The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  Witkopf refuted most of what Tattersall had said in defense of his music. It had no roots in tradition whatsoever, according to him. It owed nothing to anybody, living or dead. It was a revolution overturning the form of government, indeed government as such, and not merely offering another change of administration such as even such radical innovators as Stravinsky and Schönberg had done. Conventional instruments themselves were dispensed with except insofar as they might offer their electronic contribution to those of picks and shovels, saws, vacuum cleaners, running faucets, and anything else at hand. For all sound was to be regarded as music, and the sequences, or modalities, to follow on recording, often unplanned and unexpected, were improvised out of what painters and sculptors, too, called “available materials.” A basic reverence for reality, in short, permeated it all. There was one effect achieved by using a violin to beat a rug, another by blowing a flute underwater. The human voice was employed, but in arrangements and to purposes arbitrarily chosen by the composer, often on the spur of the moment, actually as the conductor. Thus the music was in part aleatoric, that is, the product of chance, hence replete with random turns and unexpected developments to which Witkopf urged his audience to listen with closed eyes, the better to keep an open mind, and simply give themselves to what they heard without prejudice or predilection. There would be “loud hushes” interspersing the rhythmic and arhythmic sections, in which they might recompose their minds and await the next “duration.” They must feel perfectly at liberty to hiss, but in so doing they would be only aleatorically contributing to the whole. That ought to be borne in mind. It was only fair to remind them.

  Tattersall abandoned the horse blanket he had planned to keep in mind as an aid to comprehension, and instead let the succession of noises that followed have their way with him, though not precisely in a manner envisioned by the composer. What he did was dwell freely on whatever they suggested to him in the way of physical objects. The tradition of composers who painted musical pictures was vast, self-justifying. Tattersall made no effort to find logical or even emotional order in the tonal happenstances they were now served—to which he did not take too kindly now that their originator had undercut his defense of them—but simply converted the squeaks, rasps, buzzes, gurgles, murmurs and rumbles into their, for him, optical counterparts, and as arbitrarily as Witkopf dished them up. Thus he “heard”: chicken livers, a glass of blood, pancakes revolving on a phonograph turntable and maple syrup poured on records, a public fountain plashing motor oil, medical capsules filled with tiny multi-colored shot made to explode at staggered intervals, prolonging repose or excitement in the swallower. That kind of thing. In the climaxes of the music, which issued from four huge amplifiers stationed in the four corners of the room, he imagined all of these objects as being fed into an enormous Disposall, in which they were assimilated at inconceivable temperatures and extruded at the other end in the form of long, pure sheets of metal known as Silence. The audience was at long last put into it, everyone, including the old lady in the black hat sitting directly in front of him. There was a faint, final grinding as she went, a delicate crunch of bones, shoes, jewelry, corset stays, the works.

  Tattersall momentarily gave off this reverie to glance about him. Many heeded the composer’s admonition to close their eyes, though one or two used their fingers to stop up something else. A fragment of Repulski’s profile indicated his brown jawbreaker eyeballs to be shut in meditation, exemplifying the passivity required by a fair surrender to this medium. A long silence of the kind promised by the author, for the digestion of received impressions and the preparation of the spirit for a fresh course of effects, fostered the sense of legitimate trance among the listeners.

  It was then he felt the point of Mayo’s elbow gently prodding his ribs. He turned. Silently, she indicated that she was finished with the attaché case and would appreciate having its great weight removed from her lap back to his. Tattersall nodded. He reached both hands over and, grasping the handle with one and bracing a corner with the other, began to lift it off of her knees onto his own. It was then that the next modality occurred—all that could have been asked in the way of a random sequence with available materials.

  Either Mayo accidentally unlatched the single good clasp, or it had also now broken under the strain. With nothing to hold it shut, the lid fell back under a sudden shift in the contents of the briefcase, which also simultaneously made the briefcase slide off of Tattersall’s knee. A misguided attempt on Mayo’s part to help was partly responsible for the awkward angle at which it tilted. When the lid flopped open, everything spilled out on the floor. The objects included a pump, a hose, a timer, a solenoid (a contrivance which transmits instructions from the timer to the rest of the wash machine) and an elbow-shaped pipe assembly. In addition there was an assortment of incidental mechanical giblets such as nuts, bolts, gaskets and lock washers.

  The cascade of hardware was followed by the crash of the attaché case itself, which slipped out of both their hands. Instinctively, Tattersall moved to retrieve the articles and put them back. But the folding chairs on which they sat were too closely crowded for such a tidying up, which would have necessitated getting down on all fours—not to mention prolonging the disturbance with more racket and to-do. So he got back into his chair as quietly as he could. The last thing he saw before folding his arms and closing his eyes was a twisting sea of faces. Everyone was turning to glare at him, with the exception of the composer.

  Three

  As Tattersall walked down the driveway to his house, the attaché case now containing some purchased replacements along with the old parts, his wife pulled in with the load of wash from the coin laundry. She slowed to a stop beside him with her head out the window, like a passing motorist about to offer him a lift the remaining twenty feet. “Any luck?”

  “I think we can get that piece of action sculpture going again,” he answered with his consumer-consumed irony. He quickened his pace to keep abreast of her, like a secret serviceman guarding a presidential car. “One part they didn’t have and I had to order it. So it won’t be today,” he puffed, trotting beside her.

  “Swell.”

  Never had the principle of repairwork seemed so apt a metaphorical concept for human relations as now. They were always breaking down and having to be patched up. They were always in the shop. He had just begun to make some strides toward getting Mayo Stiles to see that he was not a poop, fink, drag, pill, blip, blob, or whatever—but fun—when now this. That the mishap had had a kind of grotesque relevance to it, amounting to an act of deliberate satire had he wished so to claim it, was beside the point, as was the fact that the accident was also partly Mayo’s fault. It had occurred, and an intricate piece of personal relationship was again on the fritz, like the washing machine itself. How would he get it back into running order? God alone knew. How would he face Mayo in class? Perhaps he would write her a song. Something in his own inimitable Cole Porter style, with deft multiple rhymes making light of her mortification and his. He might be himself. That sometimes worked, though less often than was generally supposed, and always with some confusion as to what precisely that was, at least on one’s own part. But it was all, all repairwork. It was all maintenance. That went for love as well as friendship, and no doubt for parenthood as well as love. A misunderstanding was like a broken spring. Apologies were like draining out old oil, with all its filthy sludge and slime, and pouring in new. In the end you had to scrap the old model for a new anyway, a whack at another friendship, a fresh mate—and then the ear cocked again for mechanical defects as you tooled precariously down the superhighway of life. His friendship for Repulski could be presumed in the junkyard. He had managed to duck away without seeing him, thank God, but Repulski could be counted on to track down the cause of the commotion. Fear of encountering him, not to mention Witkopf, had made Tattersall hastily gather up the fallen truck and beat it, with only the barest explanation to Mayo. A mumble identifying the available materials to be wa
sh machine giblets, and how he fought the central powers by doing his own repairwork. “Because neither Detroit …” All this while on all fours, and casting wildly about among the accusing feet for a length of cord to secure the attaché case with, if not a scourge of cords, to use as it once was used upon the defilers of the temple. He often saw himself as Christ beating the be-Jesus out of everybody in sight. He now carried the attaché case under his arm, taking no more chances, though the second latch proved not to have been sprung after all. Mayo had accidentally opened it.

  “How do you do it?” Sherry made a kissing noise of appreciation at him as she came walking toward the house, the basket of laundry riding on one hip.

  Another nerve was set vibrating. Surely a man should be able to flee the world’s poor opinion without coming home to a woman who thought he was the greatest thing that ever come down the pike. He instantly repented these thoughts, and to make amends said, “Look like a moom pitcha wife,” as he held the door open for her. Even now she was as neat as a pin, with the basket of laundry on her hip and dragging on a fag, as though making some effort to adhere to the concept of the slatternly housewife. It was a generously molded flank for one her size. She was of the feminine order known as “petite,” another word Tattersall detested and strictly forbade his students the use of, along with “intriguing,” “contact” as a verb, and “feel” in the sense of think. He plucked the cigarette from her lips and took a last drag on it himself before pitching it away for her. He concluded the ritual by giving her a kiss. All, all maintenance. “All’s to do again,” Housman had rightly said, of the eternally repeated makeshifts of men themselves the most ramshackle of instruments, in a universe now clearly defined as a mechanism speeding inexorably toward the cosmic junk heap.

  She sensed his mood. Too bad he couldn’t get to work on the washing machine right now, because this was a frame of mind often soothed by tinkering. She was always glad when he was seen going downstairs into the basement, and there heard addressing his tools to mechanical objects that seemed by turns defenseless and perverse, like himself. But he liked equally to operate machinery. Among the chores he especially enjoyed was ironing with their electric mangle. He now put the fresh basket of laundry through it while Sherry worked on the bank statement and the monthly bills, with which they had little trouble keeping abreast thanks to a small inheritance from her father’s side.

  Clean linen has restorative properties in its very nature. Watching bedsheets come out immaculate as newly fallen snow under one’s hand is almost as satisfying as slipping between them when one is tired. Tattersall sat like an organist at his instrument, erect, a pleasurable glaze over his eyes. For an hour he managed to make the world go away. Trying to cut a figure in it is beset with hazards often as great as those that threaten mountain climbers and hewers of paths through wildernesses. Like the single stone that starts an avalanche, the slightest mischance may bring down around one’s ears the supposition that one is hot stuff. But he tried to forget the mass of rubble out of which he must now dig himself by throwing himself into his ironing. He began to hum, then sing the words of an old hymn that came half-consciously to mind as he worked. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow …” When he thought of the electronics concert again, it was to imagine that the fabrics rolling spotlessly out of the mangle were photographed by a motion picture camera whose exposed film was then, in turn, converted by computer into its equivalent in sound. The result would have more esthetic validity than the aural garbage to which they had been subjected that afternoon. Plaid music indeed! He mentally drafted a few comments on what they had heard for class delivery tomorrow, for the benefit of those of his students who might have attended the Witkopf affair besides Mayo, and even for the delectation of those who hadn’t. He would not use terms like “aural garbage.” Far from it. He was foxier than to fall that easily into the hands of kids watching like hawks for the chance to tag you as an establishment poop. No, he would make them fall into his by the much subtler method of defending the far-out in principle, the better to let the product collapse of itself.

  “Now, these people like Cage, and other people who use the random and the fortuitous, are perfectly right in their assumption that ‘everything we do is music.’ All right. We have all closed our eyes and sat with our head back on a train, after we’ve finished our paper, and just listened to the sounds all around us. Just gave ourselves to them. The coach door opening and shutting, scraps of murmured conversation, the rustle of other newspapers, the rhythmic rumble of the wheels with the clatter of tracks and switches underneath, and then the sudden rich silences during station stops, and other noises mingled in turn with them. Or lain awake in a hotel room listening to their equivalent in elevator doors, footsteps in a corridor, keys turned in locks. Oh, keys turned in locks! A woman’s laughter, the thrum of traffic in the street below, the random punctuation of automobile horns (whether of motors that will or will not bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring), a doorman’s whistle. There’s nothing that doesn’t have this suggestive poetry to it—experienced at first hand as part of reality itself. Put on a record in the name of art it’s dead. A drag. So kindly don’t give me an album of railroad or hotel noises for Christmas. I’d rather get on a coach, or check in at the Waldorf.”

  This position roughly hammered out, Tattersall again tried to forget the two concerts and the banquet in between, and enjoy his ironing. “Though they be red as crimson,” he sang in his rich, rough tenor, “they shall be as wool …”

  Sherry had come downstairs, and she stood a moment watching him from behind. She may have been reminded of the scene in The Phantom of the Opera in which the girl steals up behind the monster as he plays the organ and snatches off his mask. No such dramatic potential lurked at the heart of this marriage—she thought.

  A lull in his singing made a slight motion on her part audible to Tattersall, and he halfway turned his head in acknowledgment of her arrival.

  “Hi,” she said with that unflagging cordiality that made Tattersall by turns grit his teeth and congratulate himself upon his luck. “We’re in extra good shape this month. And the fifteenth we clip another five hundred dollars interest off the Fanny May bonds.”

  “What are they again?” he asked, an intellectual to be accredited as such by the gaps in his knowledge. “What are Fanny May bonds?” he would say. “Who is Leonard Lyons?” he would ask, to show he was educated. “Who are Simon and Garfinkle? Who are Mia Farrow and Baby Jane Holstein? Who are all these people?”

  “Federal Mortgage Association. No, Federal National Mortgage Association. Someone nicknamed them Fanny Mays.”

  “Ah, yes.” He was a good provider, and they could trade their car in or buy another washing machine any time he damn pleased. They were the only people he knew who owned a mangle. They could squander a bit now and then too. He had liked a still life hanging in the Student Art Show, of which he now spoke. “I was thinking we might buy it. It’s only thirty-five dollars. It’s a gouache of an artichoke.”

  “Oh, I don’t like artichokes.” She came in farther and sat down on a camp stool to keep him company, like an intellectual companion. “But if you’ve got your heart set on it, why, go ahead. What took you? Getting the parts I mean.”

  “I stopped in at that concert of electronic music. For my sins.”

  “What do you go out of your way to listen to stuff that irritates you for?”

  “Well, I ran into Mayo Stiles. I try to keep up with what these kids like. If I don’t dig them, how can I grade what they write?”

  “I think you put yourself out too much, Hank. That’s all over and above the call of duty. It’s like putting in overtime nobody pays you for.”

  Tattersall smiled as he winced. He groaned at his good fortune. Her trusting responses were, as far as their verbal content was concerned, precisely the ones someone would make who was dishing out irony. Anyone overhearing this exchange without knowledge of its principals would ha
ve thought that here was a woman giving her lout of a hubby the wittiest what-for. Her implicit confidence in him seemed at times a kind of deficiency in a mate, almost as though she wasn’t doing her share in the war between the sexes.

  The attaché case was within reach of her, and she bent forward and pulled it toward her across the floor without getting off the camp stool. She opened it between her feet, and sat gazing down at its contents with her elbows on her knees. Once she glanced over at the disabled, and now disemboweled, washing machine. She sighed. Then she lit a cigarette. Tattersall laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  Tattersall had not been amused so much as delighted with an idea for an advertising series that hit him like a ton of bricks. There is a Freudian claim that the work of the wit is done principally by the subconscious. Certainly this brainstorm came to him instantly and with no conscious mental effort. It just hit him.

  There would be a woman sitting in a laundry room, or utility room, with a weary and harried expression, and the line: “Are you tired of detergents that don’t get your wash really white? Light up a Kent.” Or a Winston, or whatever cigarette bought the idea—or whatever cola, chewing gum, or candy bar. It would be a twisteroo catching the reader (or listener) by surprise—a pleasant surprise. All that was needed was some sponsor sophisticated enough to see the possibilities inherent in non sequitur, in an adroit application of the principle of defeat. For make no mistake about it, these would be the first commercials of the Absurd.

  He could see Wurlitzer being so struck with the idea that he would implore Tattersall to give up teaching and come to work for Wurlitzer and Wise at thirty thou a year, with annual increases and full fringe benefits. For it was a notion secretly dear to Tattersall that when it came to the agency crowd, and all those birds who looked down on teachers for their low salaries, he could outshine them at their own game any day he had a mind to. All their pretense at being “creatively” engaged in “communications,” all their jargon about identification and images, were but masks for rankling self-doubt. He chuckled to himself again, shaking his head in delight. “Do you despair of ever finding a wax that will get your linoleum floor the way you really want it? Are you sick of inferior cleansers and their lavish claims? Pick yourself up with a Snickers.”