The Subterraneans (14 page)

“Baby I’m going to tell you something and if I tell it to you I want you to promise nevertheless you’ll come to the movie with me.”—“Okay.”—And naturally I add, after pause, “What is it?”—I think it has something to do with “Let’s break up really and truly, I don’t want to make it, not because I don’t like you but it’s by now or should be obvious to both of us by now—” that kind of argument that I can, as of yore and again, break, by saying, “But let’s, look, I have, wait—” for always the man can make the little woman bend, she was made to bend, the little woman was—so I wait confidently for this kind of talk, tho feel bleak, tragic, grim, and the air cold.—“You know the other night” (she spends some time trying to order confused nights of recent—and I help her straighten them out, and have my arm around her waist, as we cut along we come closer to the brittle jewel lights of Price and Columbus that old North Beach corner so weird and ever weirder now and I have my private thoughts about it as from older scenes in my San Francisco life, in brief, almost smug and snug in the rug of myself—in any case we agree that the night she means to tell me about is Saturday night, which was the night I cried in the railyards
—that short sudden, as I say, crying, that vision—I’m trying in fact to interpose and tell her about it, trying also to figure out if she means now that on Saturday night something awful happened that I should know—).

“Well I went to Dante’s and didn’t want to stay, and tried to leave—and Yuri was trying to hang around—and he called somebody—and I was at the phone—and told Yuri he was wanted” (as incoherent as that) “and while he is in the booth I cut on home, because I was tired—baby at two o’clock in the morning he came and knocked on the door—“

“Why?”—“For a place to sleep, he was drunk, he rushed in—and—well—.”

“Huh?”

“Well baby we made it together,”—that hip word—at the sound of which even as I walked and my legs propelled under me and my feet felt firm, the lower part of my stomach sagged into my pants or loins and the body experienced a sensation of deep melting downgoing into some soft somewhere, nowhere—suddenly the streets were so bleak, the people passing so beastly, the lights so unnecessary just to illumine this … this cutting world—it was going across the cobbles when she said it, “made it together,” I had (locomotive wise) to concentrate on getting up on the curb again and I didn’t look at her—I looked down Columbus and thought of walking away, rapidly, as I’d done at Larry’s—I didn’t—I said “I don’t want to live in this beastly world”—but so low she barely if at all heard me and if so never commented, but after a pause she added a few things, like, “There are other details, like, what—but I won’t go into them—like,” stammering, and slow—yet both of us swinging along in the street to the show—the show being
Brave Bulls
(I cried to see the grief in the matador when he heard his best friend and girl had gone off the mountain in his own car, I cried to see even the bull that I knew would die and I knew the big deaths bulls do die in their trap called bullring)—I wanted to run away
from Mardou. (“Look man,” she’d said only a week before when I’d suddenly started talking about Adam and Eve and referred to her as Eve, the woman who by her beauty is able to make the man do anything, “don’t call me Eve.”)—But now no matter—walking along, at one point so irritable to my senses she stopped short on the rainy sidewalk and coolly said “I need a neckerchief” and turned to go into the store and I turned and followed her from reluctant ten feet back realizing I hadn’t known what was going on in my mind really ever since Price and Columbus and here we were on Market—while she’s in the store I keep haggling with myself, shall I just go now, I have my fare, just cut down the street swiftly and go home and when she comes out she’ll see you’re gone, she’ll know you broke the promise to go to the movies just like you broke a lot of promises but this time she’ll know you have a big male right to—but none of this is enough—I feel stabbed by Yuri—by Mardou I feel forsaken and shamed—I turn to look in the store blindly at anything and there she comes at just that moment wearing a phosphorescent purple bandana (because big raindrops had just started flying and she didn’t want the rain to string out her carefully combed for the movies hair and here she was spending her small monies on kerchiefs.)—In the movie I hold her hand, after a fifteen-minute wait, not thinking to at all not because I was mad but I felt she would feel it was too subservient at this time to take her hand in the movieshow, like lovers—but I took her hand, she was warm, lost—ask not the sea why the eyes of the dark-eyed woman are strange and lost—came out of the movie, I glum, she businesslike to get through the cold to the bus, where, at the bus stop, she walked away from me to lead me to a warmer waiting place and (as I said) I’d mentally accused her of wan-deringfoot.

Arriving home, where we sat, she on my lap, after a long warm talk with John Golz, who came in to see her, but found me too, and might have left, but in my new spirit I wanted at once to
show him that I respected and liked him, and talked with him, and he stayed two hours—in fact I saw how he annoyed Mardou by talking literature with her beyond the point where she was interested and also about things she’d long known about—poor Mardou.

So he left, and I curled her on my lap, and she talked about the war between men—“They have a war, to them a woman is a prize, to Yuri it’s just that your prize has less value now.”

“Yeah,” I say, sad, “but I should have paid more attention to the old junkey nevertheless, who said there’s a lover on every corner—they’re all the same, boy, don’t get hung-up on one.”

“It isn’t true, it isn’t true, that’s just what Yuri wants is for you to go down to Dante’s now and the two of you’ll laugh and talk me over and agree that women are good lays and there are a lot of them.—I think you’re like me—you want one love—like, men have the essence in the woman, there’s an essence” (“Yes,” I thought, “there’s an essence, and that is your womb”) “and the man has it in his hand, but rushes off to build big constructions.” (I’d just read her the first few pages of
Finnegans Wake
and explained them and where Finnegan is always putting up “buildung supra buildung supra buildung” on the banks of the Liffey—dung!)

“I will say nothing,” I thought—“Will you think I am not a man if I don’t get mad?”

“Just like that war I told you about.”

“Women have wars too—“

Oh what’ll we do? I think—now I go home, and it’s all over for sure, not only now is she bored and has had enough but has pierced me with an adultery of a kind, has been inconstant, as prophesied in a dream, the dream the bloody dream—I see myself grabbing Yuri by the shirt and throwing him on the floor, he pulls out a Yugoslavian knife, I pick up a chair to bash him with, everybody’s watching … but I continue the daydream and I look into his eyes and I see suddenly the glare of a jester
angel who made his presence on earth all a joke and I realize that this too with Mardou was a joke and I think, “Funny Angel, elevated amongst the subterraneans.”

“Baby it’s up to you,” is what she’s actually saying, “about how many times you wanta see me and all that—but I want to be independent like I say.”

And I go home having lost her love.

And write this book.