“Yowzuh. It’s nothing I’d care for permanently, but I appreciate your getting me the job, because I sure like the sound of things ripping apart.” This was a leading reply designed to excite the words he loved to hear applied to himself—“sublimation,” “vicarious,” and the rest. They were not forthcoming now, the Lamplighter having wearied of this aspect of things. “Wanna make anything out of it?” he grinned invitingly.
“No, Pete,” I said, with something of the granite smiling quiet with which Spencer Tracy has done his settlement work, blinking as I spoke, “we all have outlets of that kind. Me, I like to bowl. Sound of patterns being busted up and all.” Cheshire’s face fell at this hint of exile from a special category. “You’re lucky you’re getting your release from the work itself.”
Cheshire took the leather club chair to which I had initially waved him, and with a pondering frown, another tack. “I have these awful guilt feelings about what I’ve done. You know what?” he went on when I declined the gambit, “I get them while I’m doing wrong.” And he looked at me as if to challenge me to tie that for intricacy.
I was consulting a dossier in a Manila folder open on my desk, which gave a rough history of this youth’s exploits. The first had been panning pennies from a local wishing well, using his mother’s flour sieve and wearing his father’s hip boots at the age of nine. In late adolescence he had come under the sway of a certain Mike (“Agony”) Lammermoor, so nicknamed because of the suffering he went through with and over women. Lammennoor was a connoisseur of billfolds but he was not averse to prospecting in shops after quitting time, and it was for one such job that the two had been convicted and sent up for six months apiece. I knew the story of Pete’s meeting with Lammermoor by heart but I never tired of hearing it, so under the guise of excavating data for analysis I jogged him into telling it again. Lammermoor was probably the man I wanted more than anyone else to meet Pete rose and struck a narrative tone.
“I’m standing on the corner of Updike and Ruby, minding my own business, when up walks this Damon Runyon character. He stems a smoke and we get to chewing the tallow, and first thing I know we’re double dating a couple of snipe. Friends of his. He’s interested only in the nighttime kitties with the choice cuts, which takes capital, so the first thing I know we’re climbing in this store window. Like a fool, I should have stayed home. But there we were, and I gets this terrific guilt feeling right there on the job, also one hell of an anxiety. Crawling through the window it dawned on me, I said to myself, ‘Pete, this is crazy. This is all wrong.’ It dawned on me like anything.” He cleaned the carbon from his nails with a file long enough to have sawed his way out of jail with, also extracted from under the skirt of his coat I asked him just as a matter of interest which way he’d been crawling when the light struck him, in or out, and he answered, “Oh, out. But by that time it was too late, him having the boodle and all. The rest is in your report. What a guy goes through.”
“Are you in touch with the Agony?” I asked.
“He writes me from stir, which he’s in again, but I don’t answer him.”
“I wish you would, Pete. He may need your friendship, and besides,” I said, closing the folder and setting it aside, “I’d like to meet him when he gets out.”
“I’ll see if I can arrange it. He never got in with the right crowd. Hey, you know why you and him might hit it off? He likes books.”
“Perhaps we can have lunch one day.”
Pete reached for his cigarette which he had left burning in one of the soup ramekins which constituted the management’s idea of ashtrays. “That brings me to my subject.” He took a last drag on it, and twisting it out said, “There’s no future in wrecking unless you own the business, and I’ve got something else cooking. I’m supposed to report to you.”
“Nonsense, I’m not your Sunday-school teacher, I’m your friend. If you want to tell me something man to man, shoot, Pete.”
Cheshire frowned a moment. “I’ve always thought I’d like to run a restaurant. Oh, I don’t mean just a place to put on the nosebag, I mean a place with—”
“Class.”
“That’s not enough.” Cheshire tried to make himself clear. “The word restaurant fills me with a mood right away. I like the idea of night falling and of the town percolating all around me, into evening. I’m getting dressed and so are lots of others, good-looking men who will escort women in beautiful gowns with teeth as white as toothpaste, and some of them heading for my restaurant Where they’ll ask, ‘Is Pete in yet?’ A sophisticated place where the boss will be table hopping.” His face clouded over and he said, “But what’s the use dreaming? A man who’d done a stretch hasn’t got a chance. He’s marked for life as a moral leopard.”
“That’s not true and I won’t hear it,” I said. “Of course you’ll have your restaurant. I’ll do all I can to help you.”
“This idea of night, and people coming to where—Who’s that?”
There had been a knock on the door and I rose to admit Mrs. Thicknesse. I was eager to have Pete resume his rhapsody about Night for her benefit, and, the introductions over, I said, “Mr. Cheshire is an acquaintance of mine, we were just talking over a business interest of his. Pete, maybe you’ve seen Mrs. Thicknesse’s musical reviews in the Pick. Or do you care for music?” I slid a straight-back chair under Mrs. Thicknesse, who had declined the leather one Cheshire had offered her, on the ground that deep furniture was bad for one. “It mashes up the withins like a bag pudding,” she declared. “Do you like music, Mr. Cheshire?”
“Music is the universal language. I osculate between jazz and the better, personally,” Pete said, thoughtfully wrinkling what there was of his brow. “What I can’t stand is this in-between, that sweet popular stuff.”
“It’s claptrap in the main,” Mrs. Thicknesse agreed.
“Craptrap is right, and the main is just where it belongs.” Cheshire navigated the room as he talked, twirling on his finger a keychain tethered to a trouser pocket. He had no end of winking gear. “The other day I heard a waltz by Wayne King. I threw up.”
“You were quite right It’s not the true folk expression, as jazz is, but a bastard form.”
“Bastard is right.” Say, this dame was all right, Pete was thinking. “Guy Lombardo is another one.”
I got Pete back on his Ode to Night, and pouring us paper cups of dry sack from a bottle I kept in my desk, soon had all our tongues a-wagging. There was a subtle balance of ingredients here. Pete Cheshire breathed a bracing air, which Mrs. Thicknesse clairvoyantly sensed herself to constitute: the social atmosphere that Cheshire, owing to obscure elements within himself, was driven to impress. She opened a window on his apocalypse. Pete’s game, you see, was to be suave. As young men plan to go into medicine or law, he planned to go into suavity. The yeast that activated him was in reality the same as that which worked in Nickie Sherman, with whom he was about to match wits, and in myself too, for that matter. It was after all but the simple wish for worldly patina, so present in all of us in some form or other; in Pete’s case movie-nourished, woman-haunted, bathed in swank; containing within the same circuit of associations a restaurant for smart people in which he would officiate in a tux, and a smoothie who might show up there, also in a tux, between feats of legerdemain at the cutomers’ library safes. He could see himself in either role and the smallest shift in fate could send him into either; thus the Lamplighter was right in divining his ward to be where he considered him: at the forks.
“Of course I’ll need backing,” Cheshire said when he had reviewed his ambition for the newcomer.
Mrs. Thicknesse dug in her bag and gave him a hundred dollars. “Take this, Mr. Cheshire. A sort of start on all the saving up you’ll have to do. Take it and go thy way.”
“How can I ever thank you?” Cheshire said, pocketing it. “I’ll do all I can to justify your faith in me. I aim to run a mature restaurant where people can enjoy the group spirit.”
“Never mind that,” Mrs.
Thicknesse said, as from behind her back I also gesticulated for Pete to lay off that. “It’s your own spirit that’s important, which if you lose it and gain the whole world, or even the local trade, you have nothing.”
I coughed, as to ask who was Lamplighter here. But it was to Mrs. Thicknesse Pete continued to give account; she who sent him off with a final word of blessing; she who watched his departure from the window as I had his arrival.
“Well!” I said ironically. “You certainly have a lot of faith in him.”
“I have next to none.” She turned back from the window. “It’s usually too late to whip the crust back into the batter, despite what science would have us hope about remaking people in its image. You see I’m a skeptic—about science.”
“Then why …?”
“Bread on the waters. Call it that,” she said with a smile. “Maybe it will come back after many days, maybe not.” The room had begun to darken, and in the soft summer dusk her words took on a sad felicity. I lit no lamps. Every once in a while Mrs. Thicknesse drew a breath on purpose. She inhaled a lungful of air now as though conscious of ingesting a fraction of the universe, and sat down. “I have a great curiosity about people. I have a great curiosity about you.”
I transferred my gaze to my blotter pad, resuming my own seat, and murmured some acknowledgment. In the muting twilight I thought I had never seen a handsomer woman; everywhere persuasion of line for the journeying eye, a suppleness of posture and gesture subtly elongating, as it were, the work of a sculptor with his heart set on classic amplitudes. She had a perfection of tone about her, like that of ripe fruit. But of course there the resemblance ended, for Mrs. Thicknesse was voracious rather than edible.
“I’m so tired,” she said, brushing eyes with finger tips. “So if you’re not otherwise involved what about coming along home and listening to a little Chopin? I have the new Horowitz of the B-flat Minor.”
As we glided smoothly toward the limits of the city, Mrs. Thicknesse deploring dianetics as she drive, I thought of Harry Clammidge, my boss, and chuckled nervously to myself. He had forbidden me to call love the lotus that turns into lettuce, forcing me to grind out the likes of, “A fellow has to pay for enjoying a woman’s lips by forever after taking her lip.” But now I felt the old boulevardier in me reawakened, given half a chance again. My wife at her mother’s with the family car thought I was spending the evening bowling; no yokels gaped at us from the evening sidewalks, or very few. I was with a woman with whom I might taste again a citified communication, that paradox and nuance which I had loved long since and lost awhile, of which her own mot of a moment ago, about being a skeptic on the side of tradition, was indeed itself an earnest. That Zeitgeist which had been choked off in my youth was abroad again.
Mrs. Thicknesse was saying something astringent about human motives. Glancing negligently out the car window I remarked, “We know God will forgive our sins. The question is what he will think of our virtues.”
It wasn’t La Rochefoucauld, maybe, but then neither was she any Mademoiselle de l’Enclos. We must make do with one another, in adventures as in marriage. Still she turned and smiled at me. “That’s rather neat,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were such a wit.”
Mrs. Thicknesse lived in a large house just beyond the city’s raveled end, where the country began. It was of white-washed brick, pleasantly scrawled with ivy. It had been remodeled often in its past, and was now an assemblage of added rooms and corners which clung to original sections like bridgework to surviving teeth. It was dark when we approached it from a twisting drive. I got out of the car and followed Mrs. Thicknesse who led the way into the house, snapping light switches as she went from room to room. The living room was done in tastefully chosen furniture from some bowlegged period, and as I stood taking it in a small French clock chimed ten o’clock. Bending to inspect a framed picture on the piano, I asked, “Your husband?”
“No, that is an early photograph of Rachmaninoff.”
Mrs. Thicknesse got us some brandy—no more evidence of house servants than of a chauffeur—then went to a huge phonograph beside which were toppling stacks of records. I told her I wasn’t terribly familiar with the B-flat Minor. She fixed that.
“Chopin’s own comments about it are interesting,” she declared. “Luckily we have some of the correspondence on it. ‘I am composing here a Sonata in B-flat Minor in which will be the Funeral March you have already,’ he wrote in 1839 from Madame Dudevant’s. She was, of course, George Sand.” I nodded, crossing the room to the sofa where I remained on my feet while Mrs. Thicknesse continued from the other end of the room on hers. “Much of Chopin’s most brilliant work dates from his growing passion for the novelist. The first movement of this is an ingeniously developed étude …” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other as she stood beside the already revolving turntable, record in hand, as though patiently waiting for herself to finish. “The Scherzo is a thrilling dance whose somber tensions are relieved by a melodic middle section. The third movement is the celebrated Funeral March, and the concluding one is a Presto of tremendous eloquence and vitality.”
She put the record on the turntable and set the tone arm in place.
We sat at opposite ends of the sofa, listening without speech. We leaned our heads back, Mrs. Thicknesse, on the whole, perhaps slightly more than I, and there was no stir between us for long periods. During the second movement, in the part where the somber tensions are relieved by a melodic middle section, her hand chanced to settle on the cushion between us, where one of mine already accidentally lay, so that our little fingers just touched.
Mrs. Thicknesse appeared unaware of it, and indeed the contact was so minute that she might very well have been; it was so microscopic that I had the sense of being joined to her by a single cell. It was the merest seed of sensation, there on our skin; sometimes I lost it, then there it was again, on the crust of one knuckle. I had the feeling of being myself it, of being reduced to an utter crumb of consciousness. The experience itself became at length monstrous.
The sonata over, we sat as we were while the needle rasped in its groove. Mrs. Thicknesse shook her head, the first to evict herself from our pentecostal trance. “What two hands can do,” she said, as I went over to shut off the phonograph. I saw that there was some more Chopin and some Liszt on the other side of the record, a long-playing one of course. “How that sense of order and beauty mocks our mechanistic one.”
“You don’t realize it till you hear it on hi fi.”
Mrs. Thicknesse rose. “Before going, would you like to play a little ‘vingt-et-un’?”
“I’d love to. One should always be eager to do things about which one knows absolutely nothing.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know one’s favorite game!” she chided, and, catching my hand, towed me into the back of the house where the dining room was. I chuckled again at what Clammidge might think if he knew that, instead of bowling, I had spent the evening trading niceties with his music critic and was going to finish it off with a little “vingt-et-un”—whatever that was.
“The object of the game is to obtain from the dealer such cards,” said Mrs. Thicknesse as she dealt them across the dining-room table, “that the sum of their pips, or spots, is as near as possible to twenty-one, without exceeding it.”
“‘Twenty-one’! Of course, I know that,” I said, falling happily to. Like the man in Molière who learns that he has been talking prose all his life without knowing it, I discovered that I had been playing vingt-et-un all mine without realizing it. I liked the game a lot, played it with my wife as a matter of fact, under the name of “black-jack” as well as “twenty-one.”
I read my face-up card, then took a peek at the facedown one. “Hit me lightly.” Mrs. Thicknesse slid a nine of spades across the table and I was over and she gathered the cards laughingly back.
“Why, my husband is away a good bit of the time. Sometimes a year at a stretch,” she told me. “South America mos
tly, where he has all sorts of interests—copper in Venezuela, a soft drink concession in Ecuador. One is practically an Enoch Arden widow.”
“How much of the year is he home would you say?”
“Not more than a month or two all told, and he spends half of that taking pictures. One of your camera fiends. Not that I mind that, even as his longsuffering model. Oh, I’ll not bore you by trotting any of them out. There are simply bales.”
“I like to look at pictures,” I said, frowning at my cards.
“Most of them are nude—studies, do you call them?”
“Hit me.… I don’t mind. Hit me once more, ever so lightly. Vingt-et-un!”
Mrs. Thicknesse twisted around in her chair and looked off into a small anteroom. “Well, just a few then.” She went into the anteroom and returned with a large green envelope from which photographs of every description cascaded when she overturned it.
They ranged from snapshots to cabinet-size, and were of everything from bisected leeks to empty doorways, but the bulk were of Mrs. Thicknesse and most of those were nudes. I had a furthered sense of the subject’s moulding. I mean that even still I expected to find Rubens and encountered—perhaps not Cranach, but something remarkably close to it. The impression was in part fostered by the “stretching” effect that seemed to be the photographer’s obsession: she was forever reaching over something, or toward something, or at something, like Eve aspiring toward an implied apple. There was one of her lying on her back with a knee arched up and one arm outflung above her head in a suggestion of lyric ruin. The eye was carried in one highlighted line from foot to chin, detained only by a soft sparkle, like a thistle of light, on one tinctured breast, and sent along the profile away to a dark smoke of hair. There must have been a rational explanation to all of this. This was the body linked by circumstance to that peculiar mind and that preposterous name; a body lying in smashed light or some damn-fool notion of vivisected space, left reaching for unincluded and probably unrenderable fruit.
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