Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Ain’t nobody here at home ’cept me. Would you care to leave a message? I’ll write it down on de pad, always supposin’ I kin find it.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Walker. ‘How long will she be away?’

  ‘Dey’s on Fah Island. Be five days more before dey gets back home.’

  ‘Oh, it’s no use then,’ said Walker. He put down the phone and felt bereft. The thought of not seeing Julie again – for when she came back he would be gone – depressed him; he peered out of the glass booth at the passers-by, terrorized by loneliness, until he recalled that an acquaintance of his had a copywriting job in an agency on Madison Avenue, and he called him. ‘Hallo, old boy,’ cried Henry when he had penetrated the switchboard. ‘Absolutely topping to hear your voice.’ Henry hadn’t talked like that when he was in Nottingham, Walker recalled, but then America could probably do this kind of thing to a man. He also had a suspicion that Henry didn’t recall him at all, but had simply, with urban bonhomie, responded with pleasure to anyone who actually knew of his existence at all. But then Henry waxed sentimental, recalling the good old days, and it was on a note of intensity that they arranged to have dinner together and show Walker the Village. ‘Pip pip, old boy,’ said Henry. ‘See you.’ The booth and something more had made Walker sweat. He went across the road to the Marlboro bookshop and looked through the bargains, finally purchasing Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for one dollar. Then, realizing that he was hungry, he set out to find the automat again; he was ready for some more cornflakes and another blueberry pie.

  Henry Wilkins was an old acquaintance of Walker’s with whom he had drunk many a pint in the back bar of Severn’s. In those days he had been a quiet, rather sad youth of lower-middle-class parentage who worked in a public library, stamping books, fining delinquent borrowers, ushering out hacking old men from the reading-room. The bottoms of his trousers were always frayed and he had a nibble of baldness on each of his temples. He smelled often of bacon fat, and he had a sprayed, blotchy tie which, if boiled, would have made a meaty soup. He was now another man. His clothes were smart and dark; he wore a checked shirt; his tie was English hand-blocked foulard and his temples seemed to have reseeded and grown up again. When he met Walker in the foyer of the vast yellow skyscraper where he worked, he took him surely across Madison Avenue, holding his arm protectively, and into a high building devoted entirely to the parking of cars, where the automobiles were stacked one beside and above the other like the blueberry pies in the automat. When Henry’s car came down it was a Triumph Sprite. ‘Must keep the old flag flying,’ he said, in his more English than English voice, now devoid of its Bulwell twang. He drove the car with American efficiency, holding the right speed so that all the lights changed as he approached them. He took Walker to dine at an Italian restaurant on the edge of the Village where signed photographs of famous writers and actors stared down at them from the walls. The meal was impeccable, and afterwards Henry insisted on paying. He said his apartment was close by, on Second Street, and drove Walker to it along dark shuttered streets littered with wrecked dismantled cars and sleeping winos, seemingly waiting to be filmed by men with cameras in loaves of bread. He stopped off at the liquor store and came out with a bulky package. The apartment, in a faintly sleazy modern block, was furnished inside with Danish settees and low tables and madras hangings. Walker sat in a butterfly chair, his bottom suspended just above floor level in the canvas sling, and drank martinis that were cold and composed almost entirely of gin.

  ‘My rule with martinis,’ said Henry, who had never heard of martini when Walker knew him before, ‘is just show them the label of the vermouth bottle. No more, you know; I say, I haven’t bruised the gin, have I?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Walker, more and more impressed.

  Henry asked Walker whether he had a pipeline – ‘People to stay with, millionaires in Mexico, you know?’

  ‘No,’ said Walker, ‘I don’t know anybody.’

  ‘Must give you my addresses. The great thing is to be a freeloader. Americans love it. Sometimes I think that if you’re clever enough you need never pay for anything ever again. Until you meet another Englishman.’

  ‘I meant to pay my share for the dinner,’ said Walker.

  ‘Nonsense, old boy. And now I suppose you want to stay here. Soon get a day-bed made up. Actually there are four other chaps here too; never met them before. I have to pick them up at Idlewild just after midnight. They’ve been to Denver to stay with the parents of one of them’s mistress. I told Ralph, pick a mistress with a spare car. But he says he prefers to fly.’

  ‘I see there’s an art to America,’ said Walker. ‘I’ve clearly been missing out.’

  ‘An art indeed,’ said Henry.

  ‘Actually,’ said Walker, ‘I’m booked in at a hotel.’

  ‘Good one?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, look, if you want to move out here . . .’

  ‘Thanks a lot. I’ll think about it.’

  ‘How about a wander round the Village? Bookstores, coffee bars, some jazz?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Walker.

  This time they set off on foot. The winos seemed more threatening and one of them caught Walker by the trouser leg. ‘He wants a handout,’ said Henry, giving him a dollar bill. The man said nothing, but let go of Walker’s trousers. ‘I told you,’ said Henry. They stopped in Washington Square to watch the émigrés in berets playing chess on the stone tables.

  A girl in a denim shirt and tight jeans said to Walker, ‘Take a look at these tits,’ and opened her shirt.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Walker politely.

  ‘Screw you too,’ said the girl.

  ‘Nice work,’ said Henry, when she’d gone. ‘You were real cool. That’s what she wanted.’

  ‘It didn’t sound like it,’ said Walker.

  Across the square a man in a leather jacket was talking to a tree. ‘You’re the goddamest tree,’ he said, ‘all these other trees are garbage, but you . . .’

  They went into a bookshop where a crowd of old men were reading books on sexual postures. ‘Tourists,’ said Henry, ‘the Village people just steal them.’ The whole city was now turning rich blue in the evening light. They passed the women’s prison, a high block, and looked into the windows of some of the Village shops, full of handmade thong sandals and pottery for sale at stupendous prices. ‘Here’s a place I know,’ said Henry, ‘they serve a good chocolate with an onion in it.’ Inside there was a small podium where a couple in powdered make-up were doing a mime. Though the mime was called Leda and the Swan, nothing very much happened. The waitress, a girl who had shaved off all her hair, brought their chocolates, bobbing her shiny bare pate in front of them. Then the proprietor of the place announced the poetry reading. The poet was a young man in jeans and a poncho; he wore dark glasses.

  ‘Night people,’ he said; the audience clapped appreciatively.

  ‘Tourists,’ said Henry.

  ‘Am I talking to night people?’ He looked at the audience and munched for a while on the end of a French roll.

  ‘You’re beautiful, boy,’ shouted a man at one of the tables.

  ‘Yeah, we all are,’ said the poet. He munched for a few moments more, then looked at the ceiling. ‘Come, bird, come down, bird, I need you,’ he said. ‘I’m calling you to help me. Oh, bird, you gonna make it tonight? Make it with me.’ The bird must have come, because an expression of ecstasy took his face for a second or so, and then he said, ‘A black dog pissed on my lawn. For Gregory Corso.’

  ‘This is the poem,’ whispered Henry. The poems were all in the verbal tradition; they mixed wit and intense sentiment in equal parts. Walker enjoyed them, but afterwards, when they left, Henry was disappointed. ‘Some nights he takes his clothes off,’ he said, ‘but I suppose that’s just Saturdays.’

  The next place they went into had a jazz combo that Walker had almost, but not quite, heard of. They sat round a counter with the combo behind. The beer
s were a dollar and a half; again, Henry paid, insistently. The crowd was largely composed of young people with crew-cuts and neat Harris tweed sports-coats, or short straight hair and dark shirt-waist dresses. The jazz was witty and cool, the group, who wore madras check shirts and grey flannel Bermuda shorts, stylish and efficient. After they had drunk their beers, the barman came by and said, ‘Same again, fellers?’

  Henry nodded and said to Walker, ‘If you stop drinking they throw you out.’ After the next beer they stopped drinking.

  ‘Let’s make some space here, fellows,’ said the barman.

  Henry said. ‘No. I just want to digest my beer in reasonable comfort.’

  ‘Are you going to take your friend out the easy way, or want me to do it?’ asked the barman of Walker.

  ‘Come on, Henry,’ said Walker.

  ‘Bully,’ said Henry as he got down unsteadily off the stool.

  ‘And bully for you too, old cock,’ said the barman, wiping the counter.

  ‘I need a drink,’ said Henry when they came out into the street. Two girls in leotards went by and Walker looked after them. ‘Cool, man, cool,’ said Henry, shaking a finger. A liner hooted, calling the Village Fulbrights to Europe, and a breeze blew off the river. Henry remembered he had some friends in the block and dived into a liquor store to reappear with another package. The friends lived high up in an apartment block; when they went in, the two of them sat typing in their undershorts on opposite sides of a desk, their little portables singing as the words rolled off. Reading-lamps on snaky supports were the only illumination. They seemed not to resent the intrusion, and at once, as if they had been waiting all day for it, began a discussion about E. M. Forster and the moral life.

  ‘What I admire about England,’ said one of them, a teacher at Hunter College, ‘is its moral stability. People even have flowers in their gardens named Honesty. That’s the way it should be; moral principles in all things.’ Walker felt a warm glow when the words hit his eardrums. ‘They still believe in good and bad,’ went on the college teacher. ‘You know, this sounds quaint, but I wish . . . do I? Do I . . . that I did too?’

  ‘But how is it done?’ said the other man, an editor with a college publishing house, elbows on his hairy knees.

  ‘Well, we beat it in through the bottom when we’re children,’ said Walker, ‘or at least we used to. It’s amazing what you can get in that way if everyone does it too. But I’m afraid you’re talking about the past.’

  ‘You should keep at it,’ said the editor.

  ‘Why should the English be the ones to spit against the wind?’ said Walker.

  The college teacher fixed some martinis and they talked on. Outside, the city went on roaring, and at two they went out to a Jewish restaurant and had blueberry blintzes and sour creams. Life seemed as busy as ever and small children stood outside grocery stores. When they had paid their tabs in the restaurant they decided to drive out to Coney Island and take a look at the ocean. They drove in the college teacher’s old Pontiac through dark cold streets blowing with paper, until the smell of sea and popcorn blew into the car, and they were there. Rows of closed hot-dog stands and shuttered entertainment booths, tawdry and worn, lined the way to the boardwalk, and the odd loiterer stumbled among the rubbish and the heavy shadows. The ocean nosed sadly on to the shingle. They went along the boardwalk until, suddenly, four darkly clad figures appeared in front of them.

  ‘Where are you going, fellers?’

  ‘We came to take a look at the sea,’ said Henry to the four cops.

  ‘Let’s go home, fellers.’

  ‘Don’t argue,’ said the editor, ‘let’s go.’

  ‘Smart boy, ain’t you?’ said the cop.

  ‘I wanted to look . . .’ said Henry.

  ‘Your friend looking for trouble?’

  ‘No,’ said the editor, turning Henry round, and they went back to the car.

  ‘That was rather frightening,’ said Walker.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the editor, ‘they’re worse than the hoods.’

  They dropped Walker off at his hotel, and he went up the stairs to his room. It was hot and foetid and when he had stripped he got between the sheets without putting on his English pyjamas. A mosquito buzzed around his head. After groping for his bed-lamp, which had some kind of patent switch that wouldn’t light, he struggled out of bed and went over to his cases for his bottle of anti-mosquito lotion, sprinkling the stuff liberally over himself. Back in bed, he suddenly recalled that his suitcase also contained a bottle of marking ink. But he couldn’t care. He felt sweat gathering in his crotch. Through the wall came noises of dispute.

  ‘No, you beat it, she’s gonna stay wid me.’ ‘You wouldn’t know how to do it when she got on de bed wid you.’ ‘Yeah, my good old buddy, pull me down in front of her. This is a friend.’ ‘You’re both crazy, I’m going, I’m wasting my time,’ said a girl. ‘Walk all over me, good old buddy, break my arm.’ There was a hammering in the corridor and a voice louder than any yelled, ‘Cut out all that noise, will ya? This is a respectable premises.’ ‘Now you fetched the desk clerk,’ said the girl. ‘Shall I bust him one?’ ‘No, give him a five, he’ll go away, won’t you, boy?’ ‘I already had some complaints . . .’

  Walker got up and went to the window. Moonlight shone in his navel and a mosquito dived at his buttocks; it must have been marking ink he had sprinkled on himself. Outside, the streets were as busy as day. Shining cars stood at the kerbside, steam surged from a grating, a police siren screamed across the city. Across the street the wreckers, in metal caps and overalls picked out in the arc-lights, went on ceaselessly demolishing the perfectly good building. All New York seemed like a vast confusion; it hummed around him like a steady note of menace. He had asked for a vision, was this the best the created world could do? The vote of appreciation that he felt he ought to give simply would not come; too much that belonged to him, too much of the market-town, too much that had to do with smallness and gentleness and sensitivity and decency, was threatened. He knew that he had made a poor job of the voyage out. His sins – sins of omission rather than commission, for he was always interrupted – stayed the same and felt the same. The future, to which he was trying to give himself, stood ahead of him, hard, insistent, destructive, with very few promises. Further on, in the country beyond the city, where he was soon to go, he envisaged greater follies, greater mess, more incompetence on the part of that crude self that crouched inside him, still believing, as the man had said, in good and bad, still with flowers in its garden named Honesty, still an ugly little dwarf. More was demanded, and more had to come. But would it? A load of rubble smacked into a truck; with a roar of its diesel motor it ripped off down the street. He went back toward the bed. The voices in the next room rose to a scream; somewhere in the building a radio played trauma music for the unsleeping; and the shoot of rubble into trucks went on. Walls fell and the subway shook the hotel. Tomorrow he would take advantage of Henry’s hospitality and escape. Now he opened a new pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth, tasting the unusual treacly taste on the end of his tongue, and waiting until the telephone rang to tell him his name and invite him to take part in a New York day.

  BOOK TWO

  A Middle State

  Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

  A being darkly wise, and rudely great:

  With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

  With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,

  He hangs between . . .

  – Pope: Essay on Man

  4

  THE VISITING LECTURER from England came in on the late afternoon of a September day. Bernard Froelich, a lover of meetings, arrived at the railroad depot a little early for the day’s one transcontinental train. There was no one around, but he reversed his car with an ornate gesture into the dusty, deserted parking lot, and lay down on the front seat, with his feet sticking out of the window. It was an intensely hot day, without a wind blowing, and Froelich took it as
a day of omens, a day for arrivals; he was sure in his heart that the train would stop and Walker descend. His sensations were already disposed to be those of pure awe; it was a day, he felt, he had spent a lifetime preparing for, by spiritual activity and political conniving; it had to go just right, and it would. He looked out across the plain, his head on the hand-rest on the door; it was bare and silent, but after ten minutes had passed he heard suddenly, faintly blown across the hard flat landscape, the cry of the train. The metals began to shudder; a bundle of noise rolled over the platte. The train had to halt; there had to be a Walker on it. And sure enough, the brakes began to groan, the flyer began to slow, the moment took on historic dimensions. He was coming. Froelich watched the train ride by. The great single eye on the front, which had seen the way all the thousand and more miles from Chicago, glinted in the western sun.

  The train stopped, and now the ceremonial was beginning. Passengers looked out of the cars to see what was happening, what special event had halted them in the middle of the void. The blue-coated negro porter lowered the steps, wiped the handrail clean with his rag, and handed Walker down from the high car on to western soil. It had to be Walker. It could be no one else. There he stood, dishevelled, panting, his long English hair hanging down; pure poetry. Froelich had one thought as he looked at him; it was: he isn’t real, he’s a toy. He looked, immediately, so lost, so deculturalized, that Froelich, controlling the urge to rush forward and meet him, stayed in his car and savoured the experience.

  ‘This is it, sah, Bushville,’ said the conductor, grinning. ‘Sure this where you want to be?’

  Walker seemed not to be sure at all. He looked around twice, as if to make sure that what he was seeing was true – he was in the middle of nowhere. The countryside around him was completely, endlessly flat, the only horizon a vague haze that prevented him looking downhill clear to Chicago. In this haze, like big white icebergs, stood indeterminate white shapes, the forms of distant barns and farm-buildings. The scene offered only two sensations, of levelness, and dryness. It was like a painting by Buffet – straight lines, blurred by their parallels, composed every aspect of the scene. Above were streaks of cloud, enormous, significant. Only the unwavering, shining tracks of the railroad formed a reasonable order, a firm hard line of ingress and egress. Froelich, watching Walker, saw it all anew, in its strange and challenging poverty.