by Henry Miller
Then suddenly he had a presentiment that the towering steeple up which he had climbed in panic was crumbling at the foundation, and that he and this immense spire together hung teetering over the edge of the cataclysmic waste, threatening at any moment to be dashed into shattering annihilation. Presently the profound stillness was broken. Faintly there came the sound of a voice—a human voice. Possibly it was Blanche enticing him again with her throaty warbling. He forgot for a moment the imminence of the pit, the scaly reptiles waiting with heavy-lidded eyes for his certain downfall. As though his very salvation depended on it, he strained every nerve to recapture the tones of that faint human voice. Suddenly it rang out again with a weird moaning accent, and then quickly died, as if it had been choked down deep in the sulphurous abysses of the slimy void. His support was lurching violently, describing great swooping arcs that ceased miraculously just when the inevitable seemed inescapable. The voices rang out clearer. They were human—as human as the laughter of hyenas. Shrill lunatic screams, bloodcurdling oaths and epithets . . . the piercing, horror-laden cach-inations of the mad.
And then the rail against which he was leaning gave way. He was flung out into space, catapulted with meteoric velocity into the shrieking Bedlam. Leprous claws, and talons covered with verdigris, reached out and stripped the tender flesh from his hide as he continued on in his swooning flight. Down, down, down he shot, his beautiful frail body a loathsome dripping carcass of ribboned flesh. His bones felt as if they had been mangled by unicorns.
And now he was no longer hurtling with terrifying speed through the interminable void, but shooting down a paraffin incline which was supported in space by gigantic columns of human flesh, formed in an inextricable pattern of latticework. The chute, he could see, emptied into the cavernous maw of a decapitated ogre who champed his teeth with fierce delectation. Only a few hundred yards to go and the cruel gaping orifice would open for the last time. Another instant and he would be enmeshed in those frightful tusklike fangs ... the monstrous jaws would be crunching his polished bones into pulverized bits....
But at the very moment of his doom the monster sneezed. The explosion snuffed out the universe.
12
A TWELVE-HOUR SLEEP HAD REPAIRED THE RAVAGES OF the previous night, the night spent in Greenpoint with Dave. Moloch found a note lying in the top drawer of his desk. It was from his new secretary, Valeska.
The office was crowded with youngsters waiting to be interviewed. It promised to be another terrific day. He glanced at the note impatiently, put it down absentmindedly, and looked at the sea of faces that swarmed up close to him. They reminded him of curious aquatic sports whose flattened snouts rubbing restlessly against the glass tanks in the Aquarium provide amusement and edification for the sightseer. His thoughts were divided between the answer that he would be obliged to make and the arithmetical problem of filling the vacancies that appeared on the slate. It was a terribly late start he had made, and the mob beyond the rail was impatient. He read the note once again.
“I’m going to hold you to your promise tonight. You must take me somewhere—I don’t care where, but tonight!”
“Later, Valeska . . . later,” he begged.
Valeska was nettled.
“But you’ll go?” she pleaded hurriedly. She appeared to be desperate about it.
“I’m not sure,” he mumbled. A perplexed look came over his face.
His perplexity was well founded. Only that morning he had promised Blanche to raise a sum of money so that she might have an abortion performed. He hadn’t the slightest idea, when he made the promise, how he would raise the money. No matter whom he thought of it seemed hopeless. Debts, little ones and big ones, old ones and new ones, confronted him at every turn. There wasn’t a soul whom he had overlooked. He got out an address book and skimmed through it; opposite every name there were figures. They ran from two dollars up to three hundred. These latter sums, running up into three figures, he no longer regarded as debts. A debt was an obligation one intended to meet someday.
Toward the middle of the afternoon Valeska made bold to broach the subject of the note.
“Look here, Dion,” she said, with strange determination, “you simply can’t put me off tonight. I don’t care what you had planned, you’re going out with me?”
“But Valeska—” He leaned as far forward as he could and murmured: “Can’t we make it tomorrow? I’ve got something very important to attend to this evening.”
Valeska refused to countenance the thought.
“Tell me what it is,” she whispered. “Perhaps I can suggest a way out.”
“Wouldn’t do any good,” he replied, looking more than ever perplexed. He looked at her again, baffled, wondering if she could help in any way. There was only one way she could help, he knew that only too well.
She gave him a strong look of encouragement. “You don’t need to keep anything from me, Dion. Can I help you? What’s disturbing you?”
He told her the whole business—falteringly, apologizing at intervals, and blushing now and then like a schoolboy. She seemed neither surprised nor aggrieved.
“Must you have it immediately?”
He grasped at the straw she proffered. “Absolutely!” he replied.
He looked at her so straightforwardly she never doubted him for an instant. “Well, then . . . how much?” she asked.
He dissembled further, not so successfully this time—at least, he thought not.
“You don’t mean that you want to . . . er, that you’ll get it for me?”
“How much?” she repeated. Her voice had grown a little harder.
“At least a hundred ... I guess.” He had no precise idea of what was needed. When he promised Blanche faithfully that he would raise the money for her he hadn’t the slightest hope of carrying out his promise. A hundred dollars seemed like a sensible sum now. It was a round figure and it sounded to him, as it rolled off his tongue, just the appropriate sum for a professional fee. No doubt it could be managed for less, but he was not supposed to be a connoisseur in this realm. The last time Blanche had managed everything herself. He never knew what she paid. All he remembered was that it was a sanguine affair. He resolutely shut his mind to further speculation. It left a bad taste in his mouth. The very thought of those filthy butchers on Henry Street made his blood boil. . . .
Valeska put an end to his reflections.
“Meet me at six o’clock and I’ll give you the money. Return as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting. A hundred’s all I can manage . . . not a cent more. However, you won’t need to worry about returning it immediately. When I need it, I’ll ask for it.”
He was about to thank her profusely but the look she threw him made him change his mind at once.
“You don’t need to think I’m playing the good Samaritan,” she sneered. “Let’s not make any pretenses.”
When she left he tried to apply himself to his work. Questions presented themselves. He wondered where she was going to raise the dough. “Tonight, tonight!” What the devil was that all about?
“Christ,” he mumbled to himself, “I hope the old man doesn’t get wind of it.” And who was going to foot the expenses for this little expedition? “Hell,” he said to himself, “I guess there’s no need worrying about that. If she can raise a hundred as easily as that, she can raise a few more.”
He knew he wouldn’t have any trouble getting away from Blanche. Once he showed her the money he could do what he liked. But what the devil did Valeska want of him? That’s what bothered him most. . . .
In a dancing trough in Harlem they were playing “The Circassian Walnut Waltz.” Ebony giants in emperor green were clinging fast to pale, skinny things smothered in lace and pearl smoke. The hall was one huge mirror of banjo eyes floating in a sloe gin fizz.
Moloch and Valeska were jammed together at a little table wedged in among many others. A magnificent, barbaric jazz deafened their ears. They were forced into such proximity that Valeska’s knees
had no freedom of movement except between the vise of his muscular legs. Floods of rain-drenched melodies poured forth from the powerful epileptic figures on the dais. From the sluggish, drugged couples on the floor a peculiar aroma emanated, as from the marriage of camphor and patchouli. Notes like deep wounds gushed over them in founts of dragon blood.
Valeska pointed to the leader, a hypnotic topaz clown. Her bosom was heaving, her shoulders twitching in response to the frozen thuds that reverberated from the traps.
“Have another drink?” Moloch was in an ecstasy himself.
“Get some gin,” she begged. “I can’t drink your rotten booze.” She slipped him a bill under the table.
They sat there electrified, unable to take their eyes off the weird figure who directed the swaying group on the platform. He was no great mogul with his men, this leader. No panjandrum of stuffy concert hall, wielding an airy baton. A smooth, slippery dynamo, rather, charging the sentient ether with shuddering violet rays of ecstasy. His eyes had the mossy glaze of two oysters on the half shell. Wrapped in a tarnished skin, like a strong cigar; a Mumbo-Jumbo in a full-dress suit. Wearing a lyric smile.
“Sour music with a vengeance,” chuckled Moloch.
“I love it, love it!” Valeska ripped out with becoming passion.
A nigger, dancing lightly, brought the gin, and as he poured the drinks his feet kept moving, shuffling, working with the music.
Valeska looked up at Moloch with frank admiration, her lips slightly parted, luscious-looking, warm as the tip of Ceylon. Someone said of a great tragedienne that her eyes were like a drowsy flame. So were Valeska’s. She wore a pale yellow gown that was almost transparent; it matched the faint bronze of her skin. It became her admirably, and she knew it.
“I want to do as I please tonight,” she said, squeezing the hand that rested on her knee, that burned her like a branding iron. “You didn’t tell me what happened when you got home this evening.” She made a little pout, as though she were ruffled by his thoughtlessness.
“You haven’t given me a chance! God, you look wonderful, do you know it?”
“Say that again!” She gave his hand another squeeze. He felt her limbs trembling between his own. “Now tell me,” she went on as if nothing had happened, “wasn’t Blanche curious about the money?”
He smiled blandly. “Naturally!”
“Well, what did she say? Don’t make me drag it out of you.”
“Oh, I gave her another one of my fifty-seven cock-and-bull stories.” He topped this off with a gulp of gin which twisted his face into a wry grimace.
Valeska’s gaiety seemed at the point of evaporation. “I suppose I’ll be listening to them, too, someday,” she added with a pensive air.
He was enjoying the flavor of the place too much to permit himself to become annoyed by her pensive mood. Women were always talking about the end. There was time to develop that theme later. Just now—he looked at her tenderly, raised the glass to his lips again, and threw a glance above her head at the colorful throng on the floor, huddled in grotesque embraces. They were being jostled and pushed about by a turbid mass of glistening humanity. The voluptuous tide lapped against the frail tables that formed a cordon about the dance floor. The reek of perfume and barbaric crash of sound almost whipped them into one another’s arms.
“Come on and dance,” he whispered hoarsely.
She closed her eyes and permitted him to crush her like a sheaf of wind bending before a storm. He murmured something in her ear, over and over. The words fell on her ears like a torrent of liquid fire. Whatever barriers had existed between them were beaten down like chaff. . . . They were gyrating in the midst of a turbulent mob whose civilized veneer had been checked at the door. Above the raucous din rose exhausting trombone smears and the libidinous wail of the saxophones. “Hold me tight,” whispered Valeska, “hug me, squeeze me. . . .” Her pleas were like the snarl of an exasperated bitch.
Here and there were a few white faces, women sheathed in silk, with gleaming arms and necks, men in dinner coats—just a sprinkling of pale faces in a grotto of wide-eyed, expectant blacks. Dusky limbs and bodies flashed and poised, and flashed again in a frenzied ritual of eccentric gestures. With bland, sylphlike motions the leader distilled a blare of vertiginous fanfares: barrel-organ tunes, orchestrion studies, ocarina solos. The sourish, velvety tones of the clarinet were lost in a sonorous snuffle. Jazz reared its anonymous bestial voice.
The dance ended spectacularly in one final discordant wail. Valeska and Moloch sat down to drink and stare intoxicatingly at each other. Suddenly the lights were dimmed and a stocky mulatto in full-length saffron tights appeared.
“She has the refined grandeur of a murderess,” cried Valeska, quoting for Moloch’s approval the words of an immortal Frenchman. Her eyes were flashing, her entire body alive with the vigor of an unrestrained imagination. They sat back and watched this “murderess” with the brass bellows as she paused for a space at each tiny table to do her stunt, and then pass on.
“Mah daddy rocks me with one steady roll;
Dere ain’t no slippin’ when he once takes hol’. . .”
With repetition of this verse at each glutted table she threw in a few suggestive movements and held out her hand like an organ grinder. Valeska extracted a greenback from her purse in readiness for her coming. A dazzling spotlight accompanied the movements of the saffron tights as the “murderess” passed from table to table, repeating the performance, shoving greenbacks down her flaccid bosom. Meanwhile the epileptics on the dais kept pouring forth an explosive mixture of trip-hammer rhythms that affected the very chemistry of the blood. With nervous, angular pulsations they shook out a gorgeous fretwork of counterpoint, like vague theorems of watered silk. Glittering clusters of lapidary chords, following upon one another like the incessant beat of a tom-tom, disclosed gusts of wind and fading sounds, fluffy clouds of silk with flowers, skeletons in décolleté, athletic robust limbs swelling with sap and blood. There was a fury in their eyes, at the climax, like dark hot coals, and in their cavernous flapping mouths the thick blood beat.
The mulatto’s performance ended on a split in a parrot-blue spotlight.
“You should have brought me here before,” murmured Valeska, breathing heavily. A riot of sensations deluged her in quick succession. The cheap gin permeated her guts. She was like a house afire.
Her eyes roamed over the boisterous groups. They brimmed with unfeigned admiration.
“They’re real, aren’t they?” she said excitedly.
“Real?” echoed Moloch. “I’ll say so! No neuroses, no inhibitions, eh?” It seemed to him that he had darned few himself.
Valeska had expected a different response. “Do you find them attractive, that’s what I mean,” she asked. “Could you make love to them—to one like that over there?” She pointed to a tawny female with straight black hair and aquiline features who reclined in the arms of a ferocious-looking buck.
“He seems to find her attractive.”
Apparently Moloch was unwilling to commit himself. Valeska had broached an idea that was not at all new to him. There were Negresses he had glimpsed on the street, not necessarily pale ones, either, who proved more enticing—some of them, at least—than any white woman he could think of. He had even followed them on occasion, wondering if he could screw up sufficient courage to engage them in conversation.
He realized that Valeska’s enthusiasm was not a mere expression of idle rapture. She was fully aware of the dark blood in her veins. At times she became morbid about it and shrunk out of sight like a leper, or she would ask him at the most unexpected moments (when they were riding in a bus, or dancing in a public place) if he wasn’t just a little bit ashamed of her.
This unwonted ardor of hers, this curious medley of exultation, of savage pride and ostentatious affection, made him slightly uncomfortable. He looked her straight in the eyes as she went on to accuse him of discarding his habitual frankness. Her eyes were smoldering; they
leaped ahead of her words, inflaming his senses, making him sick with desire.
What was she going to do—start a scene? Was it the cheap booze talking, or had she dragged him here purposely to reveal her inmost self? She was pretty well oiled. He hoped she wouldn’t go blotto . . . not in this Eldorado of lust.
Another entertainer had taken the floor. “Get the words of this, Valeska.” As he spoke he detected the big buck with the woman Valeska had pointed out ogling the latter wickedly. He nodded toward the amorous couple and whispered: “You have an admirer over there.”
Meanwhile the performer was crooning:
“Ah wouldn’t be where Ah am,
Feelin’ lak Ah am,
Doin’ what Ah am,
Ef you hadn’t gone away. . . .”
When the entertainer had concluded Moloch nodded toward the big buck again and said: “Let’s call him over, what do you say?”
“Splendid!” she answered. “And you take his woman, eh?”
The music opened with a crash of carbolic tartness. He reeled among the swirling figures in a shaft of cobalt blue. In the middle of the floor stood a big Ethiopian with a red sweater. He acted as master of ceremonies. His nostrils, the color of roast veal, were distended and quivering. His ears had the puffy quality of a frankfurter skin. He glowered ferociously at the reeking bodies, taut and tingling, which brushed by him in all directions.