Eyes

by William H. Gass

  Yes. Yes. Vichy Water filled me in about the ENDING. It—the bottle’s label with the bottle on it—was taken to the hangar for the dénouement—don’t be surprised, I have a range if not every key—music does not acknowledge the barriers of tongues—okay, the climax—anyway did they blow that! Blow! Blow! Blow! Captain Frog has been ordering Champagne cocktails the entire film—did you notice that nobody finishes their drink but Rick?—you can tell he cares about something—and Captain Frog brings his war ribbons and a bottle of Vichy to the send-off. He celebrates the moment with dead fizzy water? Nobody opens it for him, it is just at hand like the U.S. marines. And we know why. So he can drop the Vichy bottle into the wastebasket at a summational moment. Vichy told me itself how the camera followed it into its hole like a rat after cheese.

  There were so many changes they had to use colored pages to keep the actors’ heads straight about them: blue, pink, salmon, green. Now this you’re going to like. This guy’s name I’m going to remember like I remembered Scheid because it’s part of the joke. Stucke. His name was Stucke. Like some of my keys. He brought the pages to the set. That’s why everybody knew the entire movie was—. Right. And in that way, too—from stuck to stuck so to speak—the production stumbled toward the truth of what they were trying to do—achieve a perfect mix of chauvinism and schmaltz.

  Enduring qualities, you’ll agree.

  You want me to explain? Pianos don’t explain. We riff, we run, we trill, we even thunder, but we don’t explain. The inexplicable is the order of the day here. Chauvinism is reflected in the war of songs, ONE; in issues of duty, TWO; in Strasser’s devotion to the Nazi party, THREE; in Ilsa’s husband’s selfless nobility, FOUR; in the Frog’s subservience, FIVE; and schmaltz…schmaltz in the character of the conflict between duty and indulgence…where?…when they’re at odds in the same official like the Frog, by the tug of war between duty and love in Ilsa, and betweeeeeeen love and indulgence in Rick.

  Vichy said the scene was shot in a homemade fog. Rick and Ilsa are trying to enjoy a farewell clinch, and Rick says—Vichy swears he says—Rick is trying to be persuasive—he’s been a real prick about Paris—so she loves him all the more—what a dumb doll—anyway—he says something like our troubles are but bubbles in this messed-up world, we don’t even amount to a hill of beans—something like that—I say how high is the hill? how big are the beans?—anyway—then he says—Vichy swears he says—someday you’ll understand that. That’s what the condescending bastard says to a dame who’s married to a freedom fighter on the run from an army of Fascist thugs. She’ll understand that! I remember one night Rick sits in the set and drinks a fifth of 100-proof self-pity because his honey didn’t leave her hero for…what did Rick have to offer?…his hill of beans. It’s not a sad note. To end on. It’s a sour note.

  But Vichy says the movie ends happily with the two self-indulgent party pals, Rick and Frog, disappearing slowly in the mist, Frog rid of duty, Rick rid of love, both looking forward to a life of boffery and bourbon, or, if you prefer, complaisance and Champagne.

  Don’t run off, dear.

  I’ve got an idea for a horror movie. Objects—see—in this movie—come alive. How or why remains to be worked out. They come alive and take over. I am this monstrous alien life form with a mile-wide mouth of teeth. When some ham hand lays a finger on me I bite it off. I just nip the tip. Neat as though it were all nail. Walk on me, will ya? And I scowl.

  Whattya think?

  Hey, I made a plink.

  Try that one again.

  —

  With thanks to

  Aljean Harmetz. Round Up the Usual Suspects. New York: Hyperion, 1992.

  Jeff Siegel. The Casablanca Companion. Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1992.

  Soliloquy

  for a

  Chair

  When we were born you wouldn’t believe the fuss that was made over us: so many, so fit, so simultaneous. People drove by our mother’s house and dropped off gifts and small change. We were tiny, especially when we were folded up. Crowds waited—patiently, I must say—to see us, maybe through a window when we were carried across the parlor, or during the few hours every day that people were permitted to walk through the kitchen to look at us lined up on the linoleum pretty much as we are here, only with not so much gray hair. Ha ha! I’m the only one of us with a sense of humor.

  We’re still together as you can see, even after all these years: that’s Deadly Reckoning on your left, the one of us who received so much press; and Barry Buttock is next—we got around to calling him that on account of his constant complaining about the burdens he bore every day of his life, well, we were all weighed down from time to time (I always told him he hadn’t a leg to stand on—ha ha!—he’d say he had four); then Overly Neighborly is on Butt’s left, neighbor to me, always wedged in as we customarily were, but he seemed to enjoy it; then I’m in the middle—I was always in the middle—positioned below the paper pinned to a coat hook, the one that has curled like a burnt worm for being so long in a room moist with razor washings and shampoos; now we come to Commander Prince Paul who looks to me pretty much like the rest of us but one who fancied himself some sort of exiled African royalty, compelled for political reasons (that he pretended threatened his safety) to endure our life of required labor and enforced comradeship by parking against the wall of Walter’s barbershop in Natchez, Mississippi, waiting, the guys say, like the taxi girls down the street, to be of use, but fearing (as the Commander insisted) to be found out and snapped into shackles on the spot.

  We were all born together despite Prince Paul’s preposterous mytherations, and healthy as bean sprouts, but Perce was without the entirety of his equipment—a front strut—though it never seemed to interfere with his duties which he carried out with as much enthusiasm as the rest of us…not much—ha ha!—yet an infirmity that sharp-eyed customers were bound to notice.

  They’d pick up a comical magazine from Walt’s rack to stay busy-headed while they were waiting their turn; then often leave it in Perce’s lap when a barber became available, since some folks didn’t want to settle down on a chair with no front strut. Perce wants me to say that all of us were fitted with those safety braces once but that Perce lost his in a terrible accident, and because of this unfortunate omission nobody would make use of him, just politely shy away and put their reading on his lap instead of lowering their anatomy. If it suits him in his heart to say it went that way, why not say it that way, say I.

  The last in line, though he would hate to hear it put in those terms, is Natty Know-it-all, who got his name by being just the opposite, not quite there as to brainy particulars, and slow as faucet drip to learn or find, execute or opine anything. “I’ve half a mind to spin a top,” he’ll sometimes say—ha ha! It does make us laugh a lot cause he couldn’t spin a top if his life depended on it. Just not built for tergiversations. Honest as the day is long though. Honest even all night. All night. The neons have a nervous flash. All Nite they bite air. Honesty’s smaller hours go to those who pass them in their sleep. We have no sex life though we’ve seen plenty of yours, and we are greatful not to have to suffer the same miseries. If we continue to be of use, you will multiply us. Since many languages assign genders to things, we have voted to be pronounced “he,” not “it” or “she,” as if we were ships or fences.

  Pleasure produced by frictions of various kinds, rubadubdub-bing, and so forth—I admit—nervous kids have sometimes created it by sliding back and forth, sending pleasant little warmths rhythmically up my struts; and Prince Paul confesses he has enjoyed a few thrills upon opening or folding his legs. I find this hard to believe.

  Nights get me. Neons or not. We sit amid our particulars but they are good as gone in the dark that washes through the front window smothering what little light we might have saved up for ourselves during the day and making for a silence that is peculiar to electric things and glass shelves. We die through use—we do—buttons into buttonholes—occasionally there’s a tra
uma but mostly it is the quiet wear of unnoticed routines—life’s a chair’s hinge—our workaday seats are eaten by squirm and heat. But we also die during nights of inaction and enforced rest, when rust’s slow debilitations pick at what we are and what sustains us with more repetition and determination than the woodworm. Yeah, when we close up shop a lot stops. Of course the sleep of metal has its merits, but I find myself missing the company of our daily things, now that the passage of people has ceased. During business hours we can overhear the shaving gear and the howzitlook mirror carry on a conversation, mostly about hypocrisy or vanity and such sins, or listen to a pair of sinks or trays of tedious utensils rattle on all day while clippers, scissors, toilet sprays yap away or buzz and bicker. Make your little noises, fellows, I let one weary leg say to the others now that silence seems total and only a flicker, reflected from distant headlamps, races across the floor like one of our mice. We’ve been called the seven dwarfs. I don’t know why. People just say things sometimes.

  All the barbers have their black vinyl chairs, of course. The headman is always posted near the sidewalk. Perhaps you’ve noticed that barbershops tend to have the same configuration. Their façade is mostly made of window with a door set to one side. That door will have glass in it, too, so a passerby can see the row of us in a line like racehorses at the track, except that we shall face, not a vacant run to freedom, but the big bulbous dental armchairs where the hair is cut; where the beard is shaved; where the nails are filed and buffed; where the shoes are shined and admired. It is hard to like the three bears—that’s what we call the barbers’ chairs—they are so full of themselves and what they can do: “we rise and fall like empires,” the headrest likes to say; “tilt and lift,” the middle chair likes to put it; for the span, that is a leg’s length, the repeated slogan is “lie back and take it easy.”

  Barbers used to draw blood and pull teeth. The pole, you know, advertised that. Back when the world had meaning. Leeches were kept in the white ball at the top while the bottom basin collected serum. The moving red helix mimic’d blood’s downward flow, the white one twisted about the pole the way a bandage was wrapped around a leg or arm then, one fresh and clean the other soiled and soaked. But if you walk into such a barbershop in Chinatown you are likely to find an available girl.

  By the way, all of us here speak Utile or Toolese, not just we Chairs, but the three bears too, the bottles of shampoo, the push broom and its pan. As far as I know, in this space, I alone—Mr. Middle—speak English, though I never spoke it to the barbers, Fred or Mart or Sam, or Winnie who did nails, or Archie who blacked shoes. I thought it would freak them out. So you will excuse me, I hope, if I make odd mistakes now and then. I rarely get a chance to practice the language. Beside, I’ve had to decide where to put my mouth. Of course, we all communicate by means of vibrations. It is simply that the link between a lamp and a scissor is so much more—may I say?—sophisticated, and more closely resembles your X-rays and ultraviolets and hi-fi. A few animals hear the vowels of Toolese now and then—it causes them to yowl—but humans don’t have any ears for us unless we fall and break, or squeak and shout, or pop and whistle. Even then, you don’t try to understand our exclamations. It’s all right. We’re used to it. Most of us—foot pads, curtains, couches, paper towels—don’t grasp the meaning of your constant chirping and occasional singing any better than any of us does birdcalls and grackle cackle.

  I shall be your translator, then, during this brief period of literacy. I am breaking our silence (in your regard) because many of us here in the shop know things about the Sam Bradford affair that you human beings seem unable to understand. After all, we were here the entire time. Yes, a few of us Utes shut down during the row; it was too unpleasant altogether for them; but most of us remained—how do you say it?—mesmerized by events.

  But first, let me say something about our general situation. The species I represent originated when primitive man made the first tool. He was looking for assistance from a rock, a fallen limb, a shell, a large leaf. And when that first man found a feather, stripped a stick to make it skinnier, or sharpened a stone, he was making something he hoped would help him out. Our philosophers (once-upon-a-time wine bottles trying to make a living now as vases for single blooms) speak of this as “the materializing of human purpose.” Their celebrated analysis goes this way: the problem, which furnishes the stimulus, must be no small thing to enlist the form from a substance whose life is a continuous struggle. The instrument of solution, which is the tool emerging from the material of its making, must endure the painful lessons of error, trial, and luck. Versions of the tool are applied to the problem until the right nail is eventually smartly struck. The solution is signified by the creature’s pleasure at his success, or his relief at the impediment that has been removed.

  As an example, let’s pick on a device that will clean and order human hair and whose need is obvious. The solution: a grid borrowed from a rake or a handful of fingers. This choice suggests that the cave dweller adapted one of the uses of the claw for other purposes—possibilities no doubt discovered when she ran a hand through her hair or undid knots or waited for a waterfall to encourage the tangled strands of her locks to float free.

  Humans will have forgotten, but in those days the world and all its filaments were (quite correctly) thought to be alive: to possess a will, have plans, nurse grudges, suffer wounds. A heavy rock was heavy because it was resisting being moved. A hail of water might rush down the arroyo like an angry god. The sea was calm on account of Poseidon. A breeze might grow nervous, and the moon hide itself in a cloud. Thunderbolts were hurled from Mount Olympus at enemies on Etna. So when the toolmaker chipped at his flint, he was releasing certain powers already present in the stone. Right again. If he were smart he would cherish his tools because they were as alive as he. I am speaking proof that the things men have made are inhabited from material furnished by nature and by the energies and intentions of men.

  You might have been wondering why a bunch of folding chairs would call their first employer “mother.” Well, we do it just for fun, and because we like to display our wit and boast of the way our legs snap open. Fate was being ironic when it assigned us to a mortuary for our first full tour of duty, deeply so, since that’s what mothers mainly do—give birth to an infant who will be able to restock the general supply and keep death ungratefully in business. The big black lady who fed the mourners cookies on small glass plates oiled our joints, because “around death, the quieter we be, the better, like those who have crossed over, it shows respect.”

  When we were cut out of our cardboard casing, we did not know how much of the world might someday sit down upon us or surround us with a selection of its business noises, but we were fortunate in fate’s choice for us—a barbershop—since a barbershop was then closer to the center of things than almost any place readily available.

  Six non-holidays a week, at eight in the morning, Walter would flip from CLOSED to OPEN the card that dangled from the doorknob. Then we would wait for the little ring the door gave out when the first customer came in. It was comforting, if business was brisk, to hear the snick of the scissors, the whisk of the hairbrush, and the skid of the barbers’ razors when they were rubbed amorously along the length of their leather strops. Some guys disappeared behind the daily paper, others lost face in a roil of white lather; a few would immediately begin broadcasting their complaints about the behavior of other citizens and the ills of the nation. These routine moans and groans hid their features, I always thought, as successfully as the daily news. A regular whose name was Barney bewailed the condition of the economy, but told us little about his own perilously thin resources. The conclusions of Clarence’s sentences were a bit shrill, as if his balls were being pinched, an explanation that pleased Barry Buttock, who first conjectured it. Clare would drift in most every morning before nine just to say hi! I wondered did he have a home or other friends or a place to hang his hat. Then our row of seats would begin to fill wit
h customers, often greeting one another, their rumps already weighing—each in its own way—upon our crisscrossed legs. They weren’t the only ones who felt the relief of leaving their feet so as to settle down upon Deadly Reckoning or Natty Know-it-all, often the first ones chosen because they were stationed in the favored end of our row, and had, in consequence, aisle seats, with only one well-sited shoulder. Perce wants me to say that he was superior to the rest of us because being built without a brace was like being born without an appendix. If it suits him in his heart to say it worked that way, why not say it worked that way, say I.

  The murmur of the barbers and their clients, the clicks and snicks of implements, and the buzz of shavers were fairly constant and they were comforting too, reassuring the ear that all was well; and usually this carpet of clatter was punctuated only by the brief ring of the phone when an unheard voice asked for an appointment.

  Our shop was mainly a walk-in. We were no highbrow female hair parlor. No sir, we weren’t run by the style bunnies and their frightened hops into the latest fashions.

  Early in our careers…just a min…the mortuary died a short time after we began working there, ha ha, we made rueful jokes about that, and we were stacked, roped, and dumped into a Goodwill without the least acknowledgment of the value of our previous service, which was exemplary even if brief…As I was about to say, we Chairs sat at tables for a month in a small bar hereabouts, that’s my only experience of bartenders, and we found them, to a seat, to be careless with their equipment and noisy at their handling, banging mugs about and crushing ice, but sullen as a bar rag, especially during the night shift. That’s not our twenty years with barbers. No one could be more garrulous, gossipy, and outgoing than these guys at Walter’s. It’s not that they learned to talk to the talc (normally quiet, like unused bars of soap) or were inclined to toss their towels a chuckle…no…but once collected with others of their kind they’d be comfortable as a cushion—their tongues danced all day. With a little wax paper, Mart would play something he claimed was Irish on one of his combs—I was never sure which one—and then, energized, jig his fingers among his hair-dye dishes without bumping any.