by Jack Kerouac
street.
“Are you going to come anyway?”
Michael suddenly called. This came as a
great surprise to both Maureen and Leo,
and to Paul himself no less. He stopped in
his tracks and stood still, stiffly, as though a
stunning thought had just shot into his
mind. Maureen gave Michael a strange,
puzzled look, and Leo was again vaguely
embarrassed.
Paul had not yet turned, was still stand-
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ing numbly, as though struck.
Michael strode up the steps and into the
dark hall of the apartment house. Maureen
followed, while Leo, for his part, wavered
near the steps, to wait and see what Paul
would do. Paul had not yet moved, not yet
turned, and although Leo hesitated at least
ten seconds while Michael and Maureen
were going up the steps, he did not see Paul
move, and reported it so later.
Michael immediately went to his bed to lie
down, stating that he would sleep awhile and
wake up in time for the party. Before he could
fall asleep, Maureen questioned him about
Paul. “I thought you didn’t want him around?
I felt sure you wouldn’t have liked my inviting
him to the party, he’s such a madman, and a lot
of people don’t want him around.”
“Who for instance?” Michael illogically
pouted.
“Well, my friend Barbara.”
“Barbara is a bore.”
“She is not! And she’s a nice girl, and a
whole lot smarter than the lot of you with all
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 85
“Oh shut
up”
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 86
your fancy talk.”
“Oh shut up. I want to sleep now.”
“Don’t shut me up, you brat!” Maureen
shouted, and she hit Michael with his own
shoe that lay at the foot of the bed.
“Is this the way to start a party!?” called
Leo from the other room, where he was sat-
isfying his aesthetic impulse by moving the
flowers around to different parts of the
room. “Yelling at each other. Look, I’ve
arranged things nicely here. Look at it.”
“Now I’m sleeping,” said Michael, and
turned over.
“Yes, and you’ll wrinkle your trousers. I
just pressed them this morning.”
Michael sighed, rose from his bed,
removed his trousers, handed them to
Maureen, and lay down again to sleep.
“Close the door,” he added.
“The dreamer, the dreamer,” said Leo,
with his face in the bedroom door. “Tell me
what you dream this time, Michael. ‘Life,
you impalpable phantom, thrust not your
fog shapes at me, I reject you! Oh dreams! Oh
powerful, tangible dreams—I’ll dream till
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death is a dream!’ He wrote that himself,
Maureen, now look at him. He’s—”
“Shut up,” interrupted Maureen. The
doorbell was ringing. “Answer the bell,” she
ordered Leo. She closed the door and
Michael was left to sleep.
“It’s Arthur and Toni!” Leo cried from the
hall. “And they have wine and record albums
with them. Hello, hello, hello. And Julius is with
them. Hello Julius. Come in, come in, the place
is all fixed up; you won’t recognize it! What’s that
you’ve got under your arm, Arthur? Ha! T. S.
Eliot. ‘Ash Wednesday,’ is it?”
“ ‘Quartets,’ ” corrected Arthur, brushing into the room with his load of records.
Maureen was standing arranging the candy
bowls and preparing to light the candles.
“Well, well,” cried Arthur, “how nice
everything is! And Maureen—you look beau-
tiful. Where’s Michael?”
“Taking a nap.”
“Taking a nap, taking a nap. Toni, see how
nice these gladiolas are.”
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 88
Toni entered the room demurely and
smiled at Maureen. “My God,” she said, look-
ing around, “the place doesn’t look the same.
You must have been working all day. Is
Barbara coming?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, indeed,” Julius echoed softly, and sat
down on the couch. Leo sat down next to
him and offered him a cigarette. “Julius,” he
said straight off, “what happened during your
trip?”
“I rode,” he answered. “I rode and I rode.”
“Wine!” cried Arthur, holding up a bottle of
vermouth. He held it up to the candlelight.
“See the color? Get some glasses, somebody.”
The doorbell rang again.
“Well!” cried Leo, jumping up.
“Everyone’s coming early. It’s going to be
some night. That must be Anthony and
Marie. Perhaps they have some wine too.”
Julius had stretched out on the couch
and was perusing a volume of Baudelaire’s
works. “Take your big feet off my couch,”
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ORPHEUS EMERGED 89
Maureen warned as she ran up to the
kitchen to fetch glasses. Toni was standing
in front of the mirror preening her hair.
Anthony and Marie came in, and soon
the party was well underway.
“Big surprise!” cried Arthur, holding
up his albums of records for all to see.
“I have here the Brahms Clarinet
Quintet in G minor. We’re going to
play this and also some others I have
here. Stravinsky’s Petruchka ballet
suite, who likes that?”
“I do, I do!” cried Anthony happily.
“I borrowed these from Bartholomew,
the capitalist aesthete. Look! And here I
have Shostakovich’s Fifth, the ‘Apassionata Sonata’ and shorter pieces.”
“Shostakovich!” cried Anthony wildly,
running up to Arthur. He had already begun
drinking, and had a head start on everyone
else. “Let me hold it to my heart! And here,
you didn’t show us this one…Rachmaninoff!
His Second Concerto! Marie, Marie,” he
cried, turning to his beloved. “The Russian
soul!”
“Yes,” she said, “I know.”
“Said the rooster to the hen, or some-
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“I do,I do!”
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thing,” Julius mumbled from the couch. “Is
this the Slavic soul I’ve heard so much
about?”
“What is it from?” cried Leo, reflecting.
“I read it somewhere…”
The doorbell was ringing again.
“Barbara that must be, and her friend
Hubert!” Leo went on, hurrying towards the
hall. “I’ll bet it’s them. That completes it,
all right…”
“Only the Russians know how to write
music,
” Anthony was saying to Julius, who
lay demurely on the couch. “Don’t talk to
me about those damned classic forms. Pah!
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Rachmaninoff!” he shouted, carried away
again with excitement. “Rachmaninoff!”
Anthony had not yet taken his hat off, he
was too excited; it was a slouch hat, dark
and limp, and he looked utterly fantastic in
it. “Let me hold it to my heart!!” he repeat-
ed, picking up the album.
Barbara, a girl about Maureen’s age, and
her escort, Hubert, were the last to arrive.
Immediately after, with the serving of wine
and hors d’oeuvres, and the beginning of
the record concert, the party was in full
swing—and Michael still slept.
Anthony had insisted on beginning the
concert with Stravinsky’s Petruchka suite, LiveREADS
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but Arthur protested, and they compro-
mised on playing excerpts. All during the
performance, Anthony was in raptures; and
he would have started dancing hadn’t there
been so many people, or, rather, hadn’t he
had so little wine as yet. When the music
was finished, and everybody applauded,
and the hubbub grew, Arthur and Anthony
argued violently over the next piece to be
played.
“But did you notice,” Arthur put in, after
they had come to an agreement, “that pecu-
liar ebullient quality in Petruchka, in all of
Stravinsky? Eh? I would compare that art with that of Tchelichev, and with Joyce too.”
“Yes, yes,” nodded Anthony, drinking up
some wine. Julius was at their side. “You
know why?” Arthur went on. “Well, it
should be evident. It seethes with life—
there are great eruptions of organic matter,
and behind a sort of ripple of amoebae. Ho!
That’s good!”
“Vaguely,” said Julius. “Tell me, Arthur.
Since I’ve been gone, I hear you’ve been
espousing poetry. Can I lay that to
Michael’s influence?”
“Perhaps,” said Arthur, putting on the
new record in the machine. “This!” he now
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cried to the party in general, “is the new
Brahms Clarinet Quintet in G minor.
Everybody listen!”
The music started, but this time every-
body kept talking; wine had loosened all
their tongues. They were assembled in lit-
tle groups throughout both the rooms.
Arthur sat rapturously by the machine,
while Anthony sulked over by the couch.
“Only the Russians know how to write
music,” he insisted darkly, but Arthur paid
him no attention.
“Well, tell me,” Julius persisted, sitting by
Arthur. “Tell me now in all seriousness:
what does the modern poet want, hey?”
“That’s a vague question. But perhaps I
can answer it. Yes! He wants a return to the
conditions of the Golden Age.”
Julius chuckled softly. “That does sound
like Michael. You know, I know him better
than you think. He’s got you in his grip…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, nothing. But—” and Julius chuckled
again — “that business of wanting a return
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to the conditions of the Golden Age, you
know that sounds terribly like the phrase,
‘he wants a return to the conditions of the
nursery,’ now doesn’t it?”
Arthur waved an impatient hand.
Just after the music ended on the phono-
graph—at the termination of the second
movement of the quintet, to be exact—and
as everyone began clapping their hands,
and laughing and talking while Arthur
somewhat proudly and bashfully removed
the record from the turntable, Michael
gloomily emerged from his bedroom.
There was a pause in the hubbub, and
then Leo cried out his name and ran up to
him with a glass and a bottle of wine: “Here,
here, help yourself to some wine! Wake up!
… you’re half asleep.”
Michael stared sullenly at Leo, rubbing
his eyes with his knuckles. Then he gradu-
ally became conscious of the large group
assembled in the two rooms, most of whom
were staring and smiling at him, for he was
technically and undeniably the “host.”
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“All right,” smiled Michael bashfully, tak-
ing the bottle and the glass. “I guess I do
need to wake up. I had only intended to
take a nap…”
“Famous last words!” cried Julius, and at
this, the tension was released: laughter and
the babble were resumed, during which
Michael, with a sort of sigh of relief, poured
himself some wine and drank it. At this
point, the doorbell rang once more, and Leo
immediately dashed into the hall. Maureen,
excitedly relating something to her friend
Barbara in the next room, had not heard the
ringing. Michael sat down on the couch and
began to scratch his hair sleepily.
“Well, well, Mike,” said Arthur, coming
over. “You missed the Brahms quintet.”
“On the contrary, no,” Michael said, smil-
ing up at Arthur. “It woke me up; I listened
in bed. It was comfortable in bed and the
music was soothing, particularly the second
movement—although there was so much
noise I could hardly hear it.”
“It’s wonderful music,” said Arthur, sit-
ting down beside Michael. He lit a cigarette.
Michael drained another glassful of
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wine. He smacked his lips. “Can you imag-
ine that music?” he said eagerly. “Those
slow movements? God! What an incredibly
sensitive man Brahms must have been, to feel that type of thing in him…”
“It’s Paul!” Leo cried from the hallway.
“Come on in, friend. We have wine, music,
everything. We’ve all been waiting for you,
as you so accurately predicted…”
There was an answering mumble.
Arthur rose from the couch and went into
the hallway: “Hi there, you…”
Michael picked up his bottle and glass
and stood up irresolutely. Then he walked
quickly to the other room and stood at the
fringe of a group comprised of Anthony,
Marie, Toni and Barbara’s friend Hubert.
They were talking about the latest psycho-
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logical advances, and Hubert was holding
forth on hypno-analysis. Michael refrained
from looking directly at Marie; instead, he
concentrated his gaze on Toni
, Arthur’s
blonde girl, and would have spoken to her
hadn’t she been so engrossed in what
Hubert was saying.
“It’s a great thing,” Hubert was saying,
motioning with his long thin hands.
“Certain blind spots deny you and the psy-
choanalyst both an insight into certain
important matters. Under hypno-analysis,
of course, one lets loose completely—the
blind spot becomes an illumined eye…”
“You turn your phrases like a poet,”
Michael interrupted suddenly, and without
warning to the little group. “Let me tell
you,” he rushed on, as the others stared at
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him with some surprise, “in psycho-analysis
one very important factor is completely
overlooked, as far as I am concerned you
see—although I’m no expert on the subject.”
Hubert was staring coldly. “So you’re given
an adult insight into child emotions which
have formed certain emotional patterns in
you, so that is so…”
“Well,” began Hubert. Michael held up
his hand. At this instant, Anthony caught
sight of Paul in the next room and shouted
at him across the apartment. “Paul, Paul,
you’ve come. It worked, you know!” And
with this, Anthony ran to Paul, and as he
disengaged himself from the little circle of
conversation, he left a little place for
Michael to step into. Before the others
could turn their attentions to the effusive
greeting Anthony was tendering Paul in the
next room, Michael rushed on, hardly
knowing what he was talking about: “You
see, now, as I was saying, look! The analy-
sis regains your right, psychologically
speaking, to make adult decisions, under-
stand? It has revealed to you certain blind
spots, say as hypno-analysis does, it is a
revelation. What can I find out about my-
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self, for instance, hey? Plenty, plenty. But I
refuse to find out!— it would ruin me, I
would no longer contain dark secrets, and
nightmares, and dualisms, and thrilling con-
flicts. No, I would be left completely cleaned
out of all my poetic equipment, and I would
have to say, in a broad sweeping voice,