Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  Miss Holroyd asks a few introductory questions about my problem, using no jargon and drawing me out with rather heavy subtlety, unaware that as we speak her flesh is being systematically consumed. I take up the long and very elegant shears lying on her desk and slit her clothing deftly from neck to hem, peel away the remaining silks and ravish her on the spot. “There, I guess that’ll teach you to go around calling people latent sex criminals.” I stand over her a moment before dismembering her, breathing heavily. The scene is enacted in detail more vivid than the childhood incidents I am recounting, which though they seem to absorb her have begun suddenly to bore me—so abysmally that I resort to fabrication to hold my own interest. “My mother used to tie me to the kitchen stove.” She strikes me as remarkably cool and self-assured for one hacked into sections and stowed into a steamer trunk and left uncalled for at Pier Sixteen. Suddenly I resent the disclosures I have been making and decide to “resist” this whole line of interrogation with gibberish. That is claimed to be as revelatory as fact to the trained listener, so let her go to work on it then. Too, I recall my status as acting president of the college, which should make me immune from this sort of thing. Let her think this is all a trick to catch her off guard and put her on her mettle as an employe. When she asks whether I prefer either parent to the other I reply:

  “That depends what you mean by fascism. If you mean mechanical outward conformity to a totalitarian regime, that’s one thing. If actual party affiliation, that’s quite another. With the additional difficulty of determining how much outward loyalty is voluntary and how much dictated by prudence in the face of an existing police state, the problem becomes almost hopeless.”

  Q. Would you say your parents merely differed, or that there was open hostility between them? Did they just quarrel or did they fight?

  A. It’s very simple if you just remember the following rule. Both stalactite and ceiling have a “c” in them, so stalactites are those that hang down from above, while stalagmites point upward from the ground.

  Q. Are your parents both still alive?

  A. Yes and no. When we say that women are worse gossips than men we really mean that they are better ones. They engage in it more constantly, but they are not necessarily on that account more malicious or more vicious than men, who merely spend less time at it. I would like to dwell on this point a moment if I may. Gossip is the satisfaction of curiosity, and woman is more omnivorously curious about life because she is its custodian. She is meant by nature to be a talebearer, having an instinctive stake in What Goes On.

  Q. Did they argue or fight in front of you?

  A. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Because she has both intensity and control. She is one of the few modern poets who are frankly and openly lyrical, and that’s why I would probably pick her as my favorite, as I would Chagall among the painters, for the same reason. I think most of us miss the unabashed romantic element. The drying up of permissible emotion in the name of discipline and restraint is one of the curses of our time. Painters like Mondrian give me the horrors. It’s time we got back to nice fat girls sitting naked on the grass out in the country. I mean awaaay out.

  Q. Whom among the musicians do you like?

  A. Shibboleth. The word derives from an incident in the Old Testament. It was a Hebrew word used by Jephthah for distinguishing the fleeing Ephraimites (who could not pronounce the “sh”) from his own troops, the Gileadites. Hence a test word, or standard for sorting out people.

  Q. Do you shed tears when you listen to music, or read a book or watch a movie?

  A. Hair.

  Q. How would you describe your relations with the opposite sex?

  A. 1066.

  Q. Have you been drinking? I don’t ask it critically by any means. I often wish people coming to see me would do so beforehand. It would help them open up.

  A. There’s been a study made about what makes people become actors. Actors are apparently either people whose parents have never allowed them to express themselves, or whose parents have allowed them to. There are statistics seriously compiled on the subject, on money given by some foundation. There is no doubt about it. Easy money! While you’re up get me a Grant!

  Q. Do you sleep well?

  A. (Here a successful attempt is made to resist emphasizing the point by tearing up the blotter on her desk and eating the fragments.) Why, the custom of standing up during the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel’s Messiah dates back to the time when King George I spontaneously rose during its performance, as a sign of its effect on him. Since then it has been traditional for audiences to rise to their feet when it begins, though there are some cynics who regard it as little more than the equivalent of the seventh inning stretch with which we relieve a numb bum at a baseball game.

  Q. Do you like to get up?

  A. If that’s what she wants.

  Q. Do you dream a great deal?

  A. Why, on that, Dow Chemical has developed a pill that produces a low-grade infection when swallowed, not enough to harm the dog but enough to kill the ticks, which are then theoretically supposed to fall off. But it has never been successful to my knowledge. You still have to pick them off one by one, that’s all there’s to that.

  She was not in the least impressed. The hash I strove to make of the interview was a perfectly understandable safeguard against exposure of my secret—which she was perfectly confident she divined anyway from the surface facts themselves: that I hated my parents. “The mature thing is to recognize this for what it is, not let it fester within us. All of our personal relations are full of these hostilities, which we must simply face up to and somehow absorb into the give-and-take of civilized realities.”

  Hated my parents! This was such old stuff that the very assumption that she was telling me something new redoubled my irritation. She said nothing the previous guidance counselor hadn’t, when I was a student, and I half expected her to draw the framed diagonal cross he did (like a voting mark in a square) to illustrate the intersecting oppositions that comprised my personality. I wished she charged a fee so I could refuse to pay it. Still, I reflected as I thanked her and walked home, the session did one thing. It precipitated the riot I had felt myself building up to for some weeks now. Periodically, I had to plunge into one or the other—often both—of the conflicting emotional seapools of my life, to appease impulses or desires deeply buried or long denied. These were like emotional sprees, of the sort to which we are all subject, sops to the private furies by which we are all driven in varying directions. They serve the function of getting things out of our system, of clearing our spirit, for the time being at least.

  For me these bouts have always involved the revisitation of old haunts. Sometimes they are stimulated by sight or thought of them. It was early evening when I headed toward the center of town, and, after a few drinks at a bar long associated with my boyhood as a hangout of my father’s, I wandered into the Gospel Mission, still the same old rented store as always. There were folding chairs set in two sections, an aisle between. It was Wednesday, and the midweek meeting was in session. A middle-aged woman usher thrust a hymnal into my hand and led me to an empty seat. The danger that my mother might be here occurred to me as I sat down, but a quick glance around the half-filled hall revealed this not to be the case. The congregation was singing “Shall We Gather at the River?,” in only a chorus of which I was able to join before the hymnals were shut and the minister rose and approached the pulpit.

  He was a revivalistic spellbinder of the old school, with a shock of gray hair which he kept flinging out of his eye, and the brassy, nasal voice for some reason characteristic of the breed, either naturally or developed as a result of years of service as one of God’s barkers. He was soon going strong, waving his Bible and thumping the pulpit as he shouted out the exhortations that would rededicate believers and bring converts to the front. He was new here, at least new in the year or so since I had last dropped in. I had not seen him before, but he had not spoken ten words before I knew here was a p
rize specimen. He had the strong, gamey vulgarity I have always found bracing, and I gave myself wholeheartedly to an experience that was as much a kind of intellectual wallowing as it was a dramatized nostalgia for faith. Thus my experience was the reverse of that of my co-worshipers. They were being saved, while I was backsliding. I was, aesthetically speaking, going to hell, and I abandoned myself to it like a drunkard to his drink. The man was so supremely awful that I was soon under his spell.

  “Are you starving your soul within reach of the banquet table of God’s grace? There is the board of his divine sufficiency, groaning with the riches intended for your spirit’s sustenance. Reach out, eat. Oh, brothers and sisters, reach out and eat! Are you thirsting in the desert of reprobation while beside you flows, crystal-clear and cool, the quenching stream of his eternal love? Turn and drink, brethren, drink and slake your parched tongues forevermore! And let me tell you one thing. Don’t go for that mirage, the illusory satisfactions of this world that recede forever before us as we stumble on in our hallucination, but quaff the water of life which flows freely at your feet.”

  As his oratory mounted in hysteria, it became increasingly punctuated with “Amens” and “Glory be’s” from the audience. These swelled in a steady crescendo, at their peaks drowning out the preacher’s words. All his hearers were worked up into a lather. I joined in these outcries, furtively at first, then more boldly, till I found myself shouting “Amen!” and “Christ be praised!” at the top of my voice. It was an exhilarating experience.

  Whipped into the greatest frenzy was the speaker himself. Pulpit banging and foot stamping were at last not enough. He tore off his coat and began beating the floor with it to emphasize a point. All this was in a sense relative; the entire speech was climax. Crouching on his knees as he flailed the platform with his jacket, he shouted: “Art thou weary, art thou languid? Dost thou sometimes long for the final deliverance promised to all who will heed his call?” Here he dropped his coat, and, facing the audience squarely on his knees, he flung his arms wide to them, like the everlasting arms themselves. The chills ran up my spine. I could scarcely breathe, I became so choked by the ecstasy in which, together with the congregation shouting “Yes!”, I found myself caught up. “Oh, don’t you sometimes long for that haven to which God’s children shall be called, while those who have ignored him shall be flung into everlasting hell, there to burn in flames through all eternity? Well, I do! I long for it sometimes, and I know you do too. I long to be rocked on Jesus’s breast. I wish the trumpet would sound and the dead be raised up tomorrow! Tonight! This minute! Because I know where I’ll be when it’s over, and where you’ll be too if you heed his call tonight. Have you ever thought about what an atomic cloud looks like? Well, both Isaiah and Revelation say the heavens shall be rolled together like a scroll. Take heed, make the connection. The time is not long now, the day is at hand, history is drawing to its close. And when it does, when that great day of the Lord comes, I know where I’ll be. I won’t be deep-frying in the pit of eternal Crisco. No, sir! I’ll be—” Here he rose dramatically, and pointed an arm straight through the ceiling. “I’ll be up yonder, inside the pearly gates, kickin’ up the gold dust on Hallelujah Avenue!”

  It was pouring rain when Waltz sank to his knees and accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal savior. I shuffled to the front with six or seven other limp, bemused and battered converts. We kneeled while the evangelist said a special prayer over us, passing along the line and laying his hand on each of our heads in turn. After we had been given his blessing we returned to our seats for the final hymn, chosen and sung for those who had been saved tonight. It was, by coincidence, the one that had come to mind in my recent crisis, one long familiar to me from childhood hours spent in this mission, and I raised my voice in its strains as lustily as anyone there:

  At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,

  And the burden of my heart rolled away,

  It was there by faith I received my sight,

  And now I am happy all the day.

  I groped my way out into the street, slightly dazed by the experience. It was a little like awakening from a dream, one of those dreams, not nightmares, that are somehow more vivid than nightmares. The rain had stopped but the pavements glistened in the light of the lamps and there were pools in the gutters, so hard had the brief downpour been. I trudged along reviewing the occurrence, which left me rather shaken. I had never gone that far before. I had thrown myself into the orgies, but I had never been saved. As reality struck me again in the form of fresh air and the sight of people hurrying on normal rounds, a kind of reaction set in. I felt strongly the need of some counterbalance.

  I walked into a bar, a very cheerful place, and after three or four drinks found myself fraternizing with two men who had been drinking for a somewhat longer time. They were both truck drivers, I learned from their conversation, both loud laughing fellows who liked a good joke and a ribald song. After a few choruses in which we all joined with the dubious harmony common to such groups, I said, “Ever heard the one that goes, ‘At the bar, at the bar’? Ever sing that when you were a kid?”

  “Yes, I did, come to think of it,” one said. “I haven’t thought about that one for years. How does it go again?”

  I let go for them in a parody of the hymn with which the revival meeting had just been concluded:

  At the bar, at the bar, where I smoked my first cigar,

  And the buttons on my vest rolled away,

  It was there by chance that I tore my Sunday pants,

  And now I wear them every day.

  “And of course you know the ‘Nightgown Song,’” I said.

  “Love lifted me.”

  “Right. And then there’s this one.” I led off another mock hymn, my arms slung around my companions’ shoulders. “Nero my dog has fleas, Nero has fleas …”

  Here the bartender, who had been watching us uneasily, or rather uneasily watching a more conventional-looking party of middle-aged couples in a booth, said, “I think you boys better throttle down now. It’s getting a little rough. And you look to me to’ve had enough,” he added personally for my benefit. It was notice that he would not serve me any more, which I took as intended. I bade my friends good night and made, mellowly but a little unsteadily, for another bar, where I drank till that bartender declined to pour me another.

  Managing somehow to disguise my true condition from the sales clerk, I bought half a pint of whiskey at a liquor store, and took it to the riverside. I sat on the bank for an hour or more, watching the water and tipping the bottle to my lips. The bottle empty, I lay back on the cool grass, gazing at the swarm of stars above and listening to the steady stream of lovers driving in and out of the nearby picnic parking ground. At last I fell asleep.

  Sometime after midnight I felt the sharp sting of a club on my foot and a policeman’s voice said, “Come on, buddy, get up. We’ll take you home—if you can tell us where you live.”

  A prowl car throbbed nearby, toward which I was led babbling about Leibniz’s windowless monads and Kant’s categorical imperative. A second policeman waited noncommittally at the wheel till I got in. I was bundled into the back seat by the first officer, in whose lap I tried to climb while asking him whether he knew the hymn, “Gladly the crosseyed bear.” He rather sharply asked again where I lived, and I gave him the address of the dormitory, now rebuilt after the fire which had driven me to Mrs. Duncan’s, and where I was once again staying. I remained in an expansive mood as we made for it, calling out greetings to the occasional night pedestrians, and at one point giving a football cheer I had composed some years before as a student, in the blasphemous stage of another such cycle as the one from which I was emerging:

  Hidy didy!

  Christ almighty!

  Bim bam!

  God damn!

  Polycarp, Polycarp, yeah!

  In this way some kind of sanity was maintained, some kind of balance and integration. The cops helped me i
nto the foyer of the dormitory. I was able to pick my way without incident to the second floor room I occupied, and dropped onto the bed with my clothes on.

  To say that I awoke filled with remorse is to say nothing unless remorse be taken to mean a sort of psychic gorge rising in endless, unresolvable waves for which the word nausea likewise does not begin to suffice. The room was revolving in two simultaneous directions, its contents swirling and tumbling about like the clothes in a wash machine.

  By noon I had not yet been able to set foot out of bed, nor yet by evening, or morning of the next day. Sheer organic existence was possible only by dint of maintaining a fixed point of reference, usually a corner angle of the ceiling, and keeping my head absolutely motionless on the pillow. Any slightest disturbance was pure horror. “This is hell, nor am I out of it,” I thought, from Faustus. The dormitory matron, Mrs. Willis, looked in on me the third day to ask if anything was wrong. I told her I was sick with the flu, and declined her kind offer of “soup or something.” Neither did I want a doctor, I told her, but I would appreciate her telephoning Marion Wellington for me. I had a phone, but it was at the other end of the room, impossible for me to use. I gave Mrs. Willis the number, and she sat down and called, watching me, I felt sure, while she waited for an answer. There was none at the apartment, and I gave her Marion’s school office number. She was out there too, but a message was left for her to please come and call on me during visiting hours that evening. “It’s urgent,” Mrs. Willis added at my request. I had at some point pulled my clothes off and thrown them on a chair. She hung them up before going, also laying out fresh pajamas on the bed.