Love Among the Cannibals

by Wright Morris

  “Woman!” I said, I mean I almost shouted, and I thought I could see her, with that sea of kelp behind her, and when the dark spoke to me with her voice I put my tongue to my lips and realized they were sore.

  III

  If I’d known what the day was going to be like I’d not have got up.

  Mac was up first. I found him in the bathroom squeezing blackheads and experimenting with an oil for people who want a tan but who can’t stand the sun. You put this one on your skin with a little roller the way they now paint plaster in your apartment. It goes without saying how it looked on Mac.

  “Why don’t you just face it?” I said.

  He put the tube down, exclaimed, “Why don’t we face it! Christamighty, it’s great! You know what I mean?”

  When he sees a song hit in every remark, the die is cast—if you know what I mean. Eyes lidded, his pitted face shiny with love, he crooned:

  “Why don’t we just face it?”

  “That’s nice,” I said. “What a pity that a song called “How Deep Is the Ocean?” has the same tune.”

  “That come out before my time,” said Mac, injured.

  “I know,” I said, “both you and Bridey Murphy.”

  Repartee is not his great forte, so he said, “I told the chick I’d meet her down there at twelve,” then he plugged in his razor so he wouldn’t hear what I said. I didn’t say it. I don’t suppose I cared. I can’t both love and bite the hand that feeds me, so I went out to the kitchen and poured some juice. I had to force it down. I wasn’t sick. I just couldn’t eat. In high school I fell in love with a girl who cost me my letter in basketball and tennis. I lost so much weight and got so weak I had to quit the team. She wore blue tennis sneakers on her long flat feet and carried a pencil box in a matching color, and either one of those objects will upset me to this day.

  “I also told her,” Mac said, “we’d have some friends around to meet her. You know what I mean?”

  “You mean Hoppy and the boys?”

  That was what he meant. Hoppy is a gent who entertains himself with the flotsam of show biz. He specializes, so to speak, in the boys who want just one more chance. By an odd sort of coincidence they are all red-lipped boys who impersonate girls. If you want to know what else Hoppy has, it’s a controlling interest in the nightclub circuit.

  “If she’s gonna make time,” said Mac, “she’s gotta make it with Hoppy.” I didn’t deny it, and he added, “I gave him a call. He said he’d bring the boys over.”

  I walked through the house to the phone I had used, put my juice on the floor, dialed the number. She answered.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Oh—” That was all.

  “I hope I didn’t catch you burping one of them,” I said.

  “There’s always something.”

  “Are your lips as sore as mine?”

  “Put baby oil on them,” she said. Very matter-of-factly. Your Friendly Druggist giving you free advice. I had felt reasonably well. Suddenly I felt damp all over and weak. I took a grip on myself, said:

  “You said to call—”

  “I get one night off a week,” she replied, “and that was last night.”

  “Look, Greek—” I began.

  “I’ve had a hard life,” I heard her say, as if she had turned to speak over her shoulder, “and I’ve come to realize you can’t ignore the basic things.”

  “Right,” I said, hardly caring what I said. “You are one of mine.”

  I think that stumped her. It did wonders for me. That feeling at the pit of my stomach that wouldn’t go one way or the other, once I got that said it came right up.

  “She’s gone from twelve to one-thirty.”

  “Who is?”

  “Mrs. Mattson.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I must stay here.”

  I paused a moment, as if before leaping, then I said: “I’ll be there.”

  “Leave your car in the road,” she said. “I’ll be watching.” Then she hung up.

  I was still sitting there, my glass of juice on the floor, when Mac came along.

  “You don’t have to sneak off to do it, man. You know what I mean?”

  “I got an appointment at twelve,” I said, “so I’ll run you down to the beach a little early.”

  “That chick’s got to get clearance from me,” he said. “You bring her around.”

  Just the idea made me weak again. Mac was a clown, a real slob, but if he happened to be part of her development—if she wanted to make him a gift of life?

  “You don’t look good, man,” he said. “What kinda chick you call that?”

  I left him there and went out on the sun deck over the garage. If you live in a world of clichés, as I do, some of them of the type you coined yourself, you may not realize how powerful they can be. Farther down the canyon, in one of those Good Places you see in House Pitiful every month, with a tile swimming pool the shape of a kidney, two or three chicks were spread out like towels drying in the sun. One had a coolie hat over her face, one lay on her tummy rather than her back, but either way fairly similar merchandise. They had a portable radio on a beach chair, and the boys were doing “On the Street Where You Live,” the lyrics drifting up the canyon to my roof. You won’t believe it, but I had to turn around and go in. That street where she lived, over off Kentwood, was just two or three canyons away, and I could see that drive, the flower bed on the turn, the gate opening into the court, and coming toward me on the lawn that goddess with the child on her hip.

  The effect on me was about the same as the feeling I have about “The Song of the Lark,” the painting that is, I forget who by, but a copy of it dominated my boyhood. That girl, too, with the scythe in her hand, had about her a simple womanly beauty that moved my nine-year-old heart to do strange things. The song of the lark, in a crazy way, not being there in the picture at all, was perhaps as close as we come to portraying the sentiments of love. You can see the effect well enough, but not the stimulus. Why a street no different from ten thousand others, on which I had been just once in my life, should almost make me weak to think about it, is both gruesome and marvelous—depending on your point of view. I was too ashamed to stay out there on the roof and face up to it. I went back to the kitchen and ate some cottage cheese, the way you would force down damp surgical dressing, then I remembered to shave, take a shower, and brush my teeth. My lower lip was so sore that it had cracked. We didn’t have any baby oil around the place, but I found some rancid olive oil, left by the last tenant, and applied a little of that. I killed some more time packing the car with our usual beach paraphernalia, then went in and told Mac to snap it up. He did. It’s one of the few advantages that come from worrying him.

  A good half-hour earlier than he intended, I drove him down Sunset to the beach, where layer after layer of cotton-heavy fog was blowing in. Not more than two or three beach umbrellas had been put up. Really bleak; one of those melancholy ruins you see so often in modern painting, dappled with bottles, cans, strips of newspaper, and a body or two. Mac was just too numb to complain about it. Real emotion leaves him speechless—I mean even more speechless—and we unloaded the car and pitched the camp without a word. As an extra piece of dog he had decided to wear a black velvet sports shirt, with nautical buttons, and his hairy white legs were streaked with this liquid tan. He was also chewing a wad of chlorophyll gum. I left him there with a strong impulse to kick a little of the sand on him, the way a cat puts something unpleasant out of sight.

  It left me with half an hour to kill, so I drove around for ten minutes, going past the corner where I had picked her up. I went past the movie where she had stood for a moment out in front. I didn’t remember until too late that I might have driven down to Malibu and looked at the place where we had spent part of the night. Finally I drove up the street where she lived, and up near the top, where the altitude got me, she suddenly drove by me with this station wagon full of kids. She was at the wheel, over on my side
, and looked just great. A rather haggard, semipreserved female whom I took to be Mrs. Mattson sat on her right, a cigarette between her lips. She didn’t look at all like a woman who would have so many kids. But the turn today, I suppose, is to have them, painless, painful, or what have you, then let someone else raise them till you can ship them off to school.

  I parked in the road, as she had told me, then I killed a quarter-hour by just walking around, peering over the wall at the assorted dream houses and their swimming pools. They all seemed to have a dog that would bark, shared a Japanese gardener with their neighbor, and had a sprinkling system to water their odorless flowers. If looks mean anything, and they do, you can’t beat such looks. I’m the biggest fool in the world for pathos, and you can’t beat the pathos of a beautiful world in which nobody, and I mean nobody, knows how to live. That fact often makes me a little bitter, since I have to include myself, but having lived in one way or another for a day I was tolerant. I felt a tender pity for these ghosts, most of them decent sorts of human beings, who had everything but a man or a woman to make their heads spin, who had it all, lock, stock, and barrel. And it crossed my mind at that moment that this was why they had settled for these things. The man or woman being lacking, what else was there? Houses and swimming pools.

  I didn’t mean a dream girl, or even my girl, but the woman who in walking across a lawn makes your mouth go dry with the sense of a fatal rendezvous. What that spider probably feels, I suppose, when he meets the lady who dines on him. What a woman feels when she knows that the man lying there with her may give her a baby, and the man that he may soon have a sore on his lip. Well, let him, she says, and it is the let him that has gone out of it. Now it didn’t make me bitter. I just felt sorry as hell for all of them.

  I killed another twenty minutes brushing out the car, where I found a mother-of-pearl compact, a leather-covered lighter, and two prophylactics, unused. Signs of the times, that is. Mine and yours. That brought me to twelve, so I walked up the drive to the gate, where the colored maid had one of the little ones out in a pram.

  “You the one for Eva?” she asked, and I said I was. I watched her face to see if that amused her, but she was a woman long accustomed to it. All Evas in general, that is, and the men who showed up for them.

  I asked her how many kids there were and she said five, just the word five, but in such a way that she had the whole picture summed up in it. She rolled her eyes from the child in the pram to take in the house, the lot, and the sky. “She has ’em, we take care of ’em,” she said, but she did not laugh.

  Along the front of the house there were klieg lights of the sort they have out in front of movie houses or signboards they want lit up at night. She saw me looking at them and said, “Mrs. Mattson scared to death of kidnappers. Eva tell you not to prowl around at night?”

  I shook my head. No, Eva had not told me anything like that. It might be that a middle-aging man might think twice—while he could—before being shot down in the driveway as a kidnapper. I wandered back down the drive to my car and sat in the seat, for another twenty minutes, till the station wagon came up behind me and honked. The Greek was in it alone. She put her head out to say, “You better hurry up, I’ve only got about half an hour,” without a word about the fact that I’d just waited longer than that. I followed her car up the drive, then followed her across the lawn to the door at the side, which opened directly into her room. It looked like a student’s room, with a case of books, a desk with a portable typewriter on it, a record player in one corner, with a pile of sheet music on the floor. On her desk was the picture of a young man in his cap and gown, confidently smiling, and turning to see what it was I saw she said: “My brother.” That was all.

  I waited while she slipped off what she had on and slipped into a white dress, a uniform, then she said, “Come—” and I followed her down one of the halls. We passed several children-littered rooms to the kitchen, where a frozen turkey thawed in the sink and the morning dishes were stacked to one side, waiting to be washed.

  “I got behind,” she said; “you’re always behind,” and put a saucepan on the stove, over a low fire, added a cup of water, and put the baby’s bottle in it. From the icebox she took a carton of yogurt, from the shelf over the sink a can of fruit salad, stirred the fruit and the yogurt together, spooned out two helpings, and passed one of them to me. “You probably didn’t have your lunch either,” she said, and began to eat. I watched her eat, then she left the kitchen to return in a moment with the little one, soaking in his diaper. She placed him on the changing rack, slipped the diaper off, wiped him with a tissue, powdered him from a can, then folded him like a chop into a clean diaper. She went off with him, then came back and finished her lunch. I had not eaten a bite of mine and she said, “You must eat it. You need it,” and put her own spoon into my bowl, fed it to me. I took a mouthful, but could hardly swallow. “This is not the time for your hurt feelings,” she said. “Eat.”

  “Along with my feelings,” I said, “I can’t stand canned fruit salad.”

  “Oh!” she said. “I’m sorry.” She was.

  “I don’t mean to complain,” I said. “This is California. You can’t have everything.”

  She left the room and returned with the child, holding him in her arm so she could bottle feed him. He went for the bottle, but one waving hand found the opening to her dress, hooked on to her bra strap.

  “If you knew me, I don’t think you’d like me,” she said. She did not raise her eyes to look at me.

  “Maybe he wouldn’t either,” I said, and watched her slip his hand from inside of her dress. “I’m like him. I’m not so sure that it matters.” She raised her eyes, and I added, “Not at this stage.”

  I held her gaze, she held mine, and I walked around the table, tipped back her head, and she repeated no, no, no, no, no—up to the moment I took her breath, nothing more, from her lips. She turned and went off with the child again, and from the room down the hall she said:

  “You probably don’t want children, do you—at your age?”

  It was not something I had given any thought. I saw now that I wanted a child, but not if I thought he would deprive me of his mother. The lover, too, is a child. But the child-lover had the advantages.

  “You better go now,” she said. “She’ll be back any minute.”

  I just stood there for a moment, doing nothing, then I left. I went down the hall but made a wrong turn into a bathroom, where diapers were drying, and several large plastic fish, with an assortment of boats, floated in the tub. I backed out and found my way to her room, out the door, and almost ran across the yard. The latent kidnapper in every man’s conscience, I suppose. The inside of the car had got hot with the top up, and while I was trying to get it down, a cab, with Mrs. Mattson in it, came up the road and made the turn. A minute or two later, with the colored maid in it, it came back down. I drove back to Sunset, then west to the sea where, the morning fog had lifted, the beach was crowded, and I had to hunt around for a place to park. I found Mac and his chick under the umbrella, tête-à-tête. They were playing through a pile of Mac’s old records and drinking beer out of pint-size cans.

  “It’s a great day, man!” Mac yelled, and he looked pretty good. Either she had got him down into the water or dipped a rag in it and wiped off his streaky sun tan. He had a flush of color in his face, and the crucifix he wore looked like a war medal. Billie gave me her hand and a nice intimate sort of squeeze.

  “How’d every little thing go, man?” asked Mac, and I rolled my eyes to indicate that it had gone splendid. “You gotta watch these chicks, man. They get emotional. You know what I mean?”

  Christ knows why, but I suddenly sang:

  “A cannibelle’s affection is a dangerous thing.

  She prefers the knuckle to the wedding ring.

  The banquet of love

  Is the one she cooks

  Without the aid of how-to-do-it books.”

  There was a silence. It lasted fo
r some time, then Mac said:

  “Man, how you fit that into the Mexican picture?”

  “I’m working on it,” I said. And sure enough, I was.

  We ran up toward Santa Barbara for dinner, looking every inch the sort of people who are living the life that has escaped everybody else. The chick in between us—there is something touching about the single chick between the two wolves—and I could see the passing glances calculate which one of us boys was her own true love. What I mean to say is, we gave everybody his money’s worth.

  We had charcoal-broiled steaks at one of these clubs with the slanting windows, seeing-eye doors, and the glimmer of candles in the eyes of women fifty-five and up. The nicest people in the world, by their own standards, having eaten their farrow, buried their husbands, and now finally deserving a bit of the finer things in life. A little woman with the face of the smiling Christ and arms like the bags of shot they hang on ash trays, couldn’t take her watering eyes off Billie’s face. Two men. On the coast of California in a place called Mambo with two men.

  The Mambo Ensemble came on about ten and consisted of four Fifty-second Street holdouts, one of whom Mac knew personally. A torch-type singer with that rocky hip tic that is considered to be sexy sang two Mexican songs for “ee-frr-poddys leesnink pleshr,” as she said. Before she finished I had to revise my usual misconceptions of the public, and see a great future for Miss Harcum singing “What Next?” I didn’t have long to wait. Mac had got up, I thought to make a trip to the men’s room, but he walked up front and spoke to this bass fiddle player. By this fellow’s standards, Mac was tremendous, being a man who wrote songs they actually paid for, and the effect on this group was magic. They all came to life. Even this torch singer until she heard that Mac had brought along his own little “towtch singah.” He came back to our table for Billie, then led her up front, beside the piano, and by this time the excitement in this place was almost real. Right before their eyes a star, caesarean, was being born. All of those women who had known we must be someone were almost out of their minds to see that they had been right. Mac himself sat at the piano, turning on the stool so he could beam at Miss Harcum, and there’s no cliché in the world to equal the guy who steps from the crowd, sits down at the piano, and begins to play.