Becker looked at him but didn’t say anything. He kept on playing, slopping his head with the tune. His bow tie seemed to fit the part.
He stood and listened. He realised that Becker wasn’t going to talk while he was playing. He drifted over to the books – yachting records. Joshua Slocum. Peter Heaton.
Becker stopped playing and drank from his glass.
‘What do you know about jazz, Mr Teacher?’
‘Very little – the Negro struggle …’
Becker didn’t say anything in reply.
He felt dismissed. He felt he’d been assessed and dismissed.
Becker began to play again.
He stood there half listening to the playing, but Becker’s eyes didn’t return to him, didn’t further acknowledge his presence. Becker sang in a deep imitation of a negroid voice, snatches of song, but not for him, not for any audience. Occasionally Becker would look in his direction but not at him.
He became aware of his own body, his feet, legs, torso, hands, arms, neck and head, standing there in an upright position on a floor, in a club, in a town, on an orbiting planet – standing in stark isolation as the world orbited the sun. He didn’t belong with Becker’s playing. He didn’t belong with the trophies. Or with the crowd outside. Even his wife – he was not in contact with his wife.
He listened to the playing but always thoughts about himself pushed in between him and the music. Not that the music was easy to listen to. It broke and fumbled with Becker doggedly retracing his fumbling.
He stood there, not having the urge to do anything else but stand. Realising himself unacknowledged by anyone.
His thoughts were not anything more than pings of discomfort and a rasping uneasiness. He desperately wanted to be pleased with himself. Standing at the Yacht Club with Young Liberals dancing around him, out of place, argumentatively drunk and no one to argue with. He felt distinctly displeased with himself.
He wanted to assert himself with Becker. With Becker especially. Because he was American. For some reason he felt free to say anything to Becker, no holds barred. But Becker had eluded him. He could not snare Becker.
Becker’s and his eyes met. Becker held the stare and sang at him and then looked back to the keys. Becker had sung the song against him.
He felt he had to go. Again he didn’t know whether to try to indicate goodbye to Becker. He watched for an opportunity but it didn’t come and the playing stopped him from saying anything.
He gave a slight shrug and left the room.
Just outside the door he heard Becker say, ‘I didn’t want to be a jazz pianist. Or a brass pivot gun. Because I’m the Coca-Cola Kid.’
He stopped. So Becker had been aware of him. But nothing came to his mind to say to Becker. Despite an aggressiveness the statement was full of some sort of appeal. It deflected attack. But he couldn’t respond because its special appeal was too subtle, and he was too blurred with drink. He was opposed to Becker, but he wasn’t game enough to risk being wrong or embarrassed with Becker. So he walked on. Becker would think he hadn’t heard.
Out in the bright noise he was able to merge with the crowd and did not feel as intensely isolated.
He played another dollar in the poker machines and won sixty cents.
He wasn’t socially acceptable or socially adroit and he didn’t claim to be or try to be. So what? There was something phony about a ‘good mixer’ – a good mixer had to smother his real reactions. He didn’t have time for niceties or phoniness. Other things were more important.
After a while he moved back to his wife and the others. They chatted.
His wife said, ‘You’ve been great company tonight.’ The wound open again.
Then the band played the anthem. He hadn’t realised it was so late.
‘Have a drink for the road,’ Kevin said, ‘if you’re in our party.’ Friendly sarcasm.
‘Where have you been all this time?’ his wife said, annoyed.
‘Looking over the club – listening to the American playing the piano.’
‘The mythical American – was he reciting Kipling again?’
‘Masefield.’
‘Why didn’t you bring him over if he was so captivating?’
‘He was drunk.’
‘You’re not?’
The crowd was a criss-cross of unravelling knots. The band was shaking spittle from their instruments, unscrewing mouthpieces.
A sudden movement attracted his eyes. A young man in a dinner suit with thick blond hair had changed from a party-goer into an official. He was walking urgently through the crowd with a steward. They went through the doorway to the men’s lavatory. Outside in the hall, on the edge of the unravelling crowd, a couple of stewards had taken off their bow ties and they were stacking chairs.
Kevin came over with the drinks and as he handed them around he said, ‘A fellow tried to hang himself in the men’s – they cut him down in time.’
He sensed it was the American and tightened.
His wife said, ‘He’s still alive?’
‘Yes – just – an American –’ Kevin turned to him, ‘Must be your American?’
‘The Coca-Cola Kid – Becker.’ He was galvanised. For the first time that night he felt lifted out of his isolated preoccupation.
‘The one you were talking to?’ his wife said, her voice loud with the shock of it.
‘He was playing the piano about half an hour ago – I was listening to him.’
The crowd had smelt the event and were looking towards the lavatory. Murmuring questions.
‘He was blue in the face,’ Kevin said, ‘they’re rushing him to hospital. A steward told me he was quite a mess when they cut him down.’
They drank their last drinks watching the lavatory but the American was not carried out.
‘Must have taken him out the back way,’ Kevin said.
‘He told me Coca-Cola was a common noun,’ he told them, and being English teachers they smiled.
They moved towards the door. ‘He didn’t seem suicidal – just drunk,’ he told them.
Outside they separated from Kevin and Gwen. He said to his wife, ‘Seemed just another genial American,’ and then added, ‘the man who presses the bomb release, lynches the Negro, drops the napalm is just another genial American – good fun at cocktail parties.’
His wife didn’t comment.
As he started the car he said, ‘I suppose working for Coca-Cola would be enough to make you want to kill yourself.’
‘Come off it,’ his wife said, irritably.
‘A victim of a personality destroying system,’ he said, niggling her.
‘Must you always be so doctrinaire?’
‘I hope he dies,’ he said, goaded further, driving hard over the cattle grid at the gate.
‘Kim!’ She turned towards him. ‘Don’t be so heartless.’
‘You’re getting soft,’ he said. ‘How many Asians starve to death so the Americans can drink Coca-Cola?’
He swung hard but hit a bad bump.
An empty bottle on the floor of the car rolled wildly under their feet.
‘Do you want me to drive?’ she said, slightingly.
He ignored it.
‘Things aren’t as simple as you sometimes see them,’ she said. Then, lighting a cigarette, she laughed derisively. ‘You’d have fainted if they’d carried the body out.’
‘Lenin never watched executions,’ he said, accelerating on the straight road towards the scattered light of the town.
He saw her snort and look out her window across the corn fields, turning completely away from him.
INTERLUDE TWO
The Girl Who Met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris
‘Mia says she met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris,’ she told him.
‘So?’
He was curled in his womb chair. She was reading the Elizabeth David cookbook, Summer Cooking. He didn’t want to be told about Mia meeting Simone de Beauvoir in Paris. Simone de Beauvoir was a cold draft agai
nst his frail, invalid masculinity. But he wasn’t going to venture that information. Glancing at the material in his mind he suspected that against Simone de Beauvoir he couldn’t mount a case. Perhaps given some emergency exchange or shots across the border he could find one. Invent a case. God knows, de Beauvoir’s books seemed to move like gas through and out of the minds of women dissatisfied with men. He had read them – to see where they fitted into the panorama. The world was a panorama. A panorama of which he was, he sometimes felt, the only isolated spectator. Perhaps the only passenger in the dim observation car travelling without destination. For now we see through an observation car window darkly. A lousy spectator having no real piece of the action. And another thing, he shouldn’t have said, ‘So?’. It didn’t invite discussion – it rang the bell for a round. The sort of action he could do without.
He tried interception and diversion. ‘I’m against Elizabeth David cookbooks,’ he said, lightly, interestingly. ‘I rather like the idea of women compiling their own cookbooks from their own experience and their grandmother’s – handwritten and pasted together.’
‘What have you against Simone de Beauvoir?’
He became engrossed in the stitching and construction of his chair.
‘Answer me.’
‘Oh –’ he twirled his hand, ‘you know – the old feminist thing.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘She’s made women unnaturally assertive and suspicious of men – gave them the idea that men were somehow conning them.’
‘Where do you get it all from?’ she said, loud and querulous. ‘Is that the sort of insane shit you say to Stockwell Anderson and the others at the Moses E. Herzog lunch club?’
‘Stockwell and I are the only members.’
‘Why are the men around us so infantile?’ she bemoaned. ‘Where are the men with pricks like studguns?’
‘Women will change – all that’s accepted,’ he said, head down, headlong, ‘but the books were premature, disturbed the delicate tension between the sexes – and so biblical.’
She thundered over and placed her hands on the concave wings of his chair.
‘Don’t,’ he said.
‘You know nothing whatsoever about Simone de Beauvoir.’
‘OK, OK,’ he said, ‘I retract.’
She went back to her Elizabeth David cookbook.
‘Womanhood – the fingers of prurient philosophers pinched and poked thee.’
She threw down the book and came across the room like a hailstorm, pushing back his chair on its two short back legs. Now a cradle ready to fall, when the wind blows …
‘Not another word,’ she said.
‘I’ll tell you what it is – she’s a sexual rationalist – they’re not sympathetic to sex,’ he said gamely.
She tipped the chair over backwards and he fell with it. Down will come cradle, baby and all.
She stomped to another room.
He curled back into his chair, now lying on its side. While he was down he may as well stay down.
‘While you’re up,’ he called, ‘you can get me a Grants.’
Ho, ho.
‘You see,’ he called, ‘rationalists don’t don’t don’t recognise the the the truths and and and the experience contained in any existing situation, arrangement, what-have-you, the the the subtleties of change. Situations exist probably for good reasons. Can’t can’t can’t just chop off heads. Not a matter of of of winning debates. No sir.’
‘I’ve warned you,’ she said, from the other room. Her voice had the cock of a gun about it.
Mia worked as a waitress at the Lantern.
‘Where did you meet Simone de Beauvoir,’ he cross-questioned, using his tricky tone, napkin under chin, she standing at his table, apron and waitress cap – and Scholl sandals.
Mia brushed away the crumbs.
Victorian wenches wore no underclothes which meant you could get a feel when you wanted. Not so Mia, he wagered.
‘At a small party at her apartment on Rue Schoelcher in Montparnasse.’
Rue Schoelcher in Montparnasse. Get a load of it. He resented it. He resented talk like that which mockingly reminded him of the rich world beyond. Way beyond him. He could barely remember foreign names. Why should a waitress be able to casually say ‘Rue Schoelcher in Montparnasse’?
‘Is it true she had to be reminded to change her dress?’
‘Who in Godsname told you that?’
‘Nelson Algren.’
‘Oh, him.’
‘He says he’s the only person who can read her handwriting.’
One hand on her hip, ‘Don’t know anything about that.’
‘You met her, didn’t you?’
‘We didn’t however talk about Nelson Algren or her handwriting. Order?’
He gave his order and she went to the kitchen.
He ate his bread. Shouldn’t eat bread before the soup. She’d agitated him. He wasn’t a hungry personality unable to control himself in the presence of food. The hungry personalities always began eating as soon as the food appeared. Ate bread before the meal and if someone was served before them they’d pick at the other person’s meal. And they never left anything.
Mia came back with the soup.
‘What else?’ he asked her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What else about Simone de Beauvoir?’
Exasperated, but striving to maintain her professional cool, Mia said, ‘She has a beautiful sculpture by Giacometti.’
‘Old Alberto.’
‘You know him?’ incredulously.
‘A little – it’s interesting she likes his work – he thinks prostitutes are goddesses – the ultimate womanhood.’
Mia blinked with bewilderment.
‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘what does she look like – old?’
‘She had a fresh – rosy – complexion, clear blue eyes.’
“‘Simone de Beauvoir’s eyes were lit by a light blue intelligence!”’
She made a weary face. ‘Nelson Algren?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know Nelson Algren?’
‘We are more or less good friends – I met him at his dark untidy Greenwich Village walkup flat in the fall of 1965.’
‘Are you pissed?’
‘Tell me more.’
She hesitated. ‘I got the impression she knew and saw everything – her speech was very rapid – English – she speaks English – and her manner was, I’d say, direct, but you know, smiling and friendly.’
‘Does she in fact not know one end of a broom from another? She says she doesn’t.’
‘Why are you so hostile? What has she ever done to you?’
‘Why is everyone saying I’m hostile? Critical, maybe – hostile, never.’
Mia went away. She served another table then came over to him.
‘I’d like to see you being smart with Simone,’ she said, with a quarter sneer. ‘There was an American who wanted to get an easy interview and sat down next to her in a cafe with a notebook and said flippantly, “Now, tell me about existentialism,” and Simone said, “You don’t care about existentialism, you don’t care about anything,” and just went on with her work.’
‘What’s so smart about that? It sounds as if she was just being rudely dismissive.’
Mia went off without further comment.
‘Even imperious,’ he called after her.
He slurped his soup aggressively, prickled by her new demeanour. She wore her acquaintance with de Beauvoir like a corset. The bad fruit of sending girls abroad. Perhaps she hadn’t. Hadn’t met Simone de Beauvoir. Perhaps she was fabricating it all for self-aggrandisement.
That was probably it. He stood up, napkin under chin, and went into the kitchen.
‘Have you any proof you met Simone de Beauvoir in Paris?’
The kitchen hand paused at his chopping and the chef at his stirring and both looked at him sourly, the interloper. A problem customer.
Mia was filling a salt shaker and she looked at him with a cool defensiveness.
The three staring at him made him feel like a refrigerator with its door open. He wanted to back out but held his ground, giving the chef and kitchen hand short nods to which they didn’t respond.
‘That’s a particularly rude thing to say,’ Mia said. ‘I don’t really understand your hostility.’
‘Did you meet Sartre?’ and before she could answer, he said, ‘It was a narcissistic relationship.’
She didn’t reply or respond but continued to fill the salt shaker.
‘She says so herself virtually – they thought precisely the same way – said the same things – wrote the same way – they didn’t have to meet the challenge of acceptance in their relationship.’
Mia continued with the salt shaker.
‘All her writing is a reaction to the repressed fact that she was totally and utterly submissive to Sartre.’
The chef said, ‘Get him out of here.’
‘You’d better go,’ she said to him coldly.
The kitchen hand began chopping again.
As he left the kitchen the chef said, ‘What is he – some kind of nut?’
He broodingly ate his oysters.
He brooded over de Beauvoir’s lack of self-doubt – about Mia being able to casually say Rue Schoelcher in Montparnasse – about how you couldn’t change the role of women without changing the role of men. He muttered to himself. The point was, of course, all the other men were coping. He couldn’t make the jump.
Mia brought the main course. Without a word.
He said, ‘She refused to give a man the name of an abortionist – after she wrote a pile of garbage about abortion law reform.’
‘I’m not interested,’ she said, huffily.
‘What do you think of that?’
‘The subject is closed. Closed.’
‘She thinks sex is something that can be separated from upbringing, convention, institutions, and so on. She says so. As if it was simply an act of decision.’
‘I refuse to talk to you about Simone de Beauvoir. You’re too hung up.’
The following night, fuelled with red wine, he went to ‘Bunny’ Stockwell Anderson’s house on a mission, dragging a stick along the Paddington iron pale fences.
The Americans, Baby Page 15