by Henry Miller
That's quite all right, said MacGregor briskly and cheerily. It's good to have the other fellow's opinion once in a while. Maybe you're right. Maybe I am unduly pessimistic. But that's how I'm built. I think I'd be a lot happier if I could see it your way—but I can't. Besides, I must confess I've really never met a good artist. It would be a pleasure to talk to one some time.
Well, said Ulric, you've been talking to one all your life without knowing it. How are you going to recognize a good artist when you meet one if you can't recognize one in your friend here?
I'm glad you said that, piped MacGregor. And now that you've pushed me to the ropes I'll admit I do think he's an artist. I've always thought so. As for listening to him, well I do that too, and quite seriously. But then I also have my doubts. You see, if I listened to him long enough he'd undermine me. I know he's right, but it's like I told you before—if you want to get along, if you want to live, you just can't permit yourself such thoughts. Sure he's right! I'd change places with him any day, the lucky dog. What have I got for all my struggles? I'm a lawyer. So what? I might just as well be a piece of shit. Sure, you bet I'd like to change places. Only I'm not an artist, as you said. I guess the trouble with me is that I can't swallow the fact that I'm just another nobody...
7
Back in town I found a note on Ulric's bell, from Mara. She had arrived shortly after we left. Had been sitting on the steps waiting for me, waiting for hours, if I were to believe her words. A postscript informed me that she was off to Rockaway with her two friends. I was to call her there as soon as I could.
I arrived at dusk and found her waiting for me at the station; she was in a bathing suit over which she had thrown a mackintosh. Florrie and Hannah were sleeping it off again at the hotel; Hannah had lost her beautiful new set of false teeth and was in a state of nervous prostration. Florrie, she said, was going back to the woods again; she had fallen hard for Bill, one of the backwoodsmen. But first she had to have an abortion performed. It was nothing—not for Florrie anyway. The only thing that bothered her was that she seemed to grow larger down there with each abortion; soon she wouldn't be able to take on anything but niggers.
She led me to another hotel where we were to pass the night together. We sat talking awhile in the lugubrious dining room over a glass of beer. She looked queer in that mackintosh—like a person who's been driven out of the house by fire in the middle of the night. We were itching to get to bed but in order not to arouse suspicion we had to pretend to be in no great hurry. I had lost all sense of place: it seemed as if we had made a rendezvous in a dark room by the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of an exodus. Two or three other couples slipped in noiselessly, sipped their drinks, and chatted furtively in subdued whispers. A man walked through with a bloody meat cleaver, holding a decapitated chicken by the legs; the blood dripped on to the floor, leaving a zigzag trail—like the passage of a drunken whore who is menstruating freely.
Finally we were shown to a cell at the end of a long corridor. It was like the terminus of a bad dream, or the missing half of a Chirico painting. The corridor formed the axis of two wholly unrelated worlds; if you were to go left instead of right you might never find your way back again. We undressed and fell on the iron cot in a sexual sweat. We went at it like a pair of wrestlers who have been left to untangle themselves in an empty arena after the lights are out and the crowd dispersed. Mara was struggling frantically to bring on an orgasm. She had somehow become detached from her sexual apparatus; it was night and she was lost in the dark; her movements were those of a dreamer desperately struggling to re-enter the body which had begun the act of surrender. I got up to wash myself, to cool it off with a little cold water. There was no sink in the room. In the yellow light of an almost extinct bulb I saw myself in a cracked mirror; I had the expression of a Jack the Ripper looking for a straw hat in a pisspot. Mara lay prone on the bed, panting and sweating; she had the appearance of a battered odalisque made of jagged pieces of mica. I slipped into my trousers and staggered through the funnel-like corridor in search of the wash-room. A bald-headed man, stripped to the waist, stood before a marble basin washing his trunk and arm-pits. I waited patiently until he had finished. He snorted like a walrus in performing his ablutions; when he had done he opened a can of talcum powder and sprinkled it generously over his torso which was creased and caked like an elephant's hide.
When I returned I found Mara smoking a cigarette and playing with herself. She was burning up with desire. We went at it again, trying it dog-fashion this time, but still it was no go. The room began to heave and bulge, the walls were sweating, the mattress which was made of straw was almost touching the floor. The performance began to take on all the aspects and proportions of a bad dream. From the end of the corridor came the broken wheeze of an asthmatic; it sounded like the tail end of a gale whizzing through a corrugated rat hole.
Just as she was about to come we heard someone fumbling at the door. I slid off her and poked my head out. It was a drunk trying to find his room. A few minutes later, when I went to the wash-room to give my cock another cool spritz-bath, he was still looking for his room. The transoms were all open and from them come a stertorous cacophony which resembled the Epiphany of John the locust-eater. When I returned to resume the ordeal my cock felt as if it were made of old rubber bands. I had absolutely no more feeling at that end; it was like pushing a piece of stiff suet down a drain-pipe. What's more, there wasn't another charge left in the battery; it anything was to happen now it would be in the nature of gall and leathery worms or a, drop of pus in a solution of thin pot cheese. What surprised me was that it continued to stand up like a hammer; it had lost all the appearance of a sexual implement; it looked disgustingly like a cheap gadget from the five and ten cent store, like a bright-colored piece of fishing tackle minus the bait. And on this bright and slippery gadget Mara twisted like an eel. She wasn't any longer a woman in heat, she wasn't even a woman; she was just a mass of undefinable contours wriggling and squirming like a piece of fresh bait seen upside down through a convex mirror in a rough sea.
I had long ceased to be interested in her contortions; except for the part of me that was in her I was as cool as a cucumber and remote as the dog star. It was like a long distance death message concerning some one whom you had forgotten long ago. All I was waiting for was to feel that incredibly aborted explosion of wet stars which drop back to the floor of the womb like dead snails.
Towards dawn, Eastern Standard Time, I saw by that frozen condensed milk expression about the jaw that it was happening. Her face went through all the metamorphoses of early uterine life, only in reverse. With the last dying spark it collapsed like a punctured bag, the eyes and nostrils smoking like toasted acorns in a slightly wrinkled lake of pale skin. I fell off her and dove straight into a coma which ended towards evening with a knock on the door and fresh towels. I looked out the window and saw a collection of tar-covered roofs spotted here and there with doves of taupe. From the ocean front came the boom of surf followed by a frying pan symphony of exasperated sheet metal cooling off in a drizzle at 139 degrees Centigrade. The hotel was droning and purring like a fat and moribund swamp fly in the solitude of a pine forest. Along the axis of the corridor there had been a further sag and recess during the interim. The Grade A world to the left was all sealed and boarded, like those colossal bath houses along the boardwalk which, in the off season, curl up on themselves and expire in gasps through endless chinks and slats. The other nameless world to the right had already been chewed off by a triphammer, the work doubtless of some maniac who had endeavored to justify his existence as a day laborer. Underfoot it was slimy and slippery, as if an army of zippered seals had been weaving it back and forth to the wash-room all day long. Here and there an open door revealed the presence of grotesquely plastic water nymphs who had managed to squeeze their mammiferous trundles of avoirdupois into sylph-like fish nets made of spun glass and ribbons of wet clay. The last roses of Summer were fading away into goiterous ud
ders with arms and legs. Soon the epidemic would be over and the ocean would resume its air of gelatinous grandeur, of mucilaginous dignity, of sullen and spiteful solitude.
We stretched ourselves out in the hollow of a suppurating sand dune next to a bed of waving stink weed on the lee side of a macadamized road over which the emissaries of progress and enlightenment were rolling along with that familiar and soothing clatter which accompanies the smooth locomotion of spitting and farting contraptions of tin woven together by steel knitting needles. The sun was setting in the West as usual, not in splendor and radiance however but in disgust, like a gorgeous omelette engulfed by clouds of snot and phlegm. It was the ideal setting for love, such as the drug stores sell or rent between the covers of a handy pocket edition. I took off my shoes and leisurely deposited my big toe in the first notch of Mara's crotch. Her head was pointed south, mine north; we pillowed them on folded hands, our bodies relaxed and floating effortlessly in the magnetic drift, like two enormous twigs suspended on the surface of a gasoline lake. A visitor from the Renaissance, coming upon us unexpectedly, might well have assumed that we had become dislodged from a painting depicting the violent end of the mangy retinue of a sybaritic Doge. We were lying at the edge of a world in ruins, the composition being a rather precipitate study of perspective and foreshortening in which our prostrated figures served as a picaresque detail.
The conversation was thoroughly desultory, spluttering out with a dull thud like a bullet encountering muscle and sinew. We weren't talking, we were simply parking our sexual implements in the free parking void of anthropoid chewing gum machines on the edge of a gasoline oasis. Night would fall poetically over the scene, like a shot of ptomaine poison wrapped in a rotten tomato. Hannah would find her false teeth behind the mechanical piano; Florrie would appropriate a rusty can-opener with which to start the blood flowing.
The wet sand clung to our bodies with the tenacity of fresh-laid wall-paper. From the factories and hospitals nearby came the ingratiating aroma of exhausted chemicals, of hair soaked in pipi, of useless organs plucked out alive and left to rot slowly through an eternity in sealed vessels labelled with great care and veneration. A brief twilight sleep in the arms of Morpheus the Danubian dachshund.
When I got back to town Maude inquired in her polite fish-like way if I had had a pleasant holiday. She remarked that I looked rather haggard. She added that she was thinking of taking a little vacation herself; she had received an invitation from an old convent friend to pass a few days at her home in the country. I thought it an excellent idea.
Two days later I accompanied her and the child to the station. She asked me if I wouldn't care to ride part of the way with them. I saw no reason why I shouldn't. Besides I thought maybe she had something of importance to tell me. I boarded the train and rode some distance into the country, talking about things, of no consequence and wondering all the time when she would come out with it. Nothing happened. I finally got off the train and waved good-bye. Say good-bye to daddy, she urged the child. You won't see him again for several weeks. Bye bye! Bye bye! I waved good-naturedly, like any suburban papa seeing his wife and child off. Several weeks, she had said. That would be excellent. I walked up and down the platform waiting for the train and pondering on all the things I would do in her absence. Mara would be delighted. It would be like having a private honeymoon: we could do a million wonderful things in a stretch of several weeks.
The following day I awoke with a frightful earache. I telephoned Mara and urged her to meet me at the doctor's office. The doctor was one of the wife's demonic friends. He had almost murdered the child once with his mediaeval instruments of torture. Now it was my turn. I left Mara to sit it out on a bench near the entrance to the park.
The doctor seemed delighted to see me; engaging me in a pseudo-literary discussion, he put his instruments up to boil. Then he tested out an electrically run glass cage which looked like a transparent ticker but which was actually some devilish sort of inhuman blood-sucking contraption which he intended to try out as a parting fillip.
So many doctors had tinkered with my ear that I was quite a veteran by this time. Each fresh irruption meant that the dead bone was drawing closer and closer to the brain. Finally there would be a grand conjunction, the mastoid would become like a wild mustang, there would be a concert of silver saws and silver mallets, and I would be shipped home with my face twisted to one side like a haemo-plagic rhapsodist.
You don't hear any more with that ear, of course? said he, plunging a hot wire into the very core of my skull without a word of warning.
No, not at all, I answered, almost sliding off the seat with pain.
Now this is going to hurt a bit, said he, manipulating a diabolical-looking fish-hook.
It went on like that, each operation a little more painful than the last, until I was so beside myself with pain that I wanted to kick him in the guts. Still there remained the electrical cage: that was to irrigate the canals, extract the last iota of pus, and send me out into the street rearing like a bronco.
It's a nasty business, he said, lighting a cigarette in order to give me a breathing spell. I wouldn't want to go through with it myself. If it get any worse you'd better let me operate on you.
I settled down for the irrigation. He inserted the nozzle and turned on the switch. It felt as though he were irrigating my brain with a solution of prussic acid. The pus was coming out and with it a thin stream of blood. The pain was excruciating.
Does it really hurt as much as that? he exclaimed seeing that I had become white as a sheet.
It hurts worse than that, I said. If you don't stop soon I'll smash it. I'd rather have triple mastoids and look like a demented frog.
He pulled the nozzle out and with it the lining of my ear, of my cerebellum, of one kidney and the marrow of my coccyx.
A fine job, said I. When do I come again?
He thought it best to come to-morrow—just to see how it was progressing.
Mara had a fright when she saw me. She wanted to take me home at once and nurse me. I was so used up I couldn't stand having anyone near me. Hurriedly I said good-bye. Meet me to-morrow!
I staggered home like a drunk and fell on the couch, into a deep drugged sleep. When I awoke it was dawning. I felt excellent. I got up and went for a stroll through the park. The swans were coming to life: their mastoids were non-existent.
When pain lets up life seems grand, even without money or friends or high ambitions. Just to breathe easily, to walk without a sudden spasm or twitch. Swans are very beautiful then. Trees too. Even automobiles. Life moves along on roller skates; the earth is pregnant and constantly churning up new magnetic fields of space. See how the wind bends the tiny blades of grass! Each little blade is sentient; everything responds. If the earth itself were in pain we could do nothing about it. The planets never have an ear-ache; they are immune, though bearing within them untold pain and suffering.
For once I was at the office ahead of time. I worked like a Trojan without feeling the slightest fatigue. At the appointed time I met Mara. She would sit again on the park bench, in the same spot.
This time the doctor merely took a look at the ear, picked away a fresh scab, swabbed it with a soothing ointment, and plugged it up. Looks fine, he mumbled, come back in a week.
We were in good spirits, Mara and I. We had dinner in a road house and with it some Chianti. It was a balmy evening, just made for a stroll over the downs. After a time we lay down in the grass and gazed up at the stars. Do you think she'll really stay away several weeks? asked Mara.
It seemed too good to be true.
Maybe she'll never come back, I said. Maybe that's what she wanted to tell me when she asked me to ride part of the way with her. Maybe she lost her nerve at the last minute.
Mara didn't think she was the sort to make a sacrifice like that. It didn't matter anyway. For a while we could be happy, could forget that she existed.
I wish we could get away from this country alto
gether, said Mara. I wish we could go to some other country, somewhere where nobody knows us.
I agreed that that would be ideal. We'll do it eventually, I said. There isn't a soul here whom I care about. My whole life has been meaningless—until you came along.
Let's go and row in the lake, said Mara suddenly. We got up and sauntered over to the boats. Too late, the boats were all padlocked. We started strolling aimlessly along a path by the water; soon we came to a little rest house built out over the water. It was deserted. I sat down on the rough bench and Mara seated herself on my lap. She had on the stiff dotted Swiss dress which I liked so much. Underneath it not a stitch. She got off my lap a moment and lifting her dress she straddled me. We had a wonderful close-knit fuck. When it was over we sat for a while without unhitching, just silently chewing one another's lips and ears.
Then we got up and, at the edge of the lake, we washed ourselves with our handkerchiefs. I was just drying my cock with the tail of my shirt when Mara suddenly grasped my arm and pointed to something moving behind a bush. All I could see was a gleam of something bright. I quickly buttoned up my pants and taking Mara by the arm we regained the gravel path and started slowly walking in the opposite direction.