Beneath all this mess I came at last to what I had probably been looking for all along: the yearbook of my high school graduating class, called, with considerable want of imagination, The Pix, and bound in black and old gold. I extracted this heavy book from out of its poor company and took it to the bed, where I curled up with it and prepared to be tortured again with the sight of familiar and forgotten old faces. The one familiar and forgotten face which I wanted to contemplate first was, naturally, my own; and I did, finding it fast, my portrait wedged between those of Patsy Stevens on one side and Gladys Stump on the other. The proximity was damaging. There I sat, looking every bit of nine years old, and every bit of What-Me-Worry Alf Newman of Mad, idiotic grin and prominent ears and all, between two girls who looked every bit of nineteen or twenty, and every bit of forty pounds heavier, as if they were the two ends of a barbell of which I was the bar. Beneath the photograph was a thick column of print: “Clifford Willow Stone. ‘Nub.’ ‘He thinks, therefore he is.’ Home Room President, Beta Club, Key Club Vice-President, National Honor Society President, Nightcappers, Masque and Gavel, Varsity Boxing, Varsity Track, Intramural Baseball, Football Manager, Chambers Latin Prize, Boys’ State, Pix Staff.” I appeared again several pages later, more informally, in the “Distinctions” section, as “Best-All-Around” (gee!) on the same page with Hy Norden (“Wittiest”), Steve McComb (“Most Likely to Succeed”), Dall Hawkins (“Best Athlete”), and others. I appeared once more, a whole lace-edged page to myself, as “King of Hearts” at the Valentine Ball. I appeared also in a dozen or so club pictures, in the sports section, in a snapshot with Dall Hawkins above the trite caption “The Long and Short of It,” and finally on a special page at the end of the book above the caption, “Appeared Most Often.” By God, why didn’t Hy and some of those other bastards get out their Pixes every once in a while? Then they might remember who I was. Every inch of marginal and end-paper space was covered with their fervent and undying tributes: “To Nub, my best friend forever, Keith.” (Who was Keith?) “To the only guy I ever envied, yours always, Hy.” “To the classiest guy in our class, always remember me, your best buddy, Steve.” “For the sweetest boy I ever knew, all my love forever, Yvonne.” (Who was Yvonne?) And loads of other such unctuous drivel.
Picking up the phone book in the hall, I attempted to find the present addresses and phone numbers of a dozen or so other old friends whose faces smiled up at me from the pages of The Pix. But most of them no longer lived in Little Rock. Two of them did, and I called these on the phone. The first call was to a fellow boxer in my own featherweight class. But there was no answer. Bridge night? The second call was to a thin, homely boy named Herbert Stodbecker who had been in my Home Room class, and whom I had befriended because, although he was a scholastic failure and a social flop as well, he had shown some talent for writing imagistic poems. Herbert was delighted to have my call, and we chatted pleasantly for a while. I told him what I was doing now. What was he doing now? Well, he was working for his father in a broomworks over on the East End. Making brooms? Well no, not exactly, it was more of a front-office-type position, you know. Writing any more poems these days? I asked. Any more what? he said. Poems, I said. He laughed self-consciously, burst out, “Aw, naw!” and went on laughing. I gave him up.
My father approached, squinted his beady eyes at me with his jaw set, wagged a finger at me, and began, “And another thing—”
“Oh, the hell with it!” I said, brushed past him, and stomped off through the living room toward the front door.
Sybil eyed me with surprise as I passed her. “You’ll miss Johnny Carson!” she warned.
“The hell with him too,” I said and walked on out of the house.
I wandered for a long time around the dark streets of the city. Even the incredible spring-night fragrances of myriad blossoming shrubs could not perfume away my growing distaste for the town. I could neither stand nor understand the place. In the glow from a street lamp I saw another one of those strange blue-and-white signs: “Who’s Happy?” Not me, I said aloud, and walked on. I was in a frame of mind for nothing so much as walking on out of Little Rock entirely, walking until I came to the deepest, most virginal forest of Newton County, and there I would cut down some trees and build a log castle. I would live on berries and mushrooms and grasshoppers, making my own dandelion wine and growing an acre of corn for sour mash whiskey. If I became lonely, I would hire a local broad-hipped farm girl for housekeeping and humping. I would read, meditate, write, drink, hump: five noble activities for the easy rustic life. Ah, the hopeless fantasies of the idle mind!
For a while I toyed with the notion of going down to one of the whorehouses on Markham Street and getting myself fixed up. I had never been to one of Little Rock’s before, but I knew where they were, and I thought this would make an appropriate memory of a disappointed homecoming. But it was too far to walk, and I was not yet that hard up…or hard on, so I turned homeward. On my way home, in the quiet and dark streets of that mellow residential area, dogs barked at me. Everybody was asleep. For all it mattered to me at that moment, they might as well have slept the sleep of death.
Chapter twelve
When I woke up the next morning, after a fitful and too warm sleep, the postman had come and left an air-mail letter for me, which said: “Dear Clifford, It was sneaky of you to run off like that. It was uncharacteristic of you, and inconsiderate, and furthermore it was impractical. I called Moms this afternoon to tell her I was coming home, but Iris answered and said they have gone to Bermuda for a month and are renting a house there. Why don’t you come and meet me in New York, and after a day or two of plays, dinner, etc., we can fly to Bermuda and join them there. Please reply by wire if this idea strikes your fancy. We could have fun in the sun in that charming old place. Otherwise I would just have to sit here in Boston and twiddle my thumbs, and pine for old you. Please say Yes. Love, Pam.” I had not eaten breakfast when I read this, and I had a head, possibly from all the beer I had had the day before, so my first reaction to this curious scrap of foolscap was one of muddled awe, all the more so because of the unusual juxtaposition of those last two words. My wife?
“Your wife?” Sybil asked, hovering.
“Yeah,” I said and began rereading it.
“A love letter?” she coyly questioned.
“Yeah,” I said. Then, “Could I have some breakfast, please?” and she got off my shoulder. Alone, I studied the letter. I looked at the reverse side, which was empty. I turned it upside down, I held it against the light. Her small, cursive script, laid down in brown ink on tan Eaton’s, summoned me. Her proposal had much to recommend it, and I was tempted. In fact, I was more than tempted: I accepted. I would do it. Bugger this miscarried homecoming, bugger this home! But I would not wire Pamela. I would simply take a train to New York, have a few days of fun there by myself, and then phone her to come join me. I would take no gaff from her, then or later, or forever, and if she didn’t like it she could shove it. Uncharacteristic of me, had she written? Well, I would show her what was characteristic of me.
“Come and eat,” Sybil said, and I went and ate, and then afterward I tried a little sport with her, but she put me off again, saying that she was sorely offended that I had told her, and my father, and nice Johnny Carson, all to go to hell.
“Very well,” I said, and I packed my bag and took it to the front door, and when she asked me what I was doing, I told her. Then I made it clear that this was her last chance to play with me, and if she didn’t play with me now, I was never ever going to play with her any more, or anybody else in this funereal town. She was put on the spot by that, and almost gave in. But at last instead she laughed.
“You better come and have another cup of coffee, boy,” she said. “You’re still half asleep.” But I declined, and told her I must be on my way. I opened the front door, lifted my suitcase, pecked her a wet one on the cheek, instructed her to explain to my father why I was leaving so soon, closed the door and walked a
way, leaving her in one heck of a quandry behind me.
First I took a bus to the public library to return the books I had borrowed. This time I noticed in the library’s lobby a special display case decked out, in honor of the forthcoming premiere of James Royal Slater’s new play, with photographs and books and manuscripts tracing his career as a dramatist. I regretted, briefly, that my sudden departure from Little Rock would prevent me from seeing his new play, but I decided that if the play were any good I would undoubtedly see it soon in Boston or New York, where I had seen productions of two previous Slater plays, Christmas in Jail, at the Charles Street Playhouse in Boston, and The Pedagogic Demagogue, at the Circle-in-the-Square, New York. I had never met Slater, in fact I had never even seen a picture of him, but he had a certain reputation outside Arkansas because both of these earlier plays had been forerunners of the present Theater of the Absurd, or, as it is more appropriately called, Metatheatre. I had never been able to make much sense out of his plays, but the very fact that he was Arkansas-born-and-reared, and even today still lived not far outside of Little Rock (where, advancing into middle age, he considered himself a horse rancher more than a playwright), gave me an almost proprietary interest in the plays. Thinking back over the intricate structure of his art, I found myself wondering how any intellectual could have survived in the cultural wasteland of this city. Pausing only a few minutes at the display case in his honor, I hefted my suitcase and left the library and took a taxi to the Missouri Pacific station.
There I discovered with considerable distress that the next train for St. Louis, and thence New York, did not leave until after midnight that night. Well, I was not going back to my father’s house again. I checked in my suitcase, bought a cup of coffee and a paperback of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and sat down to while away the hours. Forty-five minutes of this, however, wearied me to distraction. I got up, stuffed the difficult book into my pocket, and went for a stroll around the platforms of the station. These same tracks, I reflected, had by night in the wandering nights of my boyhood tempted me constantly outward and away from this town, and had finally taken me away at last. What now was I doing here again? I had sold newspapers on this platform to servicemen going away or coming in, and had envied them their goings and their comings, until at last I had gone myself. And had come. And now was going again. Is this the consummation of existence, to yearn for departure and arrival, and then to spend all one’s born days departing and arriving, until there is no longer any distinction between the two? Until I do not know now whether in leaving this town, I am going home or leaving home? Bitter questions. Do I, leaving, leave, or come; or, rather, by coming, go? Is my returning really removal, or is my evacuation actually approach? Or either neither, or both both? Or should I have accepted that second cup of coffee Sybil offered?
The day now was not just warm; it was hot, and beastly so, the air thick with sticky moisture. Motion and sound both had ceased and I seemed to have the railroad station all to myself. A pall hung heavy as the air all over the place, and if any train ever did come in, I was certain it would be a hearse train, car after car packed with wooden caskets crossing the bar through the valley of the shadow toward the journey’s end, the downward path of the way of all flesh toward the Stygian shore where a great neon sign flashes in big red six-foot bloody letters, Memento Mori, and that grim ferryman punches tickets and that reaper rents pillows for a quarter, and that pale priest of the mute people sells paper buckets filled with ice cubes.
The place gave me the creeps, and I got out of there, but not before I had already been somnambulized, like that poor fellow in Dr. Caligari’s cabinet, to such an extent that the rest of that day became entirely vague, listless, insensate, almost comatose, and I moved (walked? floated? crawled? seeped?) through a great many places of that city, a zombie at last among his own. I lunched with several fat and thin zombies in Miller’s Coffee Shop on Lower Main, and I browsed with several more zombies through Pfeifer’s book department, and I wound up, sometime in the afternoon, sitting on a sofa beside one of the zombiest zombies of them all, my sister Lucinda, but for the life of me I cannot remember what I said to her, or she to me. Perhaps we did not speak at all, but only exchanged a series of deathlike stares. Or perhaps I insulted her. Or she me. Or perhaps her husband Victor came home and threw me out. Or I him. At any rate, I found myself again in Miller’s Coffee Shop, having supper. I drank a couple of cans of Miller’s Hi-Life and read a copy of the Gazette which someone had left behind on the counter, and discovered on the Amusements page that a block down the street, at the old Main Theater, there was a rerun movie I had missed the first time but still wanted to see, Two for the Seesaw, with Robert Mitchum as a Midwesterner who, as I was about to do, goes to New York and has a good time there. The cooler air of the late afternoon cleared me up a little, and I drifted out of it, and maneuvered my way, arms loose and feet sore and soul all but entirely expatriated at last forevermore, a block down the street to the picture show.
Chapter thirteen
In the titles, he is wandering lonely all day all over Manhattan, he is on a bench feeding pigeons in front of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, he is searching for the Omaha World Herald in that Out of Town newsstand which shoes the feet of the old Times Building in Times Square, he is shuffling through the Egyptian room of the Metropolitan, staring emptily at a seated pharaoh while behind him the eyes of Anobis, the jackal god of the necropolis, the same conductor of the dead who had escorted me loping all day through Little Rock, follow his progress in and out of that hushed sanctum. Then the movie proper begins, and the hollow gray breadth of his isolation is underlined: he wishes he were back home in Omaha. Will I, if I go to New York, wish I were back here? But soon he meets the beatnik Jewess, Gittel, and is taken with her, and so am I. She is a brunette, and although Shirley MacLaine’s wig seems possibly a bunkin-taka-shimada—cut short by Mr. Kenneth—left over from My Geisha, her brunetteness is of a type that I have always somehow been drawn to, strangely enough in view of my marriage to a blonde. It is a shade of lightless, sooty burnt umber; a kit and boodle of girl friends, one-night dates as well as longer drags, had come into my life wearing that same cast of black, and although this Gittel is, if not actually beat, rather obviously hip, I am drawn to her because she reminds me of them all. Therefore I am with Mitchum tooth and nail as he begins his courtship of her, and I share in his pleasure when his lonesomeness evokes her rich pity, and I sit back and muse, wryly, worldy wise: How rare is the compassion of a woman: How stupid of me to marry a blonde: How inevitable that I would bring such a thing on myself through some unconscious sort of masochism. Ah, Gittel, how charitable of you to put out so easily, so voluptuously, for a poor friendless stranger. But Mitchum—O tempora! O mores!—does not want charity, and he skips out on her. From here on, I am forced to think too deeply about the tempora, to reflect too painfully upon the mores, and I didn’t come here for that.
I lost interest. The movie was falling apart anyway, lapsing into a series of involved and impassioned conversations which struck me belatedly as the meaning of the title: the seesaw, up and down, down and up, marjorie daw. Not enough action. I wanted Two for the Roller Coaster, I had come to the wrong show. Taking out my pack of Milk Duds, my favorite cinema candy, I began a restless chomping and chawing. From time to time I glanced furtively around at my neighbors, hunting for an old face, but recognized no one, although the theater was nearly packed: an elderly man on my left, a young lady on my right, a couple of high school kids in front, an assortment of blank stroboscopically flickered faces, young adults, behind me. The sinistral old man was fortunately downwind, so the scent of his age and talc and sweat was only as gamy as what might cling to the walls of a long-abandoned boarding-house room, but the upwind starboard lady smelled of an innocent spangled essence which was disturbingly familiar and which I might have found a name for if I had thought hard enough: Ma Griffe, Bellodgia, Poivre, or some such namable eau, which had clung to my cheek and colla
r several warm evenings sometime, some long time, ago. I stole a quick glance at her profile, trimly marmoreal and ageless in the flickering light, but as strange to me as a hermit thrush encountered in a tree full of sparrows. Then I glanced beyond her to evaluate her escort, to marvel at what manner of man had brought this fair damsel hither, but he wasn’t there, I mean the seat was empty, he was either out for some more popcorn or he had never been there in the first place and would never be there; and it was this latter case which, after I had waited a while for him to return, proved correct. Well now, I thought, well now. From that point on, Gittel had a rival for my attention, and it was odd how, although Gittel’s locks were banged and hacked while this lady’s were tressed and crested, they were both of the same darkness, it seemed in the pale available light at least, which set me thinking once more about how it is that I have always been moved to take notice of that certain type of brunette, as though it were some inborn compulsion periodically returning to bedevil me. Gittel was in a hot fix, while this lady, watching, was still cool and seemingly uninvolved, but the two of them became as one for me, and I watched Gittel with my left eye and her with my right like the two separate but identical halves of an old stereoscope picture. It was impossible for me to treat either of them as cavalierly as Mitchum was treating Gittel, so that, some time later after he had been giving her pure hell and had thrown the chemistry of her poor ulcer all out of whack and it, her ulcer, began to hemorrhage when and because he was running out on her, and she almost fell down the long stairs after him, yelling, “Jerry, help me!” and I was helpless to harm that cad for her, but the least I could do was hold her hand in comfort and sympathy, I did, I couldn’t help it: I held her hand.
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