Thinking of that explanation, I suddenly bellowed into the receiver: “For Christ’s sake! What’s he gonna do to the fucking kids that the television isn’t already doing? Corrupting them! Putting their brains to sleep! Ruining them, brother, ruining them!”
I had to laugh at what George said next. His voice reflected hurt. “What kind of a way is that for a lawyer to talk?”
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, and just as suddenly I was sorry. “Really sorry. Look,” I pleaded, “give the guy a goddam chance. If it doesn’t work out, all yuh gotta do is call the authorities and, bam, he’s back in the goon garage!”
I decided now to play my ace card. “How do you feel about it, Mrs. X?” I said. “He’s your brother.”
That was my fatal mistake. For George was aware of what he unquestionably deemed his wife’s weakness concerning her brother.
“Never mind how she feels about it,” he said. “This is my goddam house, he’s not getting in here, and that’s all there is to it!”
The extent of his own anger must have embarrassed him. Suddenly he added, considerably more quietly, and obviously trying to get me to hang up, “This call is costing you money, isn’t it, counselor?” He then imitated something like a deferential chuckle, as though telling me that he could appreciate my generosity in making the call but that no useful purpose was being served by continuing it.
The reference to money was the final indignity. For a moment I thought I might disintegrate with humiliation and loathing. I was by then doubled up into a hot, fetus-like ball, with my eyelids down, scorching my eyeballs, the sweaty receiver gripped fiercely between my shoulder and cheek, and my head slumped over and lying heavily against the plastic-covered advertisement on the front interior of the booth. Time was running out and I was trying to think of some monstrously brilliant stroke that might salvage the situation. Then it occurred to me that the sister was weeping, quite terribly; and those tears, dribbling no doubt into her chalk-white Princess telephone, told me as nothing else could that any further appeals were futile and that she had not the tenacity of character to stand up to George and demand that she be per mitted to help her brother. I had, I thought, some vague notion of what she was experiencing. A family—her family— was breaking up before her eyes, and she was beginning to undergo that terrifying isolation that has become so common to the American. The weeping had gone to sobs, and the sobbing was quite horrible. Certainly she sensed that if she did not help her brother now he would be forever dead to her, and she was, in some dim, excruciatingly painful way, beginning to suffer the vast loneliness of those who do not at any price keep the family together. Because I had botched it so badly by losing my “legal detachment” and getting involved, I felt like bawling, too. I thought I had best hang up before I did so. But I had to leave George with something. It was the voice of the inside calling to those on the outside.
“Money?” I said. “Costing me money? Why, you stupid cocksucker! I’m talking about a mans life! You know what I mean?”
George began gasping into the receiver; as though he were suffering an advanced case of emphysema, he seemed to be fighting violently for breath; and—I couldn’t help it—I started to laugh. I had finally got to him. Catching his breath, with an effort that was absolutely audible, he screeched at his wife to get off the phone, the implication being that her ears were too delicate for such obscenities. Which made me laugh even louder, more idiotically. What he wanted, of course, was to protect her from the truth about himself, and what he seemed not to understand was that her tears had already signaled that she understood him too well. At least I thought I might apologize to her; but before I could do so I heard the receiver click; she had rung off, and George was making hysterical threats about putting the police on to me.
“May you rot in hell,” I said. Then I hung up.
I sat in the booth for a long time, my hand still clutching the receiver in its cradle. The operator rang and asked me to deposit four dollars and change for overtime charges. I told her I wouldn’t. I said it in just that matter-of-fact way. “No. I won’t.”
Incredulous as only those automatons can be when The System begins crumbling, she exclaimed, her voice tremulous with indignity, “But, sir. You made the call!”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I didn’t make the connection.”
Then again I placed the sweaty receiver in its cradle, rose, slid open the door, stepped out of the booth, and walked across the marble floor to the middle of the concourse, where for a long time I stood studying the Kodak advertisement which spread, as panoramically as a John Ford scene, across the entire east side of the terminal. It was a winter vista, and the snow was more brilliant than real snow, though not nearly so brilliant as the glaring and pearly-white teeth of the models depicting the American family. They were all dressed in iridescently blinding ski togs. The children looked good enough to eat, and the parents looked youthful, alert, charming, and vigorous. Surely this was the coveted America, these perennially rosy cheeks and untroubled azure eyes, these toothy smiles without warmth, eyes without gravity, eyes incapable of even the censorious scowl, eyes, for that matter, incapable of mustering even a look of perplexity. Well, it was not the America I coveted. I was well aware of my pretensions to intellectuality and that the hues of my being were preponderantly and inordinately somber—a somberness that was no doubt governed not a little by self-pity. But better that, I thought, better seek and take on the woes of Jesus Christ himself than yearn after this mindless milieu populated with these Technicolored and felicitous goons.
Abruptly, without thinking, I expectorated distastefully onto the marble floor. All during the phone conversation my mouth had been dry as dust; since hanging up, I had sensed the saliva flooding back into my mouth, and the thick and rich glob of sputum just missed a passing matron dressed in a mink coat, landing just in front of her and causing her to come to a tottering halt. She cast on me a look of outraged severity.
The sputum had neither hit nor splashed upon her, I was sure. What did she want from me? “I’m not a gentleman,” I said. Still she lingered, looking even more indignant. “What do you want?” I said finally in exasperation. “You bastards have just had a year of my life!” I was becoming very distraught, and apparently she wasn’t going to move on. Rolling my eyes into the bridge of my nose, cross-eyed, I singled out the forefinger of my right hand, shoved it up into my right nostril as though seeking a monstrous bugger, fiercely grabbed my genitalia into the cup of my left hand, let out a cowboy-like Whooopeeee! and started doing a frantic, devilish jig, all of which sent the startled woman, going Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! and looking back over her mink-draped shoulder as she went, scurrying across the concourse.
Regaining my composure, somewhat winded, I went back to studying the advertisement. Thinking again of George and Rochester, I wondered if he didn’t work for Kodak. When years before I had been at Hobart, there was a much-repeated legend, perhaps apocryphal, that the founder of Kodak, Eastman, had once offered to give the college—oh, billions, I guess—stipulating only that its name be changed to his own. The college had refused, losing the billions but retaining the name of its founder, Hobart. a bishop or prelate or monsignor or some such thing in the Episcopal hierarchy. I had always liked the story because it so reflected the integrity men like to remind themselves exists, the kind of tale a fraternity man, having just come from the sanctum sanctorum of the fraternity house where he has blackballed a Jew, passes on to a wide-eyed WASP pledge as an example of the decent and civilizing traditions he is inheriting. Integrity, it seemed to me, was a thing invariably removed; and, sadly, I had no doubt whatever that George imagined he knew what it was.
Then I saw him sitting there, drinking his beer and watch ing his television, so fat-assed and content. My guess was that he liked shows in which virtue triumphed, justice overcame, probity reigned unfettered. As Matt Dillon gunned down the bearded miscreant, I saw George’s breast swell with the loftiness of right being done; as Perry M
ason exonerated the
kindly old widow, surely George oozed fat tears that lawful ness was part and parcel of his heritage; perhaps George even came to attention, the muscles in his backside bris tling with haughty pride, as Ed Sullivan lectured him on the virtues of paying daily homage to the American flag. No, never for a moment did I doubt that George had very “real” notions of decency and honor and integrity, nor did I doubt that he believed we of Avalon Valley were not good, as his brother-in-law was a “no-good bastard,” because we could not accommodate ourselves to Mr. Sullivan’s America. I could not loathe George for it, so bombarded was he by the power cliques that rule America. But if I could not loathe him, neither could I live with him, get into bed with him. And I knew then that I never should have placed the call, that I had attempted much too quickly to break the American sound barrier.
Standing there, so wrought up, I knew that the only question was where I might go. For a moment I considered returning to Avalon Valley or going to the girl. Then I thought of telephoning the Counselor and inviting myself for the week end. “Stay as long as you like,” the Counselor said. Then I was on the train, sitting by the west window and moving rapidly north by the river, the taste of blood in my mouth.
For fifteen years I carried a recurring vision of myself. I was somewhere in Africa (Rhodesia?), sitting in a rocking chair on the screened veranda of an imposing, two-storied, clapboard building of brilliant white, an English colonialists’ club. My hair was neatly trimmed, my face tanned and clean shaven. Wearing a Palm Beach suit so snowy it glistened, I also had on a pale-blue shirt, a regimental necktie of maroon and gold, and immaculate white patent-leather Oxfords. In my right hand I held a tall iced drink whose cloudy, perspiring, and thinly cylindrical glass I brought infrequently and abstractedly to my lips, to take there the most absurdly delicate sips. My expression was ironical. In it there was a suggestion of amusement, directed, it seemed, as much against myself as against anything or anyone about me, as though I were taking myself not quite seriously, cum grano salis. Nobody at the club knew who I was. Or where I came from. Or for that matter even the sound of my voice. There was a time when English voices had invited me to sit at bridge or to exchange my name for theirs; but to these discreet overtures I had neither responded nor looked up from my interminably rocking chair. After a time everyone ceased to bother with me and I became a human fixture on the screened veranda, rocking, silent, sipping, enigmatic. In the expansive, cool rooms behind me I heard the bidding of bridge —two hearts, pass, three spades; heard the talk of cricket; heard the khaki-shorted, mustachioed gentry ordering their scotch and sodas. Over the wide lawns, to my left, the young folks, their sturdy legs glistening in the sun, played at tennis and swam in a great blue-green pool, shouting gaily to one another. The timbre of their voices was euphorically English, so soothing and civilized. From in front of me, indeed from all about me—from out there in that vast and harshly beautiful land—came still another sound, one compounded of suffering and rage and humiliation. The latter was, of course, the sound of Black Africa; and my irony, my amusement, my infuriating smugness were caused in no small measure by the knowledge that I was apparently the only one who heard this other sound. It was as if those others were deaf. Or dead. They played at bridge and tennis, they talked cricket and sipped at scotch and sodas; and a young girl, ready to dive, stood poised on a board above the blue pool, her thighs in the sun so lovely that one wanted to transform the vision to find one’s head resting in her maidenly lap. Constantly one yearned to dispel the reality in favor of the idyllic. But then that other sound would come, that wail.
For the life of me I could never fathom why I did not get up and walk away before it was too late. The augurs were unmistakable. Occasionally the din grew to an almost clanging howl (I peeped about to see if anyone was hearing: alas!), a great anguished wail signaling the world’s modifications, regroupings, new beginnings. Still I remained glued to my chair.
I had a clairvoyant notion of the future’s horrors. When they came, brandishing their spears and glimmering knives, their black bodies besmeared with dung and ashes, their pearly teeth exposed in the idiocy of their revengeful smiles, I expected to offer an absurd protest in tones quite as modulated as those behind me. “But look here, chaps,” I expect I should have said, “I don’t give a ruddy damn about these people—or you. I am here neither to Christianize, colonize, nor educate you. Nor do I come bearing Coca-Cola and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Nor do I seek your bloody vote in the UN General Assembly. You see, I am uninvolved, and my posture in life is one of detachment, irony, and amusement, which may not be a particularly lofty posture but which nevertheless has the redeeming merit of having not the slightest notion of what is good for you.” Such protests would, of course, do no good, and I fully expected to have my throat slit by one of the barbarians. I expected, too, that I would still be blabbering away in some such genteel fashion when one of them made his violent incision, reached in, snapped up my kidney or liver, and, popping it between his hideously smiling lips, began blissfully chomping away before my horrified eyes. Why I did not get up and move away proved perplexing in the extreme, though in truth it was not dying with these colonialists that bothered me. There was, in their steadfast inability to see or hear an ingenuousness such as that possessed by children stunned and held in sway by those glittering worlds that never exist save in their charming fancies. It was as simple as this: I was altogether helpless to abandon them.
As sooner or later always happens to one who bears such visions, mine began to take on the hard dimensions of reality in the four months I was the Counselor’s guest. During that time he provided me, no questions asked, with his davenport to lie upon, with paperbacks to read, with food, and with liquor. Those months were for me a most pleasant time, and I might have stayed indefinitely had not the behavior of certain visitors to the apartment seemed to me more singular than anything I had witnessed at Avalon Valley—or in my vision. When I began to discern this and, worse, began to sense that apparently no one saw anything in the least erratic in the
actions of the apartment’s habitués, it was then, whether dressed in a Palm Beach suit or not, I started to see myself as the suave, knowing chap in the rocking chair. Ominous sounds heralding grave changes were dinning all about me, but I seemed altogether too helpless or indifferent to make my concerns known.
But look:
Afternoons one or another of the Counselor’s married peers brought his secretary or girl friend to the apartment for sex. The girl was invariably knock-kneed but a young and shy and brave and lovely little thing, and I used to lie on the davenport trying to concentrate on Humbert Humbert’s searing avowals of love while overhearing the joyous and erotic laughter from the adjoining suite, used to lie there dying of longing, envy, and boredom. As stolidly as a rhinoceros the sofa perched itself hard by the apartment’s door; and whenever a couple would leave, the girl, her cheeks aglow with love, would smile demurely at me and the man, strutting his absurd virility, would wink lewdly. To either farewell I nodded and smiled amiably; in that smile there was a hint of simple-mindedness: I was a most convincing and good-natured cretin. No one seemed to know who I was, or what I was doing there. Nor did I seem to provoke any curiosity in these siesta sex partners.
One of the prettier girls (her legs were straight and there was something like intelligence in the way her eyes were set in and complemented her fine brow) did speak to me one day. Winking as lasciviously as ever any of the men had, she nodded in the direction of Lolita, clutched open and cover face up against my chest, and with a great sigh remarked to me the book’s alarming sexuality. That sigh was wrought with heavy sensuality, as though merely calling back the huge and lustful appetites of the book’s characters all but prostrated her with fatigue. She was the only one who had so far spoken to me, I liked her intelligent looks and fine legs, I pitied her the fake sophistication of her predicament, and I should have accepted her pleasantry for what it was. But I was b
y then drunk on Nabokov’s prose and loathed her facile misreading of the author’s intentions.
“Quite the contrary,” I said. “Lolita is about as sexy as Little Women.”
My tone was tendentious and abrupt, and though she came often afterward, she never spoke again. Her mon-cher barrister, a black-tied, horn-rimmed, hairy-nosed, and towering old fraud (as might be expected, he was, I later learned, very good at The Law), continued to speak, invariably remarking his wonder that I was still “on Lolita.” He’d wag his horn rimmed head, smile secretively, wink, and proclaim his astonishment: “Still on Lolita?” Then he’d issue a past master’s chuckle by way of letting me know that he and I were joined in some scatological conspiracy. It never occurred to him that I might be reading the book for the fourth or fifth time, and as the days passed I know he came to regard me as either depraved or the most moronic reader in Christendom. “Still on Lolita!” became a recurring din, like a daily summons to waken. In response, I gave up nodding my moronic assent and to please him came after a time to feign utter cretin ism. He’d shout, and prior to answering I’d knit my brow into a painful knot and fake a tortured reading, zealously and gropingly forming “all them hard words” with my mouth. “It’s kinda hard reading,” I’d say. “It is, huh?” he’d shout, solicitously steering his paramour toward the boudoir. Eventually they both came to view me with that compassion one reserves for burlapped monks and homely girls. “Really hard reading!” I’d exclaim as the door was closing in preparation to their erotic play. Then I would hear them giggle and had a grand time envisioning them wagging their superior heads in sympathy with my driveling addle-headedness.
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