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

by De Vries, Peter

  His obsession with impressing the Wurlitzers abruptly recalled his reasons for wanting to. Just as Lucy had probably told her husband about the incident at the concert, it was a cinch Mayo had told them both about the repetition of his conduct at the banquet and would now go on to relate the debacle at the electronics recital. The portrait of an ass was emerging at breathtaking speed.

  Suddenly he found himself telling Sherry the story, in a rush, but affecting a straightforward, offhand amusement, a nothing-to-it attitude which he hoped her own reaction would validate. We all tend to exaggerate a secret. It becomes like a worm gnawing us hollow inside. Sharing it with someone who in the nature of the case will be more objective helps us to recover our own perspective. It was by way of shopping for this reassurance that, continuing matter-of-factly to iron, he related: “I was sitting at that concert the other afternoon, you see, and there was this woman whispering behind me. It was rather annoying, to some others around there too, I could tell. Well anyway …”

  In a moment he had told her the whole story, and was relieved to find her laughing freely.

  “I know that feeling,” she said. “Something like it happened to me. Driving the car, remember? I must have told you. Somebody made a stupid move passing me, and I don’t snap at people as a general rule, so it must have been pretty bad. Not that I snapped, exactly, but I did turn and give him a dirty look as he went by, and who should it be but Jerry Freeland. I was so mortified—well, we both were—”

  “Of course I remember!” Tattersall said, prolonging his laughter to impress on himself the molehill out of which he was making a mountain. The sense of deliverance was so great that he took her out to dinner, made love when they got home, and then fell into a deep sleep.

  But he awoke from one of those dreams in which we are naked in public, and he groaned into his pillow. “It’s not the same thing. Traffic is not a reunion, and Jerry Freeland is not an old flame.” And he spent the next black hours substantiating Mark Twain’s observation that we are none of us quite sane at night. This was the hook on which Mark Twain writhed in his hotel room after making an ass of himself at the Whittier birthday dinner.

  Sherry spent a few days with her mother, out of town, leaving Tattersall to turn himself steadily on the lathe of self-torment. He avoided Mayo’s eye in class, save for a few glances which confirmed that she was avoiding his. That Friday afternoon, she was scheduled for a personal conference. They tried to talk about her work as though nothing had happened. Then he made another move. Locked in those gambler’s toils in which we are driven to take ever greater risks to recoup ever heavier losses, he prolonged the conference to the point where he could glance at his wristwatch and say, “Hm. After five. Time to be thinking about dinner. Can you join me, by any chance?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I should, Mr. Tattersall.”

  “My wife’s out of town.”

  Bleeding Christ, what was he saying! Had he gone completely off his chump? His throat was now dry, and though he was only a chap asking for one more second chance, to show he was great gas and not a clod, poop, fink, blob, fog, drizzle or gink, he knew his eyes were being taken for the eyes of a rebuffed old lech. Those were the eyes her eyes told his eyes her eyes thought they were looking at. Or, rather, again avoiding.

  Bending a paper knife in his hands, as an alternative to slitting his throat with it, he said, “I only meant otherwise I’ll have to dine alone, and that’s no fun. I miss my wife when she’s gone. We could talk about your work a little more. I may not have made myself clear. That a substandard, illiterate narrator imposes extra disciplines on a writer—it does not relax them.”

  “You make yourself clear, all right. And I think I ought to go home and work on that, you know, molestation scene tonight,” Mayo whispered.

  Tattersall stumbled across the campus, his skin again feeling as though it were on inside out, and all his nerves seething like a crock of boiled worms. Now would be a good time to nip home and test his theory that you ran a temperature when mortified. There was definitely the skin-on-wrongside-out sensation that went with fever. But he was in no mood for clinical investigation. He wanted to jump into the Chichester, and would have done, had not the Everlasting fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter. There were voices, “He asked you to dinner, really? Said his wife was away? Hm. Turned out to be quite a chaser. Glad I passed him up.” No! It’s just the eternal Footman holding my coat and snickering, don’t you see, Lucy, as I tried to explain to you in the rowboat long ago—. “Sometimes when men reach a certain—” Nonsense! Nothing of the sort at all. Simply trying to recover my self-respect, groping and threshing blindly about for it, like a man stumbling about for his trousers in the dark, knowing they’re there somewhere. Can’t respect yourself beyond the point where other people’s respect for you stops. Self-esteem is what others think of you, no use in denying that.

  So what’s a good plan of action?

  Because proving to Lucy Wurlitzer what a catch he had been became now the consuming passion of his life. After debating several possible courses, he thought, Got it. Call the Wurlitzers on some pretext or other, and then you toss in something about asking Mayo to dine with you. Anything, so long as you get there first. Ounce of prevention idea. Our Lady of Prophylaxis. Throw yourself on her mercy. But the important thing is to be casual about it, as though you have nothing to hide. That ought to defuse it. Phone booth behind the physics lab. You’ve got the two dimes it costs to call the city. Around the stone bench dedicated by the class whose thews no longer hustle them about, past the sundial that records only sunny hours, and thank God there’s a city directory in there. Where did Lucy say they lived? East 79th Street.

  “Hello, Lucy? Hank Tattersall. Glad I caught you in. Look, I find I’ve got to whip into town for something and I was wondering if you and your husband were free this evening. Could possibly even rip a chop with me.”

  Briefest possible moment of hesitation?

  “Why, Savannah already has dinner going here. Why don’t you come up? We’ll be alone.”

  “Wouldn’t think of barging in. No, this was just an impromptu notion of mine. Happen to find myself alone—wife-visiting-her-mother type bachelor—and I was hoping Mayo might join us. Well, maybe she’s footloose for the evening. Perhaps some other time then. It seems ridiculous we never see each other, living so close. So let’s take a raincheck on it when Sherry gets back.”

  Tattersall stood outside the phone booth breathing heavily, and with a sense of having tucked another strand of entrail back through an emotional hernia he seemed to be springing. “Phew,” he said with relief. But it had been a narrow squeak, and the struggle to pull himself together and set things to rights had only begun. He needed some food, to say nothing of the drinks to precede it, and so he headed for a restaurant—Tony’s, to convince himself that his and Lucy’s old steakhouse housed no ghosts of which he need stand in fear.

  Instead of checking his attaché case, he carried it to the table with him, and there in a corner he sat reading and grading the week’s papers over a whiskey and water. From Oxenfelt another chapter of the predictable anti-hero, an alienated Brooklynite depicted in black adventures in which the time sense was deliberately distorted in order to emphasize modern fragmentation. “Two can play at that game,” Tattersall thought, and, smiling over his drink, tried to think up something a little more lighthearted than the average pedagogical comment. A very amusing whim seized him. He reversed the pages so that they read backwards, and on the margin of the last one, now the top, he scribbled, “Real impact. Genuinely shocking and galvanizing. But I tink it pacs an eem greater wallop dis way,” and signed himself “Anti-reader.”

  Anti-reader soon had three whiskeys under his belt, and was warming to the lark. He found both the fancy and courage to do what, he realized, he had vaguely been wanting to do for a long time—namely pay these kids back in their own kind. If the English language was no longer the coin of the realm, then he would cash his in
for what was. If the slob was in, he would join whom he could not lick. He was by now so used to narration by goons that he was beginning to think like them anyway. And they would all have more fun this way. He could already hear it bruited about the campus what a gas that Tattersall really was.

  “Jeez,” he jotted on a section of Mayo’s novel that she had revised, “din’t none a dese characters eem git into de foist grade, dat not eem one a dem can talk United States? And how about character development? Dis wino a yours, he gits put troo a series a episodes so bloodtoisty it musta done sumpm to him by dis time—at least make him woise. I mean he’s bein put troo de wringer fa Chrissake. But I must say de deliberate confusion of reality wit illusion in de guy’s mind is most adroitly done. B—”

  Tattersall had entered into a state of near exhilaration. His mellow frame of mind made him do something else he had not done in a long time—grade the submissions. When after dinner he drove across the bridge for an evening in the part of town where Chichester’s modest version of the lower depths was to be found—the “tough” section—the mood engendered by the narrators, not to mention his own self-intoxicating parodies of them, was still upon him. Shouldering his way between two men standing at one of the representative bars, one in a turtleneck sweater and the other in a blue denim shirt and lumberjacket, he ordered a beer and began shooting off his big mouth.

  “I says fa Chrissakes if you don’t know how to drive a car, get de hell out from behind de wheel and leave de road to people who do,” he related, rather expansively. “He turns to look at me, and I’m a sumbitch if it ain’t some guy I know. Was I mortified, you.”

  The two listeners took in Tattersall’s tweed jacket a little dubiously at first, but as the evening wore on and liquor blurred particular impressions they forgot it, engrossed as they became in his tale. It was largely fabrication, but based at several points on fact, minor incidents that had befallen people he knew if not always himself personally, and of no consequence in themselves, but woven into a single night’s odyssey, and with no especial regard for time sense, they packed a good deal of punch, of the sex-and-violence kind in vogue.

  “So de sumbitch says I’ll git out from behind de wheel all right, Buster, provided you do too. Get what I mean? And I’ll knock dose teet so far down ya troat you’ll tink you’re eatin popcorn. So I says Oh, a master a irony, huh?”

  “Of what?” the turtleneck asked.

  “Some friggin expression he used. I don’t know.” Tattersall took a pull of his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He says dere’s ways a buttonin up lips like yours fa good, ya know. And I says you stink on ice. And he says you jist gonna sit dere wit only your head stickin out, like a cuckoo clock, or you wanna git out all de way and try to back up dem fancy words wit a little action. Well, dere was nuttin to do but oblige dis gink. So I climbs outa de car and we starts mixin it up in de middle a de street. And I mean he had a right like a mule. I got in de way of it a coupla times dat I din’t care much for, I’ll admit, but den I commences gittin in a few myself. We hung a mouse on each odda, is about de size of it. I don’t know how it woulda come out. Because a squad car arrives and starts pullin us apart like a coupla refs. Well in de course of nearly bein booked, me and my opponent get so peed off wit de fuzz dat we turns friends. How’s dat fa motivation, pal?”

  “For what?”

  “How de hell do I know? So anyways, when de fuzz finely lets us go we shakes hands and has a beer on it. We’re buddies now, and starts combin de town fa gash. We finely picked up a couple plums at anodda bar, and went up to one a dem’s place wit a bag a delicatessen stuff and some more cold beer and tied one on. I’ll never forget it. Finely dis one plum says she’s got to woik de next day and would like to hit de sack early, and we says dat’s fine wit us, let’s hit it, and we all roars. Laugh, we thought de plums was gonna bust a gut. Well,” Tattersall continued after another gulp, and a dramatic pause, “dere was a slight confusion about who was wit who—know what I mean? It seemed we bot’ had our eye on de same plum, namely de one who wanted to hit de sack early, and by Christ what with one ting and anodda if we don’t wind up where we started—fightin! How do ya like dem potatoes?”

  Both his companions shook their heads in appreciative acknowledgment of the dramatic power inherent in this development. The one in the lumberjacket, a short powerfully built man with coal-black hair, said, “The way it happens. Then what happened?”

  Tattersall had been settling himself against the bar in ever more raffish attitudes. Now he leaned with his back to it, propped on his elbows. He surveyed the premises with a sinister boredom, as though debating whether to go on with this saga or start a fresh chapter of another with a brawl here.

  “What happened?” He took another slug of beer, stalling till the wheels of improvisation had accommodated another shift of gears. “We mixed it up agin while de ceiling and walls got pounded on by different tenants. Jealousy is one a da strongest a human emotions, nest pa? My old pal was now so mad because it looked as dough de plum was not goin fa him dat he goes fa me, wit a bottle dat is. He lets me have it over de head, and dat’s what might of saved my life. Because I passed out cold, and de sight of me layin dere made him so contrite wit remorse dat it sobered him up and brang him to his senses. So it was beddy-bye witout no gash, always a letdown, nest pa? Because when I woke up de plum was dressed and on her way to woik …”

  In this way Tattersall held forth far into the night, grooming his diction as well as the style it served. When he got home, about one o’clock, he went straight to bed and fell asleep. He awoke with a headache it took most of the morning and several aspirin to make a dent in. He got through his two classes somehow, mostly by letting the students read their stuff aloud for general criticism, and then giving them their heads while he sat holding his as inconspicuously as possible. It wasn’t until he had put away a good breakfast—at lunchtime—that he could pull himself together enough to read what he had written on the papers. He had only the foggiest memory of the happy inspiration that had overtaken him the evening before, here in the same restaurant.

  “Sweet Christ in the morning, what have you done now?”

  He breathed this in such an audible gasp that the waiter came over to ask whether he wanted something. He shook his head politely. The waiter left.

  Tattersall drew a thermometer from his pocket, shook it down, and poked it under his tongue. Something had made him that morning take it from the medicine chest and clip it, in its case, to the inside breast pocket of his coat, where he carried it like a fountain pen. Now was as good a time as any to test his theory that you ran a slight fever in moments of intense chagrin. This was probably now his most embarrassing moment, superseding the one that had precipitated this series of events, which was like a chain reaction he seemed powerless to check. It made you believe in the Greek idea of Nemesis. The fact that his embarrassment now was private rather than public did not make it any the less scalding an experience. Yes, he was sure he had a fever. He put his palms to his cheeks. They were burning with shame.

  With the thermometer in his mouth, he got out an eraser and tried to rub out some of the comments, particularly the one on Mayo’s manuscript. But they were in ink, and resisted deletion short of making tatters of the entire page. He gave this off, and, while waiting for the thermometer to register, sat chin in hand, reviewing the present stage of his general predicament, and sorting out alternatives for trying to extricate himself from it.

  His mistake had been in not writing preliminary drafts of his remarks on separate sheets of paper, and waiting to see how they looked in the morning before entering them permanently on the manuscripts themselves. It was too late for that now. He tried to recapture, or at least clearly remember, the spontaneous impulse to which he had so irrevocably yielded, but he could not do so. It must have seemed to possess a valid gaiety at the moment, but that did him no good now. It did not survive cold reappraisal by daylight. He could scarcely now quit
e believe that he had written those words on Mayo’s manuscript, yet there they were, in a bold scrawl running diagonally across the top of the page above a chapter heading. Of course he could retype the page, but not without detection. Mayo’s type style differed from both that of his typewriter at home and the one in his office. Even if he rented one that matched hers, the ribbon she used was some strange purplish color he would probably have trouble duplicating. He might even have to run in to New York for it.

  He pulled the thermometer out of his mouth and and looked at it. Not even ninety-eight. Which showed the shape he was in. People in a bad way are often subnormal, owing to lack of energy. His blood had certainly been running cold for the past five minutes. His actual temperature was probably more like ninety-seven and a half. Chagrin had sent it up half a degree.

  He clipped the thermometer back into his pocket, beside his fountain pen, and then put the manuscripts back into the attaché case with the decision to try to forget them for the time being. He was known to keep submissions for a week or more, by which time Sherry would be home and he could try his comments out on her. He often showed her his remarks, for her opinion. Perhaps she would reassure him as she had the last time he had tried something out on her for size, namely the story of the original incident at the musicale. She was level-headed if anybody was.

  He showed her Mayo’s the instant she got home, almost before she could get her coat off. He made her sit down and read it in the living room, and as she did he watched her anxiously from another chair. It turned out that she was quite genuinely amused. In fact his comment finally had her in hysterics, he was overjoyed to see. “This is a scream, Hank,” she said. “Teachers ought to do this sort of thing more. Unbend.”