“I don’t know what to think,” I said.
“Well, I am. I’ve been a heel for so long, old man, I’m going to make something good out of it. I’m going to write the greatest book a shit-heel ever wrote.”
“Baudelaire was no slouch,” I said.
“I could make him yell doctor, old man.”
I didn’t know but what he could. A lot depends on your standards, and he had the highest admiration for Baudelaire.
“I know what Lawrence thinks,” I said, but I didn’t mean that the way it naturally sounded. I didn’t mean to imply that we had talked it over behind his back. “He thinks you’ve got the gift,” I said, and the book Proctor was holding dropped to the floor. He was sitting on the tub, but he didn’t stoop over to pick it up. “He didn’t mean the gift of gab either,” I said. I knew that was what he must be thinking. I had thought so myself, at the time, but it was not what Lawrence meant. I didn’t know, as a matter of fact, what the hell he meant.
“This is no bullshit, old man?” Proctor said.
“He said it like he meant it,” I said, “whatever the hell he meant by it.”
That was all we said about it. Proctor just sat there staring into the tub. I thought he was sitting there mulling it over, but he suddenly got up, came back to my corner, and unrolled about eight or ten feet of toilet paper. Then he went back to the tub and placed it over the slope at the back. He tapped the drain end of the tub with the toe of his shoe, and a big cockroach, trapped in the tub, came up the ramp so fast it nearly spilled over at the top. Then it went around the rim, one game leg dragging, and disappeared through a crack in the wall plaster.
“Proctor Salvage Operations,” he said and rolled up the paper he had put down. He came back to the corner for a look at my hand. “How’s it feel, old man?”
It didn’t feel good at all, but I said, “Fine.” I added, “I think I better run along, though, just in case, and get something on it.”
“Mind if I put you in the book, old man?” he said and smiled, but when I said, “Me and the cockroach, you mean?” he stopped grinning. I could see that the cockroach was already part of it. I wasn’t. The salvage operations hadn’t got around to me. “It’s all right with me,” I said, “but I think you better clear it with the cockroach,” then we left the bathroom and walked down the hall to his door.
“It’s been a great pleasure, old man,” he said, “but I better get on with my packing.”
“You leaving?”
“Got to scoot for Brooklyn tomorrow, old man. I’m a heel, you know, but I owe it to my mother.”
“In that case,” I said, “I’ll see you back at school.”
“Sure thing,” he said, slapped me on the back, then let his door stand open while I walked down the hall.
I passed a tall blond girl who had been eavesdropping on the landing of the stairs. She had a saucer with some pieces of fresh fudge on it, and when I got to the landing she said, “You Lawrence?”
“No, I’m Foley,” I said, taken by surprise.
“Just so you’re not Lawrence,” she said, and she stood there on the landing till I reached the door. It made me wonder how much Arlene Miller had grown since I’d seen her last.
The day before I left for school I had a card from Proctor, mailed from Santa Fe. They had stopped at the La Fonda, he said, to pick up some more towels. On the following Thursday I went out on the mail train that got me to Colton by Sunday morning, and I rode up with the baggage man to our new suite of rooms in the dorms. Thanks to Lawrence we now had a tile shower, a fireplace with a gas log, and the Los Angeles Times delivered every morning at the door. It was lying there in the hall when I walked up. A big two-column picture of Lawrence was on the front of it. I thought he might have just won another title—they were playing tournament in southern California—but the caption read:
TENNIS STAR SURVIVES
FREAK, ACCIDENT
I read that Lawrence, with his college companion, had driven off the road near Williams, Arizona, where the lanterns marking a detour in the road had gone out. His companion, Jesse Proctor, suffered barbed-wire cuts on the arms and face. Lawrence had escaped with a crushed finger on his right hand.
“That you, baby?” Lundgren said, calling to me from the shower; then he said, “I will now sing you a little ditty,” and sang, “ ‘Who’s going to bite your neck when my teeth are gone.’ ”
Then he came to the door of the room, the towel in his hand. The summer at Jackson Hole had been good for him. He was black except for the white saddle at the crotch. He dropped the towel on the floor, stepped on it, ran his hands down his wet body so that the crisp golden hairs all went the same way. Riding on a burro had rubbed some of them off between his legs.
“Pretty swanky little dump, eh, baby?” he said, and we looked at the room together, and the brown imitation gas log in the fireplace. “I miss the smell of the can though,” he said and combed his hair. Turning to face the mirror, he said, “What the hell’s eating you, baby?”
“Lawrence banged up his right hand a little,” I said and held up the morning paper.
Lundgren walked across the rug, leaving his wet tracks on it, and read the article.
FOLEY: 8
A squirrel, like a stone skipping on water, hopped across the asphalt of Washington Square, the surface dark with rain except where the puddles reflected the sky. Foley made his way between them, careful not to shatter what was now at peace. The smell of dogs, wet leaves, and moist earth hovered in the air trapped under the trees. He took a seat on a bench where the leaves dripped rain on the walk. He was reminded—he sat there, that is, in order to be reminded—of Peter Foley, still to be found, unfaded, on the flyleaf of the Latin books on his shelves. There was about that Peter Foley something reassuring, and something puzzling. He seemed to be a pleasant sort of character to know; he was fond of his mother, a hard worker, anxious to master the pluperfect subjunctive, and every bit as immortal as Tom Swift or the Rover Boys. He did not change, grow up or grow old, marry the right or wrong girl, come to a good or bad end, or merely peter out, as most men seemed destined to do. No, that Peter Foley was out of time, time and the river of silt had passed him by, although a certain erosion was noticeable in the softer parts. The heart, the liver, and the pudding in the hollow round of the skull.
Down the steaming walk, slantwise across the square, Foley could see the mute gallery around the chess players—four men playing, ten, twelve men gathered to watch. Absorbed. Iron filings gathered around the still point. World around them breaking up like an ice pack, but peace on the cake on which they were floating—peace and chivalrous war with the knights and the hazardous life of the pawns. Man nearest to Foley, hat in hand, was avocado-shaped veteran in fireman’s braces, fanning himself with the hat, not from the heat but from concern. He could see what was coming. Could hardly bear to wait. Ulcerous price of the terrible gift of prophecy. At his side, clasping rolled newspaper, tall man with wide, forked hips, like a mare, legs of pants spaced out so child could run between them, play London Bridge. Right arm dangling large yellow hand, curiously disembodied in the shadow, palm turned back like fingered flipper hanging at rest. Fingers twitched as if dusting invisible cigarette. Swarthy keeper of vines now an idle white collar, hand reduced to head-scratching, crotch-adjusting, and gestures on the thin air to illustrate a fine point. Five-fingered toy to help idle grownups pass the time. Foley glanced at his own soft houseman’s hand, fingers almost hairless, palm almost fleshless, worn down to smooth claw for correcting papers, bizarrely jeweled with old Navajo craftsman’s coin silver ring. Also nicotine stains, the egghead’s suntan, several pitted scars resembling moon craters, left over from rash of big warts he had chewed on as a boy.
“God bless you!” the voice said, but for a moment Foley missed the man behind it, for no more than his head showed above the signboards and no more than his feet below them. A human sandwich. “God bless you!” he repeated and, seeing something in Foley’
s face that disturbed him, he poked an arm from the sandwich and crooked his hand around to point at the sign. Foley read:
DON’T WORRY!
GOD
HAS
A
LAYAWAY
PLAN
He may have looked relieved as the man turned away, offered his message to the couple on the bench across from Foley. “God bless the little one!” he said. They sat with a baby stroller between them, the little one pink and sore with a summer rash. The mother smirked, but the father with an animated face said, “Kitchy, kitchy, kitchy!” He bent over the child and made a corkscrew noise, a wide-eyed baby face.
Foley closed his eyes, but on the lids he saw the great kitchy-kitchy lover, Charlie Chaplin, in his endless pursuit of the blind flower girl, his face forever pressed to the window of the florist shop. Another Layaway Plan. The first. Rapt face of the lover in love with love, the promises men live by, and the heavenly Bazaar of America.
“Kitchy-kitchy-kitchy!” the young man said, and the sour taste of pity coated Foley’s tongue. He opened one eye to watch human sandwich, blessing all as he passed, cross the square to the men’s room, leave his signboards parked where they would carry on the good work. Then he glanced at the bride, none could be fairer, only one of her kind with other lovers unhappy, thin, sallow-sad girl maybe twenty-six, maybe forty-one. On her feet a pair of Gimbel’s huaraches, plus dirt from cold-water flat.
Foley sounded an Ahhhhh, as if under pressure, and watched father toss his rash-pink child in the air. On his animated face, in his kitchy-kitchy-kitchy, well-advertised concern and security for loved ones, long vacations with pay, carefree old age in ranch-style home, stone’s throw from the ocean, cool, tangy breeze stirring flowers along the pickets, flaps on beach umbrella thrown up in the yard shading ever-fair bride from Time’s cruel onslaughts, and holding in her lap first bouncing grandchild of the male line. In neat two-car garage, oiling the power mower, friendly head of house smoking his Kaywoodie pipe as up the driveway comes smiling mailman with Rock of Ages monthly insurance check.
Dim and phantom-faint, ghostly as moon shadows, and yet like something tattooed on his eyeballs, over this diorama, hovering, Foley could see familiar shades. The shades of Lawrence and Proctor in this young man, the shade of Lou Baker in this faded bride, and in their dream of happiness, the udder-dripping cow, the oranges that grew to fall in the kitchen window, Foley recognized the bold, faint-hearted shade of himself. Shades of nature, that is, imitating art. The Girl of the Golden West, stars in her eyes, in an up-to-date Gimbel-gunned model, and the man with the golden dreams and the same immortal resolves:
No wasting time at Shafter’s
No more smoking or chewing
Read one improving book or magazine per week
Save $5
Be better to parents
Shades of shades, but still casting their shadow, the same golden sun lighting up the diorama, where the brooks too broad for leaping were easily leaped in the Elevator shoes. A little rough at the start, even a little sordid, but one fine day—as advertised in Life—that brook too broad for leaping would be lapping at the door. A heartbreak dream, with the soundtrack by Chaplin, full of young men still fighting Hemingway’s war, still loving and seducing Fitzgerald’s women, and believing in perfection—a machine-made perfection—if anything at all. A witness to the power, the glory, and the terrible risks of art.
The sun was still rising, or not rising, but it would not stand still. Coitus interruptus now continuous, the sex life of male, the female, and the gall wasp, given the green light, the VD smear, the analytic and disarming candor that came from a close and detached observation of the erotogenic zones. The facts, as anyone would tell you, spoke for themselves. But not for Lawrence, not for Proctor and Lou Baker, not for those shadows on the streets of Hiroshima, and not for those shades sprouting on the graves where the radioactive corpses were buried. They did not speak for these things, nor in this language. They spoke for themselves. The new man, the cybernetic marvel, opened his plastic jaws and said, I am a fact finder, then smiled to show his teeth and gums coated with Nature’s green. Under a cloud of unknowing, Foley arose, walked south across the square.
Hearing the whinny of Pegasus above him, he tipped his head back, gazed at the sky. The Flying Red Horse? It would not have surprised him. Nor did what he saw. There on the cooling sky, tossing their manes, were the heads of two big dray horses, protruding from the window on the top floor of a tenement. At the adjoining windows, unperturbed, were human heads. Curious about Foley. Not about horses peering from the windows of tenements. Wisps of straw fell from the blue lips of the white horse as she whinnied, blending with the voices, the traffic noise, and the persistent tang of fermenting manure. Both fine horses, wearing collars, and Foley waited for them to walk out on thin air, flap their wings, and make off for the cumulus peaks. Passing strange, but not at all stranger than Peter Foley, there on the corner, having come from no more than the glint in the eye of a chipmunk with nothing on its mind but a sublime audacity.
Foley walked to Broadway, took a southbound bus for a whiff of sea air or a ride on the ferry, but, passing City Hall square, he saw the gray stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. He left the bus and, in the lines of a force like the iron filings around Lundgren’s magnet, walked back through the square and out on the overhead bridge promenade.
When he had lived in Brooklyn, in the room beneath the room where Hart Crane had lived and worked on his poem, Foley had walked out on the bridge every day. He was writing no poem, nor anything else, but all that summer he thought he might, and he hoped that living in a house where poems had been written might help. It didn’t, but he had a wonderful time.
He had discovered the bridge for himself—that is, Lou Baker had not told him about it—and it was Foley who had told her about Brooklyn Heights. She had taken an apartment across the street, one at the back, with a view of the river and a small balcony where her gentlemen friends liked to sit. The balcony was so small the chairs sat inside, but the feet of the guests could be seen on the railing.
There were plants there now, and television aerials on the roof. Lou Baker no longer had that particular apartment—she had moved farther down the block, beyond the modern cliff dwellings where the roofs were spotted with beach umbrellas. Foley had never been there, nor had he walked across the bridge since the war. A strong wind now blew up the river, flapping the flags on the excursion steamers and whipping up a scud of whitecaps on the slate-blue surface of the bay.
There on the bridge, spooning ice cream from a carton, Lou Baker had turned Crane’s phrases on her tongue and let Foley understand that the Brooklyn Bridge was America. A span of art, that is, between the dream and the reality. A bird’s wing, no more, across the broken gap of memory. Become a fistful of words, a modern corn-dance ceremony for making rain.
At such moments Lou Baker, a raddled oracle, her Left Bank hairdo like a wig on her gauntness, was nevertheless possessed by the authentic Delphic air. They had not been deceived, she would have him know. They had been possessed by a truth. Perhaps by too many truths, as it happened, every other one a seeming contradiction, but as they eroded, like Proctor, the bedrock truth stuck out. Lou Baker knew it, Foley knew it, and he had watched her yellow fingers fumble at her lips for the tobacco crumbs that were no longer there. Had not been since that Delphic spring in Paris, when she had rolled her own.
As if time had not passed, as if life had not been lived, as if she were still Montana Lou Baker and that endlessly rising sun had never set.
Gull dung, wind-borne up the river, splashed on the bridge cable vibrating with traffic and left a creamy splatter on the back of Foley’s hand. He wiped it on the iron rail along the walk, picking up a smear of rust. As he passed the Squibb tower he inhaled the aroma of the paste.
On Henry Street he paused to consider a row of bottles, packed in straw like eggs, and at the back of the window an advertised special, the square Jack
Daniel’s bottle with the sober black label. He whistled softly, reading the price. He passed, turned and came back, and with the Jack Daniel’s in a tight paper bag he cut through the dim, haunted lobby of the St. George Hotel. Then headed down the street toward the gap over the river, the soft-focus view of Manhattan, seen through the haze of river traffic and tugboat horns. Turning left, on Columbia Heights, heard wind-blown song of street singer, in street shadow himself, but facing windows where the sun was ablaze. From one such window, partly curtained, a coin fell end over end, sparkling, then dropped soundlessly, like lead, in the summer-soft street. Singer did not stoop, hut with bird’s cocked eye sidled quickly to where he could put a shoe on it, one that was hand-boned, hand-stained, and bench-crafted, but unshined.
THE CAPTIVITY: IX
Lundgren and I Were still in bed the morning that Proctor came in and yelled, “Where the hell is everybody?” then went off leaving the door open, as if the rooms needed a change of air.
Later that day, between classes, I saw him waxing the floor in the mess hall, the new barbed-wire scars in a white criss-cross on the top of his head. Another ran along his jaw, like bone showing through his beard. In the evening Lawrence was back, black as an Arab and looking great. There was not a scratch on him that you could see, but he was wearing a pair of chamois gunning gloves. When he came in he gave me that smile and said, “You’ll pardon the glove, old man,” and put into my palm the good fingers of his right hand. They had saved the thumb. Enough of it, that is, to fill out the glove.
We had our first class rally that night, in the Greek Theater, under the stars. Nobody nominated Lawrence, Proctor, or Lundgren for anything. I was nominated for class treasurer but declined. Sydney Brown, who ran the school Vespers and introduced all the Visiting Artists, won the presidency from Clip Gower, a football man. A resolution was proposed and passed that all members of the class, high and low, should take more active participation in college life. Then the candles were lit, the glee club sang, and the flame of life was passed across the darkness, hand to hand, in the traditional flame-passing ceremony. The Ghosts danced the ghost dance, wearing the white sheets with the skull and crossbones glowing in the dark, and the giant Colton C was lit up on the mountains, blinking like a banner hanging from a blimp, and as we walked back through the wash to the dorms Proctor said, “Christ, what bullshit!”
The Huge Season Page 15