin I’m just sick—.” No doubt, too, Sand must have hipped him quietly in a whisper somewhere what was happening with the lovers, Mardou also being silent—one of the strangest guests ever to hit Bromberg’s, a poor subterranean beat Negro girl with no clothes on her back worth a twopenny (I saw to that generously), and yet so strange faced, solemn, serious, like a funny solemn unwanted probably angel in the house—feeling, as she told me, later, really unwanted because of the circumstances.—So I cop out, from the lot, from life, all of it, go to sleep in the bedroom (where Charley and I that earlier time had danced the mambo naked with Mary) and fall exhausted into new nightmares waking up about three hours later, in the heartbreakingly pure, clear, sane, happy afternoon, birds still singing, now kids singing, as if I was a spider waking up in a dusty bin and the world wasn’t for me but for other airier creatures and more constant themselves and also less liable to the stains of inconstancy too—