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

by De Vries, Peter

  “That’s because we no longer trade with Cuba.”

  “Oh?” He spoke as one interested in current events, eager to learn more. So she continued:

  “For a while, I was afraid I might not be able to get my own favorite brand of tea, lapsang souchong, for the same reason. Because it comes from Red China, with whom we no longer trade either. But of course England does, and we import it from her. I don’t see why we allow in tea from there and not tobacco from Canada, but anyway there it is. Mainland China is now completely in the hands of the Communists. Chiang Kaishek only has Formosa.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  She had dropped her cigarette into the sandpot, and now he did his, and escorted her back onto the dance floor. There, as he drove her around the ballroom at breakneck speeds, he whispered into the pink shell of her ear, “How would you like to go bowling next Saturday?”

  “Mustn’t you see your father?”

  “He’s not having any visitors. I doubt whether he’ll pull through.”

  “Oh, well, in that case …”

  She was hot and wretched, convinced that things would get worse before they got better. She was both galled by the persistence with which he kept dating her, and gratified at the early hour in each evening at which he procured himself another. It showed an endearing uncertainty, and tended to indicate that she was needed. The realization filled a rather sharp necessity of her own.

  These were her scrambled thoughts each time she plodded up the steps to her apartment behind him. He always preceded her, as though instinctively sensing she was one of those women who preferred this fine inversion of courtesy to being themselves trailed up a stairway. Such subtle filaments were always turning up in his nature, making it difficult to end this as she would have liked. He had more redeeming features than any man she knew—but should a man need that many! He bowled insufferably well too, his gimp in this case putting an extra thrust into his delivery at just the right terminal moment. He gave her pointers about her own, explaining that to hit the front pin head-on always resulted in a split, or railroad, while an impact slightly on one side or other of it gave you a better pin-mix. She continued aiming straight for the center, banking on a certain inaccuracy to get the ball slightly to the right or left.

  It was that night over hamburgers that he criticized her on a scale, and with a candor, to which no man would resort who was not seriously interested in you. Such, at least, was the thinking with which she saved face for both of them—bailed both of them out of this rather nasty little dilemma.

  “Want to know something about yourself? Don’t wear a girdle,” he said. “I mean give the whollies a chance. I mean you haven’t got that much that you need to go around with it in a sling, tightening in the natural curves and flattening out the wherewithal. Let it breathe. Same thing up here. Give the mercy-me’s a chance. Here,” he persisted when she looked away with an injured hauteur, silently eating. “Mezzanine. Ribbons, laces, notions. So give the Jaspers notions. You know what? You’re the kind of woman who could go without a bra altogether, let alone always folding your arms on top of it, like an Indian. With sweaters and even the right dress. Let the merchandise gallop a little.”

  He’s got to go, she told herself as she tramped up the stairs angrily behind him. He knows nothing about the new emerging African nations—he thinks Cameroons are some kind of cookie—the ghetto problems, or what a megalopolis is. He seems to think that’s some kind of prehistoric animal. That the country was about to become three or four of them, one of which would spread from Boston down to Washington and be known as Boswash, was wholly lost on him. With each succeeding such topic that sprang to mind she trod the stairs that much more indignantly, her numb legs notwithstanding. She remembered her mother saying how awful her father was. Mrs. Shilepsky said she sometimes crossed the street to avoid him, or popped into a closet till he had passed her in the hall. Tillie didn’t want to get into that. No, she would break it off. Tonight.

  “How old are you?”

  The question stung her like a whip. Regret for her lost youth was so keen in Tillie’s unmarried case that to be asked her age was a threat of which she stood in actual physical fear. That was how she understood Gertrude as fiercely as she did. Her recoil was literally a reflex: her nerves jumped before her brain comprehended the words that had made them do so, as pain makes us withdraw our hand from a stove without the intervention of thought. A shock went through her, a blast of hot air, of cold wind.

  “Thuh—thirty-two,” she said, compounding her sensation by catching herself in a Gertrude lie. Tillie had turned thirty-three, but so recently that the falsehood might be forgiven; it would have been accurate a week ago. I’m three years older than this Pete Seltzer, she told herself through gritted teeth.

  The incident made her fear the telephone wouldn’t ring as, had it not occurred, she might have begun to hope it wouldn’t. Instead of making a date that night, he kissed her goodnight at the door with only the promise that he would give her a jangle. A week passed without his doing so. By Wednesday of the following week she was frantic. Then the phone rang.

  “Care to chop some more wood tonight? I think this is the best night for a lane there. Not a league night.”

  “Why, swell. But don’t bother to come all the way over here to pick me up. I’ll come by and honk.”

  That was the night she dressed as he had suggested. But it was for only one reason, and that not to give the whollies a chance, or certainly to let the merchandise gallop a little, or whatever: it was to put Pete Seltzer to a very crucial test, one that entailed, for her, the very criterion of sensibility. Would he crudely comment, or would he have the grace not to?

  He passed the test with flying colors. There was only the merest murmur of extra pleasure at what his loitering palm found under her coat when he kissed her goodnight at the door. “Dear Diary,” she mentally noted in the imaginary journal she kept, “he is incapable of the gaucherie of remarking that he saw I had taken his advice.”

  So against his jazzy raffishness and political immaturity (he signed any petition thrust at him without reading it, on the ground that anyone stellar enough to pound pavements and ring doorbells deserved your admiration per se) must be balanced this innate delicacy of which she had now so many tenuous but none the less palpable proofs. He was a bad Jasper from one point of view, but what foraging male wasn’t, from that? Only the gray, proctoring presence of her mother with whom she lived kept him from “trying anything” there. The question was only when he would suggest they go “up to his place”—par for the course today.

  But what was he really like all told? she asked herself again as, from the curtain of her third-story window, she watched him pump along home by way of the corner bus stop. She remembered something her mother used to say, in the humor of the spiffy-gink days of Pete’s father, now, at last, departed. “Men are like streetcars. If you miss one, there’ll be another along pretty soon,” Mrs. Shilepsky would tell Tillie. And Tillie now answered aloud, as though Hollywood cameras were grinding behind her, “Yes, but they don’t run after midnight.” She waited a moment, imbibing the pity of the night streets, till Pete had swung aboard the last bus and vanished, before dropping the upheld curtain and turning to bed.

  So having been forced into giving him a hearing, she began to see that he had possibilities. He was something like an old barn standing in an open field, ignored by the hurrying passerby but irresistible to the discerning eye, its foundation found on scrutiny to be firm and its beams sound, and, for the rest, crying out to be remodeled.

  “Why don’t you get your hair cut, Pete?” It was after all her turn.

  He looked woundedly away across the restaurant, as the sheep before his shearers is dumb.

  “All I mean is, I don’t think long hair is right for you, Pete. It’s still thick, and that wiry kind I think looks better short. I don’t mean crew cut, but what’s the term? En brosse. I think that would be right for you.”

  She did
not comment after he had made his long overdue trip to the barber, but noted to herself how cruelly young the high-clipper jobs made men look. Then it seemed a pity he hadn’t something better to go with the result than the frayed sport coat in which he kept turning up. So she accompanied him to a men’s store where they picked out a gray herringbone suit as well as a standard navy blue blazer. That gave her the courage to bring up the subject of his teeth. They were in visible need of repairs thanks in part to a habit of sucking lozenges in order to keep his mouth wholesome in the grapplethrocks.

  “How often do you see your dentist, Pete?”

  “My dentist died some years ago.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry. I was looking for one myself.”

  The hint was taken, and he wound up having his teeth not only filled but capped, which gave his smile a rather villainous air, at least until you got accustomed to it.

  Instinct told her that now he was going to pop the question. All the signs pointed to it. She knew it was coming one night in a French restaurant, after a lot of good food and wine. He cleared his throat as he picked up the coins from a saucer, leaving a pair of bills for the waiter.

  “How would you like to come up to my place for a spot of heavy breathing?” he asked.

  “All right,” she said, gathering up her bag and gloves.

  After all, if she was going to reform him, she would have to start mending her ways.

  Two

  “This sort of thing does go on,” she assured him as they mounted a flight of stairs even dingier than her own. She had told him before that she didn’t find the neighborhood in which he lived very appetizing. To which he had replied, “It’s the safest neighborhood in town. It’s protected by the Mafia.” His flat was over a Chinese restaurant, which Pete said had his favorite waiter in the world. Every time he spilled a plate of food or a bowl of soup all over you, he viewed the resulting havoc with Oriental resignation.

  Then she was sitting in an overstuffed chair of russet brown, as nearly as could be judged in the light shed from a distant lamp, for the living room, at least, was a large one. Some kind of small doll-like trinket dangled from the lamp’s tasseled pull, one feminine touch undoubtedly left behind by a forerunner. There was an upright piano against the opposite wall, while in another corner sat another short, rather frightened girl wearing Tillie’s fun-fur coat of sheared rabbit, smiling tautly back at her from an oval mirror.

  Pete took her coat, leaving her in her red wool dress. She felt as though she were being stripped for surgery, not, as it happened, altogether inappropriately. “I’ll whip us up a little anti-freeze,” he said, vanishing into what by inference would be the kitchen. She didn’t want to see it, right away. Out of the tail of her eye she caught a glimpse of an open bedroom with an unmade bed.

  She rose to make a tour of this room, examining one by one a wealth of snapshots surely illustrating a sentimental turn of mind? There were some people picnicking in a field, a woman waving in bright sunlight from an open roadster with wooden spokes in the wheels, a fat boy humorously hugging the pillar of a white porch-rail on which he sat. Then she came upon a fleshy man in middle age, buttoned into a Chesterfield and holding a Homburg. His thick, not yet graying hair was short and brushed back, a cane was hooked on one arm, and Tillie could fairly smell the 4711 cologne she herself so loved, scent, label and all. The diamond eyes, though probably as blue as Pete’s, looked vaguely Irish rather than Teutonic. She was holding the picture, stroking its small gilt frame and its glass cover with her thumb when Pete returned with their highballs.

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. Cheers.”

  Leaning back on the sofa with an arm characteristically spread along its back, he told her a story he’d just read in the medical section of a news magazine. A young woman nearly seven feet tall had had sections of bone removed from both legs—six inches in all. The operation was a success, making her a woman of at least reasonably normal height. The surgeons crowed. But they had forgotten one thing. When the woman got up out of bed, her arms hung down to her knees.

  “That’s some story to tell a girl on her bridal night,” Tillie said. She set her glass down and put her ten fingers into her hair, in that tidying gesture with which women seem also about to claw themselves. She was really ready to grab her coat and run when Pete said, “Doctors have said they could fix my hoof, but what the hell,” so she stayed.

  Walking to the piano, for he was going to entertain her, he saw that she was reading a large novelty-shop button lying on a table beside her. “I make friends easily. Strangers take a little time,” it said. “An out-of-town client gave that to me,” he explained. “Do you realize I had to wear the damned thing all through lunch?” He dropped it into a wastebasket and continued on to the piano.

  He gave the stool a ceremonial twirl and, without further preliminary, hurled himself violently into Twelfth Street Rag. She had never heard anything performed at such breakneck speed. Hunched in shirtsleeves over the yellowing keys, he pounded them with a velocity and ferocity whose object seemed to be that of seeing how fast he could get through the piece. One chorus finished, he would negotiate the systematically stumbling, offbeat interpolation familiar to such low classics, and then instantly fling himself into another, as though determined he could clip a fraction of a second off his record, like a track athlete training for the fifty-yard dash. Also his two hands gave the impression of racing each other to the finish, somehow always winding up in a draw, as you did with Pete on the dance floor, and, happily, both did with the orchestra. The piano itself was more than a little out of tune—she was certainly seeing life—and that enhanced the “raw” effect prized in the honky-tonk and cathouse pianists on whom he obviously modeled himself.

  As abruptly as it had begun the squall of syncopation stopped, and with a last flourish of a hand he rose, turning around with a modest smile.

  “That’s terrific, Pete.” The adjective seemed for once right. “Do you play anything but ragtime?”

  He gave a vague mumbling shrug intended to be modest, and the next thing she knew he was gone and there was water drumming into a bathtub somewhere. It was then, in his absence, her coat hanging in a closet from which it could be easily snatched, that the Dark Stranger reappeared to her in another of the cautionary visions to which she was subject.

  He was that romantic personification of one’s schoolgirl dreams, visualized as approaching across the lobby of a European hotel to warn you against the local drinking water, as a pretext for next asking whether you believed in fate. He now stood at a gate overhung with eglantine, or some other old-world flower such as poets used to weave into their verses, a sad frown on his face as he gesticulated warnings to her. Raving, deploring, he called to her, but she could hear nothing, as he existed only in a picture with the sound track dead, or, still worse, a silent film with nothing but the splatter of piano music against it. His clothes were new, but old-fashioned: a gray frock coat, rich dark cravat with high collar, and the Homburg, clutched at breast level like a steering wheel. The figure had taken root in her mind when she was traveling abroad with her mother long ago, and was modeled on some of the men she had actually seen promenading in the streets of some of the smaller European towns from one to another of which she was whisked in her mother’s half of some kind of experiment her parents were conducting, called separate vacations. She was still not old enough to be a virgin at the time, but would, as she understood the term, become one. The phantom began definitely to haunt her at Oberammergau, where they paused to take in the Passion Play, which had sounded enticing enough. He had flickered and floated in and out of her thoughts these twenty years since, that one who after discreetly accosting you in the lobby asked your mother’s permission to “pay his respects” and then to take you to tea. She would have had to be at least twenty for that to seem feasible, and that was how the principals in the drama had proliferated into four. There was the girl of thirteen standing on tiptoe to peer into the tea shop to se
e herself at twenty sitting inside with the Dark Stranger, and now her thirty-three-year-old self watching all of that. It was intensely cinematic in flavor, and now it was all “wipe dissolved” except for one corner of the screen where the Dark Stranger remained, rocking his head in his hands, at the gate overhung with eglantine.

  “You never turned up, you know,” Tillie told him hurriedly, “and now here comes Pete Seltzer, so if you’ll excuse me.” And with an eyeblink he was wipe dissolved.

  Pete could be heard tearing the bed apart and remaking it with fresh linen. She finished off her highball, like a thirsty child gulping down a glass of milk. When he came to fetch her, she saw from his gleaming jowls that he had shaved into the bargain, and was sure that the bathtub had been scoured as well, in preparation for her. “I’ll go bathe now,” she said, but he checked her with a hand on her elbow, quixotically murmuring that not all flowers needed watering, as he steered her into the bedroom.

  Shivering on the cold floor, as her last silks dropped like flags lowered in surrender, she told herself that ignorance was correctable, but innate delicacy such as his could never be taught. He was a gentleman to his fingertips—those now breaking the bread of her body. He worshipped on his knees, Pete, stroking her smooth sides and babbling skillfully as he sought the garden where the whollies grew. She broke and ran away from him, into the bed.

  “Do you like Joyce?” she asked through chattering teeth.