William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (86 page)

Except that he had taken on a little bit more weight, he had not changed at all. He was dressed in an elegant turtle-neck jersey and blue jeans, looking very much the artist from top to toe—though an artist with money—and he seemed to be enjoying himself. I saw his grinning face through the smoke of the room, one hand held high, flourishing a schooner of beer. Even now I remember how our eyes met in the flicker of a glance, my sudden shock of delight darkened by a half-hope that he had not recognized me—both of these feelings almost simultaneous and in such confusion that I had no time to make up my mind whether to rise and shout hello or to steal silently out, before he was on top of me, thumping me on the back—“Hey, Petesy, let’s flap off on a wild one!” he cried—and falling around my shoulders with loud hoots of recognition.

“What an absolutely fabulous coincidence,” he said, when he had quieted down. “At a dinner I was at last night I was talking to this guy—a very fine painter—and we got to talking about the people we had known at school. I said I couldn’t speak for Princeton, having been eased out my first year. Do you know, I got booted out for the most undistinguished reason. Petesy, dollbaby, let’s face it, I’m a brilliant man but as far as education goes I’m simply a horsefly on the ass of progress.”

I would have had to be a more stolid individual than I am not to have been warmed by his energy, his big grin, and by the note in his voice, as he clapped me on the shoulder, of honest affection. I must have smiled, saying: “But, Mason, how did you get
in?”

“You mean after I got kicked out of St. .A.’s? Oh, Wendy pulled some wires through one of her relatives and got me into a chic reform school up in Rhode Island. They drilled you with rifles and all that crap but I bore down hard—you know, for the glory of Wendy-dear—and I got good grades. That, though, Petesy, is what they call a non sequitur. Because I
didn’t
get booted out of college for boffing or drinking or anything sordid. But for my grades! Grades! Can you imagine anything so absurd? And I tested out with an I.Q. of 156! This
gluttonous
widow I was week-ending with on Sutton Place just kept me away from the books. Poor Wendy. The old man had kicked in with I don’t know how many bushels of dough to the library, and when she came up to Princeton I thought she was going to take the place apart …”

“Look out, Mason, you’re spilling beer on your pants. How is Wendy, by the way?”

“Oh, she’s fine. She tried to go on the wagon after the old man died. I guess you heard about him. She goes on and off, poor thing, but I haven’t had to give her the cure for months and months. Chloral hydrate and Cream of Wheat. You know, it’s a funny thing. You know how she used to absolutely loathe Merryoaks? Well, after the old man went to his reward, as they say, you couldn’t get her away from there, absolutely fell in love with the place. Sits down there and slurps Old Crow all by herself, and rides around on this big horse. My wife and I—you’ll meet the wife—anyway, we were down there last week end. It’s the biggest goddam horse you ever saw. And off she goes, loping down the riverbank, with this new boy friend she’s got. He’s a seventy-year-old Belgian and he’s gotten her all interested in something called Zen. I think they shoot arrows at each other. Jesus sake, Petesy,” he chuckled, wiping foam from his lips, “I don’t know who’s sleeping with who down there. I think the horse is getting the best part of it.” He began to shake and tremble with quiet interior laughter. “Ah Jesus,” he sighed, “Petesy, it’s great to see you again. I knew if I ran into you at all it’d be in a purgatory of the spirit like this. You know, Wendy still asks about you all the time. She had a real sneaker for you, you know? I think it must have been because you kept your mouth shut. She was so sick and tired of the old man. He kept yowling into her ear all the time, trying to smoke out her psyche, no wonder she took to the sauce. Poor Wendy,” he said, with a sudden wistful look, “I’ll have to get her up here so she can see you. What with that spooky Belgian and that horse and all that sauce she’ll end up for certain in some laughing academy.

“Anyway,” he went on, “that’s beside the point.” He was not drunk (although he liked drinking, I recalled that even as a boy he was not particularly addicted to it, which always struck me as a noteworthy deliverance) but a bright hilarity burbled up in his voice, and his eyes were twinkly and agitated. “What I was telling that guy last night is that of all the dozens of little schoolmates I ever had there was only one I’d walk around the corner to see again. And then I mentioned your name—old Petesy—and I wondered what you were doing. It’s fantastic! It’s pure clairvoyance. So what are you doing? Tell me.” But before I could pop my mouth open to reply he was tugging at my sleeve. “The love of my life,” he was saying. “Come over here and meet her.”

I remember my surprise at the idea of Mason’s being married, and I studied the girl—a slow-stirring blonde named Carole who gave me a warmed-over smile and kept displaying her handsome bosom in a sort of habitual shrug of weariness. In the booth beside her sat a red-haired, blanched, unwell-looking young couple in blue jeans—I think they were called the Pennypackers—who like a pair of caged foxes stared up at me out of the gloom, fixing me with their feral, glittering eyes. They made no word of greeting, but doted on Mason in a conversation thick with small yaps and noises of innuendo—about a week end at Provincetown and someone named Gus and someone named Wally—and finally, when they got up to go, Mason lent them ten dollars from an enormous bankroll (I thought it must have been a lapse, for even as a boy he had never been so graceless as to be ostentatious about his cash), upon which they battened their little aqueous, lashless eyes in one brief hot glance of conspiratorial greed before slipping out into the night. I recall wondering how these two, who seemed so down-at-the-heel and uninspired, had come to be Mason’s friends, but even before I could begin tentatively to pump him, he had answered my question, saying: “He’s in Theater”—he capitalized the noun—“he hasn’t got a cent and he’s a terrible ass but he reads scripts for the Playwrights’ Company. He’s got the first act of this play I’m writing. If they don’t do it I’m almost certain Whitehead will put it on next year, once I get it finished. It’s that second act that’s such a ball-breaker. Did you catch those two? Funny thing is—did you notice?—they look exactly alike. I really think she’s his sister. And she’s the weirdest one in the act. Jesus, I’d love to see them in action. I bet it’s like trying to stuff a marshmallow into a piggy bank.”

None of Mason’s drolleries were lost on Carole, who punctuated his talk with throaty little commas of mirth and giggles which she employed without stint whenever he opened his mouth. She was a hefty, good-looking girl with milky skin and a rich, contralto, barrelhouse voice and elliptical green eyes that mirrored almost nothing save an imperturbably confident passion. She looked openminded and procreative, a soft acquiescent woman, dimly in love. Her raucous voice betrayed her—it was pure Greenpoint—depressing me about Mason’s taste in mates, though I couldn’t help feeling a bachelor’s itch and envy over what he had acquired otherwise.

“Darling, you fracture me,” she giggled. “ ’Di’ve another Scotch onna rocks?”

“Actually, these Village dives aren’t exactly my dish of tea,” said Mason, ignoring her, “but it’s good for spasmodic kicks, you know, to see the pseudo-intellectual riffraff in operation.”

He squeezed my arm. “We’re goofing off, you know. There’s a big brawl going on at my place. It’s been swinging ever since last night. Come on, let’s go.” Outside he steadied Carole at the curb. It was a sultry Manhattan night, its stars drowned in a fragile penumbra of neon, its presence odorous with asphalt and drains and a bouquet of gardenias, borne in the hands of a frayed old peddler, floating up to us from the dark. “Baby, do you want something from Max Schling here? The kid’s bobo for flowers,” he murmured to me as, fumblingly, she pinned them to her breast, “and, frankly, it’s her only aesthetic indulgence. Anyway, as I was saying, it’s good for kicks, Peter. These people are such
flaneurs.
Jesus Christ, I may not be any Cocteau or Brecht yet, but at least I’m serious.” He whistled up a cab. “Come on, let’s get back to the studio.”

Mason’s apartment—“studio,” rather—perched five floors above the street in one of the frowzier nooks of the Village, was the only New York dwelling I have ever seen which successfully combined a garrety, blue jean-and-sneaker attitude toward art with real luxury. It was a lofty, cavernous place which had been the property of a once well-known but now forgotten portrait painter. Much of it—the peeling skylight and hideous mahogany paneling —Mason had left as he had found it, but the rest—wall-to-wall carpeting nearly bottomless to the tread, hidden lighting and elegant Chinese bric-a-brac, a Calder mobile and
three
Modiglianis and yard after yard of fine editions—he had furbished himself with great style so that the effect, after panting upward for so many shabby, cabbage-smelling flights, was not of the drab ordinariness of the atelier one had expected, but of a sudden, rich, and luminescent paradise. One anticipated such a place, say, on Beekman Hill, but not here; it was as if a maharajah had taken over a flat somewhere in Queens. With his surpassing flair for the impossible gesture, Mason had fused Beverly Hills and Bohemia: in that dulcet, insinuating light one felt that one could share the lives of the immeasurably fortunate, yet never lose the echo of the rowdy street below, out of which rose, night after night, the muffled tunes of a caterwauling juke box and all the tough, sad accents of Sodom.

That evening the place was jammed with people but soon after we arrived, Mason—disengaging himself from Carole, who by now was quite hopelessly drunk—pushed me toward a rear bedroom, closed and locked the door and, turning round to face me, said with a warm grin: “Now we can catch up on old times, Petesy boy.” Perhaps it was the firm bolting of the door but I recall how, even then, the flicker of a dark suspicion passed through my mind, and vanished as quickly as it had come. Being a fairly inwardlooking person, and one carefully attuned to the psychiatric overtones in this age, I have often wondered whether there was not something homosexual in our connection, in my attraction to Mason. I think this has bothered me mainly because I am an American, and Americans are troubled by the notion that the slightly fevered excitement, the warmth they might feel in the presence of a friend of the same sex portend all sorts of unspeakable desires. That is why, when Frenchmen kiss or embrace without shame and Italians, long-parted, rush baying into each other’s arms, an American is reduced to a greeting not far removed from a sneer and a sadistic wallop between the shoulder blades. However, in regard to the allure Mason held for me, I have re-examined it from all angles and have found it tainted enough, but not flawed by
that
complication. I think I simply felt when I was near him that he was more imaginative, more intelligent than I, and at the same time more corrupt (more corrupt, that is, than I could allow myself to be, as much as I tried), so that while he kept me hugely entertained he yet permitted me, in the ease of my humdrum and shallow rectitude, to feel luckier than Mason—duller but luckier, and sometimes superior.

That night he was at the top of his form. We compared notes on the years since we had last seen each other, but it took only a few moments to cover my own drab career. Mason, however, had lived —and I suspected with a dash granted to only a very few young men during the war; his story, to one who had seen only Illinois prairies, like myself, was fascinating, for he had been a member of the O.S.S. “Oh really, Petesy, I would rather have done time in Leavenworth than been drafted. And gobble K-rations next to some cretin from Opelika, Alabama? Really, Peter—don’t frown—we
do
have to preserve some aristocracy of the spirit.” It had been a difficult stunt to promote because of his college debacle, but one which Wendy, who had known a producer who had known a General Something-or-Other at the Pentagon, had expedited shortly after his return from Princeton. “Wendy-dear,” he said pensively. “She didn’t want me to go at all, of course, but she was positively
adamant
about one thing: she was determined that I get into some outfit where everybody brushed their teeth, even though she had heard that a lot of them were fags.”

And then he told a spine-chilling tale about his experiences: about the government school, first, that he attended near Baltimore (I had heard about it somewhere) and its incredible curriculum in which neophytes like himself, in order to test their stealth and cunning, were among other things made to break into heavily guarded military installations in the dead of night, or to purloin top-secret blueprints from the shipyard of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, or, at high noon, with false mustache and eyeglasses and bogus identity badge, to waltz past the guards at the Glenn L. Martin aircraft plant and, once inside, with the furtive skill implanted in their minds at school, to set token bombs and sabotaging booby traps in the intestines of some highly classified and vital machine, before reporting back to their superiors with a key nut or bolt or a crucial cotter-pin, or even—as once in Mason’s case—with the nameplate of some factory vice-president, as evidence of the success of their mission. “Well frankly,” he said with a laugh, “it was a hell of a lot of fun playing spy. Call it cloak-and-dagger stuff, whatever you want, it really had its—I mean, colossal moments of excitement. Of course there—at the Division Institute—that was the official name but to the public then it had no name at all, in fact it didn’t even exist—we didn’t run any real risk. We had what they call a ’check agent’ in every installation we planned to knock over; that is, there was always somebody, usually an F.B.I, man, planted there in some sort of security capacity who knew what was going on. At least he knew that the D.I. was running a speed-job that day—we called these raids speed-jobs—so that if you bungled the mission and got nabbed he could at least step in and spirit you out of there.” He paused, a ruminative expression on his flushed face, and then began to shake with a kind of tickled, anticipatory laughter. “Oh Jesus, though, some guys really had a rough time of it. There was this little fellow named Heinz Mayer, a funny little German refugee who had been living in Buffalo. He had practically no English at all anyway but he was a raving patriot and would have done anything, I think, to get to spit on the Fatherland. Anyway, they sent him on this solo speed-job into an antiaircraft installation—No it wasn’t; I remember now, it was the Naval Ordnance Depot down at Dahlgren on the Potomac. Anyway, what happened was that this check agent, this poor benighted F.B.I. man had been stricken with something—I don’t know what, appendicitis, a coronary, something—at any rate he was not there, not on hand when this poor little Heinz got caught snooping around in some building where they were assembling some kind of secret new timing device for eight-inch shells. Oh Jesus,” he chuckled, “I can hear him now, telling us about it: ’But dere I vass,’ he said, ’dese Marines, dey tought I vass Chermann! Dey vould not believe me ven I said dot I vass American, Heinz Mayer from Buffalo, New York. Und I vaited und I vaited for mein
shack agent
to come und save me but he vould not come!’ Oh God,” said Mason, “it cracked us up listening to him. I think those Marines were about to give him bastinado with rifle-butts but he got out of there somehow… .”