“Have you ever smoked hashish?” she asked.
He looked nervously toward the young boy.
“I tried it once,” he said in a low voice. “It didn’t do anything for me. I prefer alcohol.”
“Do you drink a lot?”
“No.”
The boy was wearing white flannel bags, white leather loafers, a white knitted singlet that left his slim arms bare. He moved slowly, crossing his legs, stretching, pouting. Celia Montfort turned her head to look at him. Did a signal pass?
“Tony,” she said.
Immediately Valenter put a hand tenderly on the boy’s shoulder.
“Time for your lethon, Mathter Montfort,” he said.
“Oh, pooh,” Tony said.
They walked from the room side by side. The lad stopped at the door, turned back, made a solemn bow in Blank’s direction.
“I am very happy to have met you, sir,” he said formally.
Then he was gone. Valenter closed the door softly behind them.
“A handsome boy,” Daniel said. “What school does he go to?”
She didn’t answer. He turned to look at her. She was peering into her wine glass, twirling the stem slowly in her long fingers. The straight black hair fell about her face: the long face, broody and purposeful.
She put her wine glass aside and rose suddenly. She moved casually about the room, and he swiveled his head to keep her in view. She touched things, picked them up and put them down. He was certain she was naked beneath the satin shift. Cloth touched her and flew away. It clung, and whispered off.
As she moved about, she began to intone another of what was apparently an inexhaustible repertoire of monologues. He was conscious of planned performance. But it was not a play; it was a ballet, as formalized and obscure. Above all, he felt intent: motive and plan.
“My parents are such sad creatures,” she was saying. “Living in history. But that’s not living at all, is it? It’s an entombing. Mother’s silk chiffon and father’s plus-fours. They could be breathing mannequins at the Costume Institute. I look for dignity and all I find is … What is it I want? Grandeur, I suppose. Yes. I’ve thought of it. But is it impossible to be grand in life? What we consider grandeur is always connected with defeat and death. The Greek plays. Napoleon’s return from Moscow. Lincoln. Superhuman dignity there. Nobility, if you like. But always rounded with death. The living, no matter how noble they may be, never quite make it, do they? But death rounds them out. What if John Kennedy had lived? No one has ever written of his life as a work of art, but it was. Beginning, middle, and end. Grandeur. And death made it. Are you ready? Shall we go?”
“I hope you like French cooking,” he muttered. “I called for a reservation.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
The dance continued during dinner. She requested a banquette: they sat side by side. They ate and drank with little conversation. Once she picked up a thin sliver of tender veal and fed it into his mouth. But her free hand was on his arm, or in his lap, or pushing her long hair back so that the bottle green satin was brought tight across button nipples. Once, while they were having coffee and brandy, she crossed her knees. Her dress hiked up; the flesh of her thighs was perfectly white, smooth, glistening. He thought of good sea scallops and Dover sole.
“Do you like opera?” she asked in her abrupt way.
“No,” he said truthfully. “Not much. It’s so—so made up.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “it is. Artificial. But it’s just a device: a flimsy wire coat hanger, and they hang the voices on that.”
He was not a stupid man, and while they were seated at the banquette he became aware that her subtle movements—the touchings, the leanings, the sudden, unexpected caress of her hair against his cheek—these things were directorial suggestions, parts of her balletic performance. She was rehearsed. He wasn’t certain of his role, but wanted to play it well.
“The voices,” she went on, “the mighty voices that give me the feeling of suppressed power. With some singers I get the impression that there is art and strength there that hasn’t been tapped. I get the feeling that, if they really let themselves go, they could crush eardrums and shatter stained glass windows. Perhaps the best of them, throwing off all restraint, could crush the world. Break it up into brittle pieces and send all the chunks whirling off into space.”
He was made inferior by her soliloquies and made brave by wine and brandy.
“Why the hell are you telling me all this?” he demanded.
She leaned closer, pressed a satin-slicked breast against his arm.
“It’s the same feeling I get from you,” she whispered. “That you have a strength and resolve that could shatter the world.”
He looked at her, beginning to glimpse her intent and his future. He wanted to ask, “Why me?” but found, to his surprise, it wasn’t important.
The Mortons’ party leavened their heavy evening. Florence and Samuel, wearing identical red velvet jumpsuits, met them at the door with the knowing smirks of successful matchmakers.
“Come in!” Flo cried.
“It’s a marvelous party!” Sam cried.
“Two fights already!” Flo laughed.
“And one crying jag!” Sam laughed.
The party had a determined frenzy. He lost Celia in the swirl, and in the next few hours met and listened to a dozen disoriented men and women who floated, bumped against him, drifted away. He had a horrible vision of harbor trash, bobbing and nuzzling, coming in and going out.
Suddenly she was behind him, hand up under his jacket, nails digging into his shirted back.
“Do you know what happens at midnight?” she whispered.
“What?”
“They take off their faces—just like masks. And do you know what’s underneath?”
“What?”
“Their faces. Again. And again!”
She slipped away; he was too confused to hold her. He wanted to be naked in front of a mirror, making sure.
Finally, finally, she reappeared and drew him away. They flapped hands at host and hostess and stepped into the quiet corridor, panting. In the elevator she came into his arms and bit the lobe of his left ear as he said, “Oh,” and the music from wherever was playing “My Old Kentucky Home.” He was sick with lust and conscious that his life was dangerous and absurd. He was teetering, and pitons were not driven nor ice ax in.
There was Valenter to open the door for them, the sweetheart rose wilted. His face had the sheen of a scoured iron pot, and his lips seemed bruised. He served black coffee in front of the tiled fireplace. They sat on the leather couch and stared at blue embers.
“Will that be all, Mith Montfort?”
She nodded; he drifted away. Daniel Blank wouldn’t look at him. What if the man should wink?
Celia went out of the room, came back with two pony glasses and a half-full bottle of marc.
“What is that?” he asked.
“A kind of brandy,” she said. “Burgundian, I think. From the dregs. Very strong.”
She filled a glass, and before handing it to him ran a long, red tongue around the rim, looking at him. He took it, sipped gratefully.
“Yes,” he nodded. “Strong.”
“Those people tonight,” she said. “So inconsequential. Most of them are intelligent, alert, talented. But they don’t have the opportunity. To surrender, I mean. To something important and shaking. They desire it more than they know. To give themselves. To what? Ecology or day-care centers or racial equality? They sense the need for something more, and God is dead. So … the noise and hysteria. If they could find …”
Her voice trailed off. He looked up.
“Find what?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said, her eyes vague, “you know.”
She rose from the couch. When he rose to stand alongside her, she unexpectedly stepped close, reached out, gently drew down the lower lid of his right eye. She stared intently at the exposed eyeball.
; “What?” he said, confused.
“You’re not inconsequential,” she said, took him by the hand and led him upward. “Not at all.”
Dazed by drink and wonder, he followed docilely. They climbed the handsome marble staircase to the third floor. There they passed through a tawdry wooden door and climbed two more flights up a splintered wooden stairway flecked with cobwebs that kissed his mouth.
“What is this?” he asked once.
“I live up here,” she answered, turned suddenly and, being above him, reached down, pulled his head forward and pressed his face into the cool satin between belly and thighs.
It was a gesture that transcended obscenity and brought him trembling to his knees there on the dusty stairs.
“Rest a moment,” she said.
“I’m a mountain climber,” he said, and their whispered exchange seemed to him so inane that he gave a short bark of laughter that banged off dull walls and echoed.
“What?” he said again, and all the time he knew.
It was a small room of unpainted plank walls, rough-finished and scarred with white streaks as if some frantic beast had clawed to escape. There was a single metal cot with a flat spring of woven tin straps. On this was thrown a thin mattress, uncovered, the striped grey ticking soiled and burned.
There was one kitchen chair that had been painted fifty times and was now so dented and nicked that a dozen colors showed in bruised blotches. A bare light bulb, orange and dim, hung from a dusty cord.
The floor was patched with linoleum so worn the pattern had disappeared and brown backing showed through. The unframed mirror on the inside of the closed door was tarnished and cracked. The iron ashtray on the floor near the cot overflowed with cold cigarette butts. The room smelled of must, mildew, and old love.
“Beautiful,” Daniel Blank said wonderingly, staring about. “It’s a stage set. Any moment now a wall swings away, and there will be the audience applauding politely. What are my lines?”
“Take off your wig,” she said.
He did, standing by the cot with the hair held foolishly in his two hands, offering her a small, dead animal.
She came close and caressed his shaven skull with both hands.
“Do you like this room?” she asked.
“Well … it’s not exactly my idea of a love nest.”
“Oh it’s more than that. Much more. Lie down.”
Gingerly, with some distaste, he sat on the stained mattress. She softly pressed him back. He stared up at the naked bulb, and there seemed to be a nimbus about it, a glow composed of a million shining particles that pulsed, contracted, expanded until they filled the room.
And then, almost before he knew it had started, she was doing things to him. He could not believe this intelligent, somber, reserved woman was doing those things. He felt a shock of fear, made a few muttered protests. But her voice was soft, soothing. After awhile he just lay there, his eyes closed now, and let her do what she would.
“Scream if you like,” she said. “No one can hear.”
But he clenched his jaws and thought he might die of pleasure!
He opened his eyes and saw her lying naked beside him, her long, white body as limp as a fileted fish. She began undressing him with practiced fingers … opening buttons … sliding down zippers … tugging things away gently, so gently he hardly had to move at all …
Then she was using him, using him, and he began to understand what his fate might be. Fear, dissolved in a kind of sexual faint he had never experienced before as her strong hands pulled, her dry tongue rasped over his fevered skin.
“Soon,” she promised. “Soon.”
Once he felt a pain so sharp and sweet he thought she had murdered him. Once he heard her laughing: a thick, burbling sound. Once she wound him about with her smooth, black hair, fashioned a small noose and pulled it tight.
It went on and on, his will dissolving, a great weight lifting, and he would pay any price. It was climbing: mission, danger, sublimity. Finally, the summit.
Later, he was exploring her body and saw, for the first time, her armpits were unshaved. He discovered, hidden in the damp, scented hairs under her left arm, a small tattoo in a curious design.
Still later they were drowsing in each other’s sweated arms, the light turned off, when he half-awoke and became conscious of a presence in the room. The door to the corridor was partly open. Through sticky eyes he saw someone standing silently at the foot of the cot, staring down at their linked bodies.
In the dim light Daniel Blank had a smeary impression of a naked figure or someone dressed in white. Blank raised his head and made a hissing sound. The wraith withdrew. The door closed softly. He was left alone with her in that dreadful room.
5
ONE NIGHT, LYING NAKED and alone between his sateen sheets, Daniel Blank wondered if this world might not be another world’s dream. It was conceivable: somewhere another planet populated by a sentient people of superior intelligence who shared a communal dream as a method of play. And Earth was their dream, filled with fantasies, grotesqueries, evil—all the irrationalities they themselves rejected in their daily lives but turned to in sleep for relaxation. For fun.
Then we are all smoke and drifting. We are creatures of another world’s midnight visions, moving through a life as illogical as any dream, and as realistic. We exist only in a stranger’s slumber, and our death is his awaking, smiling at the mad, tangled plot his sleep conceived.
It seemed to Blank that since meeting Celia Montfort his existence had taken on the quality of a dream, the vaporous quality of a dream shot through with wild, bright flashes. His life had become all variables and, just before falling asleep to his own disordered dream, he wondered if AMROK II, properly programmed, might print out the meaning in a microsecond, as something of enormous consequence.
“No, no,” Celia Montfort said intently, leaning forward into the candlelight. “Evil isn’t just an absence of good. It’s not just omission; it’s commission, an action. You can’t call that man evil just because he lets people starve to put his country’s meager resources into heavy industry. That was a political and economic decision. Perhaps he is right, perhaps not. Those things don’t interest me. But I think you’re wrong to call him evil. Evil is really a kind of religion. I think he’s just a well-meaning fool. But evil he’s not. Evil implies intelligence and a deliberate intent. Don’t you agree, Daniel?”
She turned suddenly to him. His hand shook, and he spilled a few drops of red wine. They dripped onto the unpressed linen tablecloth, spreading out like clots of thick blood.
“Well …” he said slowly.
She was having a dinner party: Blank, the Mortons, and Anthony Montfort seated around an enormous, candle-lighted dining table that could easily have accommodated twice their number in a chilly and cavernous dining hall. The meal, bland and without surprises, had been served by Valenter and a heavy, middle-aged woman with a perceptible black mustache.
The dishes were being removed, they were finishing a dusty beaujolais, and their conversation had turned to the current visit to Washington of the dictator of a new African nation, a man who wore white-piped vests and a shoulder holster.
“No, Samuel,” Celia shook her head, “he is not an evil man. You use that word loosely. He’s just a bungler. Greedy perhaps. Or out for revenge on his enemies. But greed and revenge are grubby motives. True evil has a kind of nobility, as all faiths do. Faith implies total surrender, a giving up of reason.”
“Who was evil?” Florence Morton asked.
“Hitler?” Samuel Morton asked.
Celia Montfort looked slowly around the table. “You don’t understand,” she said softly. “I’m not talking about evil for the sake of ambition. I’m talking about evil for the sake of evil. Not Hitler—no. I mean saints of evil—men and women who see a vision and follow it. Just as Christian saints perceived a vision of good and followed that. I don’t believe there have been any modern saints, of good or evil. But the p
ossibility exists. In all of us.”
“I understand,” Anthony Montfort said loudly, and they all turned in surprise to look at him.
“To do evil because it’s fun,” the boy said.
“Yes, Tony,” his sister said gently, smiling at him. “Because it’s fun. Let’s have coffee in the study. There’s a fire there.”
In the upstairs room the naked bulb burned in the air: a dusty moon. There was a smell of low tide and crawling things. Once he heard a faint shout of laughter, and Daniel Blank wondered if it was Tony laughing, and why he laughed.
They lay unclothed and stared at each other through the dark sunglasses she had provided. He stared—but did she? He could not tell. But blind eyes faced his blind eyes, discs of black against white skin. He felt the shivery bliss again. It was the mystery.
Her mouth opened slowly. Her long tongue slid out, lay flaccid between dry lips. Were her eyes closed? Was she looking at the wall? He peered closer, and behind the dark glass saw a far-off gleam. One of her hands wormed between her thighs, and a tiny bubble of spittle appeared in the corner of her mouth. He heard her breathing.
He pressed to her. She moved away and began to murmur. He understood some of what she said, but much was riddled. “What is it? What is it?” he wanted to cry, but did not because he feared it might be less than he hoped. So he was silent, listened to her murmur, felt, her fingertips pluck at his quick skin.
The black covers over her eyes became holes, pits that went through flesh, bone, cot, floor, building, earth, and finally out into the far, dark reaches. He floated down those empty corridors, her naked hands pulling him along.
Her murmur never ceased. She circled and circled, spiraling in, but never named what she wanted. He wondered if there was a word for it, for then he could believe it existed. If it had no name, no word to label it, then it was an absolute reality beyond his apprehension, as infinite as the darkness through which he sped, tugged along by her hungry hands.
“We’ve found out all about her!” Florence Morton laughed.
“Well … not all, but some!” Samuel Morton laughed.
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