“That's very nice of you, but don't trouble yourself.”
“Well, I'll see what I can do…. And now I'm going to indulge. I hope you don't mind.”
“No, of course not,” I said, and I was glad that Murrin, after all my worries in the tub, wasn't being pushy at all on this matter of tippling.
He left me then to procure for himself a bottle and plastic cup from one of the green tables. I could see he wanted me to fend for myself, like letting an animal out in the wild and hoping it will survive.
So my first act of fending was to walk over to the edge of the terrace, engage no one, and ensure that I would engage no one by turning my back to the crowd.
Everyone was chatting away behind me, and to show them that I was a self-contained, thoughtful person, I pretended to take in the lush green lawn and the marble nymphs in the distance.
I pretended so well that I actually did begin to take in the lush green lawn and the marble nymphs in the distance. I found it all rather pastoral and soothing and was startled when there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned, expecting it to be Murrin having come already to rescue me.
But it was the young female photographer. Diane was her name. She had dark hair and pretty features—large, heavy-lashed brown eyes, a perfect straight nose, a sprinkling of freckles, and full, seductive lips. Her chin was a little strong and her teeth were crowded, but these imperfections were attractive. To go with her tie-dyed shirt, she wore a short, faded pink skirt. She had a small, high bosom and lovely tan legs that ended in rubber sandals. My nose determined that she was not the one doused in patchouli.
“Do you want a glass of wine?” she asked. She held a bottle and a plastic cup.
“Oh no, thank you,” I said.
This seemed to stump her momentarily. She rallied. “So how are you doing? Are you freaking out to be here?”
I recognized her argot to be that of my generation. I paused, then said, “Enough about me. How are you?”
A friend had once used this remark on me when I inquired how he was doing, and I had always wanted to try it, but the humor of it failed to impress Diane. I didn't know if she was humorless or if I was humorless. My remark only seemed to indicate to her that I was in dire need of alcohol.
“Are you sure you don't want a drink?” she repeated. “I know it's weird the first night.” She smiled at me. She was beautiful. “Are you sure you don't want one?”
She was too beautiful. I felt stabbed by loneliness. I was incapable of talking to this girl. A joke I had saved for years had failed terribly. She held the bottle and the cup. I said to myself: I'll tell her I can't drink, that I'm on medication.
“I'm taking antibiotics,” I said, and feeling embarrassed for sounding like a milquetoast, I looked down at her rubber sandals and her dirty, stubbed toes, which struck me as fiercely erotic. She was a sexy female animal! I wanted to kiss those feral toes! Kiss her everywhere. “You know, I will have a glass of wine,” I said suddenly. “I was only joking about the antibiotics.”
I felt the sick spike of adrenaline that accompanies such willfulness. But wine, I knew, was the way to get to those toes—if I loosened up, I could have a shot at her. So yet again, like in Sharon Springs, the fascistic alcoholic impulse had taken over and spoken on my behalf. Why are fascists always such forceful speakers? Mussolini and Hitler, for example, could really hold an audience. If only liberals were that good at oratory. JFK and Martin Luther King and Lenny Bruce all were, but we know what happened to those three. I guess it's dangerous for liberals to speak well. That's probably what inhibits them.
“You should drink,” said Diane. “You should celebrate being here.” She poured and then handed me the cup. “I left mine on the table.”
She started walking over to one of the tables, through the happy crowd of colonists and their floating cups of wine. She intended for me to follow her. I held my own plastic cup of yellow nitroglycerin. Some of my resolve came back. I'll just hold it, I thought. I'll fit in by holding it, but won't drink. I followed Diane. Her calves were brown from the sun and beautifully shaped. I raised the cup to my lips.
CHAPTER 17
Cervantes and Pavlov are proved correctI exhibit Under the Volcano-ish behaviorA general impression of the dining roomI sit with a painter, Sigrid Beaubien, the novelist Mangrove, a fiction writer named Alan Tinkle, and a poetess called LenoraConversation begins with novels but then focuses primarily on a bat problem in the MansionThat old question of Asylum vs. Artist Colony briefly returnsI reenact a battleA force of nature, in the shape of a woman, who is in possession of a remarkable nose, makes an entrance
The dinner bell gonged just as I finished gargling that first glass of wine, at which point there was a general stampede into the Mansion. I thought of something I had read once in Don Quixote about artists and food, how they can't control themselves when presented with free nutrition. Well, that was the case at the Rose Colony—everything was free, including the food, and so when that bell gonged, the artists raced into the dining room, and I would have behaved similarly but my needs in that moment were elsewhere.
So while they stormed in, I smartly availed myself of another glass of wine, which I gulped down in solitude on the now abandoned terrace. I did consider that perhaps I should stick to just two glasses of wine for the evening, but this thought was like a balloon that has been let go by a child at a park. I proceeded to drink a third glass!
This drinking maneuver, while properly anesthetizing me, did affect me adversely when it came to the seating arrangements inside. There was a long table that ran down the middle of the room, which sat about twenty people, and then there were three satellite tables that had room for eight each. I ended up at one end of the large table, while Diane and the poetess, who was named Lindy, were at one of the smaller tables. I had commenced on this latest drinking campaign with the idea of gaining intimacy with Diane—we had exchanged but a few comments over my first glass of wine: she was doing a series of photographs of herself disguised as various animals, which seemed to correlate with what I had observed of her pawlike feet—but now she was, temporarily, beyond my reach. By drinking those extra glasses of wine on the terrace, I had missed an opportunity to sit with her, but the alcohol was a pleasing mistress in its own right. Its first kisses—that initial rush of intoxication—were, as always, delightful, though inevitably the wine was sure to turn on me.
But regardless of what alcoholic doom might await me, I was presently in a good mood—only three drinks under my belt—and the dining room was splendid. An unlit chandelier dangled in the center like an enormous diamond earring, and sunlight came through the lead-paned windows, suffusing the room with a solar-hued beauty. The walls were wood-paneled, and there were glass cases displaying antique plates that looked like works of art.
The main table, where I was sitting after getting a plate of food from the buffet line, was incredibly heavy and old, and the chairs surrounding the table were high-backed antiques, with little hungry-looking gargoyles carved into the frames.
I found myself directly across from Mangrove, the eye-patched novelist, and on my right was a short, little fiction writer, about my age, a fellow named Alan Tinkle. He had profuse curly hair and a rather manly jaw. We shared the same prénom, but he had been dealt an unfair blow in the surname department.
That first night we had salmon steaks, mashed potatoes, steamed spinach, and salad, and all of it quite good. There were more bottles of white wine spaced out down the middle of the long table, like traffic cones; conveniently there was a bottle right in front of me.
On my left was a female painter by the name of Sigrid Beaubien; she was in her late forties and quite pretty, in a fading-beauty way, with elegant, expressive hands, smooth bare shoulders exposed in a sleeveless tunic, a long pale-white face, and jet-black hair, pulled tight to her skull. She readily engaged me in conversation.
“I always like to meet the new arrivals, so I welcome you,” she said as she picked at her salmon, re
moving bones. “Every few days there's someone new, but also someone leaves. It's sad. Someone is born and someone dies.”
“Dying is a severe way to look at it, don't you think?” said Mangrove from across the table.
“It feels like dying to me,” she said. “I hate it when I leave here every summer. I can't believe that it will go on without me…. Alan here is our newborn.” She smiled at me in an eerie fashion and she spoke in a whisper, and people who speak in whispers are almost always insane. They want to draw you near so they can kill you. I drank my fourth glass of wine.
“What are you working on?” asked Mangrove, trying to save me from Beaubien. There was tension between those two. An old affair, I sensed, hung between them like a fishing line caught in a tree. I could see where they had once been attracted to each other: she was crazed in some sort of dramatic, whispery way, and he, dramatically, had only one eye. But my keen intuition said that they weren't a couple now.
“A novel,” I said, answering Mangrove, and feeling loquacious because of the wine, I kept going: “I don't want to embarrass you, but I read Hell Is Other People and liked it very much. I'm a big fan of noir. Your character who kills people by not paying attention to them was brilliant.”
“Thank you,” he said, and he looked simultaneously delighted and uncomfortable to be praised publicly. His pale pink lips lifted momentarily into a smile, but his expressive nostrils twitched oddly, and then his features resumed a more normal, severe countenance. He had close-cropped black hair that was of the same color as his eye patch—there was no hint of gray, though he looked to be in his late forties. His one eye was brown.
“What are you working on now?” I asked.
“A memoir,” he said. “But I'm calling it a mem-noir, since I'm telling my life story as a murder.”
“You're so depressing, Reginald,” said Beaubien. “Why don't you lighten up?”
“You're the one who said that leaving here is like dying,” said Mangrove.
This spat between Mangrove and Beaubien was further indication of their previous alliance. But before Beaubien could reply, Mangrove was engaged by the woman next to him on the subject of bats. This woman, a somewhat rotund fifty-something poetess named Lenora, had just sat down with a second helping of spinach and didn't realize she was interrupting a fight. So Mangrove talked to Lenora, and Beaubien busied herself with some salmon, and I craned my neck to look at Diane, who was absolutely not craning her neck looking for me, which was mildly disappointing. She was busy eating and talking with Lindy. When one goes in for neck craning to spot new objects of affection, you hope to find their eyes searching for you as well, but the fact that Diane was not looking for me was not an indication, I rationally conjectured, that I had no chance to win her affection.
I turned back to my salmon and caught something of this bat parlance between Mangrove and Lenora. It seemed that the Mansion was rife with bats at night and Mangrove was the resident expert at catching them, employing a net and gloves, and this was no small feat on his part since the bats were possibly infected with rabies.
“It's ghastly,” said Beaubien to me. “One was flying around my room two nights ago. I couldn't sleep at all, even after Reginald caught it.”
“I like bats,” said Tinkle. “They're misunderstood creatures.”
“Is it true that if a person gets rabies, they shriek when they see water?” asked Beaubien.
“Rabies's scientific name is hydrophobia, which people associate as a fear of water, but I think it's called hydrophobia because of the foaming that occurs,” said Mangrove. “But I'm not sure that humans foam at the mouth when they have rabies. They just die rather quickly. Bats can kill you if they bite you.”
“See, you are morbid! I won't be able to sleep the rest of the summer,” said Beaubien. “It's bad enough there's a ghost in this Mansion.”
“There's no ghost,” said Mangrove.
“I had a mouse infestation in my house,” said Lenora, who wasn't all there, I felt. She had a permanent fixed smile and struck me as one of those conversational declaimers: people who make remarks that are in the general vicinity of the discussion but are not in direct response to any previous comments.
“I can't stand bats. They look like rats with wings,” said Beaubien. “Flying rats.”
“I once had a rat crawl up my leg in New York,” I said, indulging somewhat in conversational declaiming myself, but when it comes to that rat story, I can hardly control my impulse to shock and regale and relive.
“My God,” said Beaubien.
“It was racing across a sidewalk and panicked, mistook me for a lamppost or something, and went right up to my knee before it realized I was human. Luckily it didn't bite me, though my kneecap may have been difficult to sink teeth into. I don't know if I'll ever recover.”
Mangrove raised an eyebrow over his eye patch as I recounted my rat story, and I very much wanted to ask him how he had lost his eye, but etiquette forbade such an inquiry.
“I'd like to be a bat,” said Tinkle, not commenting on my rat speech. “Then I could sneak into people's rooms.”
“I'm very happy with my room this year,” said Lenora.
Beaubien chose to let out a cackle at this, thinking it funny, and I sipped from my fifth glass of wine and shuddered internally for a moment as I had the recurring thought that maybe I was in an asylum, after all, but I was so nuts that I kept thinking I was at an artist colony. The people around me were definitely unbalanced. Beaubien's cackle was straight out of The Snake Pit, there was something zany about Tinkle, Mangrove only had one eye, and Lenora's face was etched in a kind of merry grimace.
I craned my neck again and peered at Diane. She still wasn't seeking me out, but at least she wasn't mad, as far as I could tell. She was just beautiful and had dirty feet. And there was Murrin holding forth at the far end of my table with the Pulitzer prizewinning poet, and those two didn't seem to be suffering from lunacy. So the shudder passed. I was at an artist colony, not a loony bin. But I was going to have to talk this over with Jeeves. It was along the lines of another Problem or Question. It was the old Appearance vs. Reality Dilemma that used to show up on my Shakespeare exams at Princeton.
I tucked into the mashed potatoes to lay some sandbags down against the wine. Lenora was back to praising Mangrove for his abilities to protect everyone from the bats, and there was an overall din of conversation and scraping of forks in the air, and then Mangrove addressed me.
“Have you been in some sort of fight?”
“Yes,” said Beaubien. “Your sunglasses and hat are hiding something!” There was an excited quality to her whisper; she was hungry for distraction and intrigue.
I took a healthy dose of my sixth glass of wine, then said, “It's rather embarrassing, but, yes, I was in a bar brawl.”
This was a case of in vino quasi-veritas. I had told Murrin and Doris that a car accident was the source of my injuries, but now, drunkenly, I had spoken a half-truth, but wasn't so drunk as to tell a whole truth, to say that I had been in a fight across the street from a bar, which isn't exactly a bar brawl.
“What happened?” inquired Mangrove with a novelist's curiosity. He was definitely pro-me since I had praised Hell Is Other People, so his asking wasn't invasive so much as a genuine expression of interest and even concern. And this led me to think that at some appropriate juncture I could find out what had happened to him, but at the moment the focus was on me, so I said:
“Well, two nights ago, I was in a town called Sharon Springs at a bar called the Hen's Roost—”
“What a funny name,” said Beaubien.
“And I was drinking and watching a baseball game, and this fellow took an alcoholic dislike to me, perhaps because I was a stranger and it was a bar of locals. Anyway, I went to the men's room and when I returned, he had taken my stool. I made the mistake of saying, ‘I was sitting there,’ and he shoved me. I then made the mistake of thinking that if someone shoves you, you should shove them back,
and so I did, imagining that would be the end of it. I knocked him off the stool, but he certainly wasn't injured. His next action was to punch me in the face, which I had not been expecting at all, and he broke my nose immediately.”
“This is worse than hearing about that rat,” said Beaubien. “I can't stand it.”
“Were you knocked out?” asked Mangrove.
“I didn't lose consciousness, though the punch sent me to my knees, but then I rose up and threw a roundhouse right.”
I stood up then to demonstrate this. I was taking to my story like a real raconteur—I was rather intoxicated, which was making me extroverted—and I threw a vicious right hand through the air, recreating the moment when I had struck the Hill with my decisive blow.
“And I caught him in the ear, clearly injuring him, at which point everyone converged on us and the whole thing was broken up.”
A general hush had fallen over the room, as everyone sensed that something unusual was taking place, my fellow artists catching out of the corners of their eyes my hatted-and-sunglassed figure standing and pantomiming a Joe Louis right hand. I was momentarily the center of attention. Then I sat back down. Conversations around the room started back up.
“I've never been in a fight,” said Mangrove.
“Let's see what you look like,” said Beaubien.
“Can you get that bottle of wine?” I asked Lenora. I had finished off the bottle in front of me, and she was closest to the next bottle up the table.
I poured a glass.
“You're putting it away,” said Tinkle.
“Painkiller,” I said, “for my face.”
“I approve,” said Tinkle, smiling at me. He was a curious fellow: as tiny as Murrin, but with a jaw like Zeus.
“Will you show us?” said Mangrove.
“Please,” said Beaubien.
“That's why I'm drinking,” I said. “Building up my courage.”
I filled the glasses of Tinkle, Mangrove, Lenora, and Beaubien—my four new friends. Even if they were crazy, I was now feeling warm toward them all; it was partly the alcohol and partly the seating arrangement—that we had all been thrust together at one end of the table—but I really did like them. We clinked glasses without making a toast. Then I removed my sunglasses and Woolworth's hat. Again there was a hush in the room. The clinking had alerted the others to more strange behavior from our quarter. The other artists strained to look at me, caught a glimpse of my swollen, misshapen nose and black eyes, and then their chatter recommenced.
Wake Up, Sir!: A Novel Page 15