Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  The subtle duality present in most remarkable natures may take different forms. In my own case, the vital polarity resulted from a conflict that was sometimes between faith and reason, sometimes between intellect and emotion—or “head and heart.” But the two are really in the last analysis one. Faith puts the requirements of the emotions first, skepticism the claims of the intellect. I have described my debaucheries as sins of the intellect, a nostalgie pour la boue that periodically set me to wallowing in bad standards like a pig in the mud. It was as simple as that. The Harvard Group could by contrast be thought of as bluenoses of the mind. There is a species of aesthetic puritan, with principles as rigidly intolerant of intellectual and artistic shortcomings as their New England forebears were of moral. When prudence decreed a truce in my war on them, the cycle in question had by no means run its course, as I say. The need to do something substandard still ran high. Temptation presently offered itself in another contest, to which I again succumbed. This was a competition run by the sponsor of a television program, a manufacturer of a line of breakfast cereals. It was shortly after Thanksgiving, the holidays were approaching, and a prize of twenty-five hundred dollars was offered for the best letter from a listener, of fifty words or less, on the subject, “What Christmas means to me.”

  Something that would make the Three Little Prigs gag was how I defined the problem to myself. It was my criterion. I finally wrote: “To me, Christmas is the one day of the year when we show ourselves what the other three hundred and sixty-four could be like too if we wanted to make them.”

  Needless to say, my letter won first prize. I was again called on the carpet. President Smadbeck asked me to come in and see him. He exemplified the tendency among many gray-haired men to dress all in gray as well: gray flannel suits, gray shirts, ties, socks. Perhaps some kind of protective coloring is the object behind such grooming. In any case, Smadbeck was very well groomed in this mode.

  “I see you’ve won another contest, Waltz.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “I’ve heard about the last one, of course, as well as—all the other things. I should have thought that would have cured you.”

  “I guess it hasn’t.”

  “You know this will reflect on the school.” There was no longer any question of hushing it up since it had already appeared in a story in the local Blade, which recalled that the member of the Polycarp faculty who was victor had also won the movie-magazine contest. The sponsors had announced on their program the plans for my appearing on the show Christmas Eve to receive the check.

  “I suppose you do it to pick up a little extra money.”

  “There is always that problem.” This seemed the best way to pass the matter off with Smadbeck, an unexcitable, eminently sane man who tended to take a practical view of things. Certainly a full explanation, with all the emotional and psychological complexities and ramifications gone into, would be very difficult, as well as take up more time than either of us had. Not that I was at all confident of my ability to make a satisfactory elucidation, if it came to that. Better by far to take Smadbeck’s line. Too, the economic motive might again point up the inadequate salaries paid teachers, their need to supplement their incomes from less dignified sources. Another round of agitation in the press, lamenting our plight, might well result. This would be all to the good.

  “Well, we shall have to think about it. I haven’t taken the case up with Inskip, who is your department superior of course, or the faculty. Certainly he should have a say in the matter, don’t you think?”

  “By all means.”

  “Meanwhile, pull yourself together, for God’s sake! And try not to enter any more contests.”

  “I’ll do my very best, sir. You may bank on that. You’ve been most understanding.”

  And he had. I was genuinely impressed. This seemed the best handling of me to date. By far. Smadbeck’s own example might well be the turning point by providing the corrective that I needed: some way of finding a stable balance between the two extremes within which I so wildly oscillated, as though each excess must purge the other, each must cast out the devil of the other. The golden mean, that was the ideal to strive for. The thing was to be warm and human, but not offensively so.

  This vow being as strong as it was, I had occasion to wonder again, as we so often do in our passage through life, why a firm resolve is so long in taking hold. I tried to put this into Shakespearean claptrap:

  As one who, amply though he slept, upon arising

  Stagger’th worse than had he not lain down,

  Till the refreshment he hath ta’en hath ta’en effect,

  So this revival to the spirit delayeth oft

  To yield her dividend until the mind

  Its fullest consequence doth ’sorb.

  My good intentions were in any case abruptly routed by the poor example set by Inskip himself.

  I encountered him crossing the campus not five minutes after I had left Smadbeck’s office, or nearly did, I should say. Because when he saw me approach he stopped short some twenty feet away, turned pale, and fled in another direction. I shook my head. If he so shrank from human contact of any intensity as to be rendered paralyzed by the sight of an underling who had embarrassed him, then what in heaven’s name was he doing as head of a department? What was he doing as head of an English department in any case, since he had dropped Matthew Arnold and to all intents and appearances become a Proust nut? He was lecturing and writing articles on the man for a fare-thee-well. I wanted to turn him around by the collar and, pinning him to the wall with a knee in his groin, say, “Don’t you realize the technical fallacy running through Proust? A narrator describing in infinite detail scenes at which he could not possibly have been present?”

  That afternoon I spoke with my mother on the phone about something, and was seized with the familiar affectionate desire to say something strictly from hunger. She spoke of a man we both knew, a local parvenu, who had now built a thirty-room house on the outskirts of town. I said, “What good does it do you? You can only sleep in one bed, eat three meals a day, bathe in one tub …” The need to talk crud arose from a feeling that I was probably a snob about my parents, especially my stupid and ignorant mother; a guilt in part appeased by sinking to her level on occasion and saying things that “pleased her,” or would have pleased her if she could have heard them; which were automatically things that would have galled or sickened the Harvard Group—hostilities on whom were now reopened with a bang.

  I got Inskip on the phone after dinner and whispered with a handkerchief over the mouthpiece, “Fra Angelico always knelt when painting the sky,” and then to Pilbeam, “Heath-cliff, fill my arms with heather!” Swept along on the tide of romanticism in which I was now irresistibly caught, I peppered their shins with buckshot once again when the factors conducive to this measure in the first instance were once more combined. I was alone in my apartment, feeling sentimental, as dusk deepened along the old quad and the chapel bells boomed out a vesper anthem calling the faithful to tea. I got the air rifle out of the closet where I had hidden it and knelt at the window with the lights out, to await the appearance of the Harvard Group. At last with their usual punctuality they came sauntering three abreast along the walk, with that superior air so in need of chastening.

  I thrust the barrel of the BB gun cautiously out between the sill and the window sash, raised an inch or two. Emotion not important, eh? Well, we’ll see about that. We’ll just defrost this tight little, right little group and see what we’ve got here, shall we? Pffwang. The first one catches Inskip, who executes a fine caper indeed. Pffwang. That one must have ricocheted off Pilbeam’s shoe and pinked our Fangle in the shin, for they both join the jig. Under the covering thunder of the bells the sniping continues. All dancing nicely now. Hopping mad and glancing about in all directions are we? That’s better. Little more human, don’t you know. That’s the stuff. Coming along fine there, soon we’ll be real people. Come a long way from the position that
feeling is nothing, haven’t we? Need lots of work yet though. Plenty of heat there but no warmth. The whole trouble. Why a chap has to do this. Show you. Not ordained of God or any such nut notion, just know it’s our duty to crack that infernal poise and let in a little spritz. For our own best to throw a fit now and again. Enriches us.

  I did not turn up for tea myself this time or await developments, setting out immediately for a walk instead. There was an early, full moon. That evening Fangle was rung up and anonymously treated to several phonograph measures of a composer he had publicly termed saccharine, Delius. Long a favorite of mine. Through the heartrending choral and orchestral strains of Sea Drift could be discerned Fangle’s own more piercing cry at the other end, “Waltz! Damn it, Waltz, we know very well it’s you who are—all this damned—” I clapped the phone into its cradle (a mistake) and stood a moment frozen in that position. Had I heard right? Or was my imagination playing tricks on me? It had been hard to be sure through the bittersweet crescendo into which the music was now steadily mounting.

  My abandonment to the mood of the Delius work, based on Whitman’s despairing poem about irremediable loss, was unfortunately apt in the present circumstance, having domestic relevance. All, all too much so.

  Marion had gone off to spend the weekend with her parents after a quarrel about this latest contest She had not taken it at all well. One’s wife is not Smadbeck, of course—just as she is no longer one’s sweetheart, alas. That is the difficulty of marriage. We fall in love with a personality, but we must live with a character. That is all too often like living within walls from which paper and even plaster have been stripped, leaving the pipes and wiring exposed, along with glimpses of some ugly lath-work. There was no reason for my wife to show the degree of tolerance and forbearance in this case that she had in the first, when we were still single. Frailties that may lend a suitor charm will be found unacceptable in a husband. Still, even allowing for those realities of the human relation, I thought the disapproval with which she greeted my latest epistolary triumph a little extreme. The rigidity of principle that I have tried to show as always more than half commingled with her girlish humanitarianism, her “youthful idealism,” had rapidly taken over in the business of daily life. I might almost say that the honeymoon being “over” took, in our case, this form. I saw gradually crystallize in Marion a kind of integrity, severity even, that reminded me more than a little of the Three Little Prigs. I must grow up. I must develop more sense of responsibility—this was openly the theme of the dressing down I received at home promptly after having found a far more understanding attitude on the official carpet. I could not help thinking that Smadbeck would have handled this whole situation differently. But then one is not married to Smadbeck, as I say.

  “You’re not the girl I married.”

  “Well, you’re the boy I did, and that’s the trouble. Won’t anything? Make you? Mature?”

  Seated on the studio couch, her head back against the wall and a drink in her hand, she watched me pace the living room. “You’ve got the emotional development of a five-year-old, you know.”

  I completed a lap about the room, circling toward a window. I stood looking out of it. I said at last: “A five-year-old what?”

  And now I am alone, slumped on the couch reading the lines of the Whitman poem reproduced on the back of the envelope in which the Thomas Beecham recording has come. The copy on the backs of record envelopes seems to me on the whole excellent. Much of my musical education is derived from it. Sea Drift is an unabashedly emotional dirge, slopping over the way such things ought to, get it over with and on with it, lay it on with the old trowel and maybe we’ll feel better after a bit. Two birds nest on the Paumanok seashore. One vanishes, and the carols pouring from the throat of the survivor become the symbol of eternal heartbreak. The lovelorn songster on the desolate bough sings for us all:

  O throat! O throbbing heart!

  And I sing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

  O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!

  In the air, in the woods, over fields,

  Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!

  But my mate no more, no more with me!

  We two together no more.

  I put on my coat and went downtown, crossing the bridge over the river, then the tracks, and headed for a bar near the Gospel tabernacle. At last I was beginning to understand how Hegel felt at the end of his life. “Only one man understood me,” he said, “and he didn’t understand me.”

  twenty

  BY THE TIME I was standing at the bar, my hand locked securely around a glass, detachment was well back in the ascendant again. I observed from my post of vantage one of those quarrels so frequently overheard in such places. The public ventilation of personal problems is almost a ritual with some people, feminine tears often as not its climax. So it was in this case. They were a young pair, obviously unmarried from the nature of the exchanges. The girl had rather a pale, wistful face, framed in long straight hair perhaps a shade too yellow.

  At last she exclaimed, “Oh, go on, get,” and he did, rising from the table where this had been enacted and snapping up his cigarettes with a truculent gesture, perhaps in compensation for being sent packing. He marched out, zipping his leather jacket up to his chin before disappearing into the light swirls of snow that had been falling since dusk.

  I remained at the bar, not watching the girl directly but taking her in out of the tail of my eye. She tidied herself with a will, then sat looking straight ahead with her chin tilted, as though determined to regard herself as well rid of him. When she had finished her beer and consulted the check preparatory to settling the account her banished hero had left behind, she began to poke about in her bag, apparently fruitlessly, and with fresh accesses of anger.

  I sauntered over and asked whether I might be of service.

  “My mother told me never to talk to strange men,” she said without raising her eyes from the task of prospecting in her purse.

  “What’s strange about me? I should think familiar would rather be the term to describe me,” I said, laughing sociably. “You knew him well enough and all the good it did you,” I added with a jerk of my head in the direction her youth had gone. “May I sit down?”

  “Punk. If I never see him again it’ll be too soon. I’ve been going with him for six months and all we did was fight. Some people do it for a lifetime. How can they and still want to be together?”

  “Love is not love that alters when it altercation finds,” I said, drawing a chair out and sitting down.

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you have a drink with me? It’s all I’ll ask in return for cleaning up your debts. So you see, some of us are not as unscrupulous as others.”

  “I can see that. One thing. You married?”

  “I’m not a loyal husband, my dear, so much as a cad manqué.”

  “Well, as long as you’re not married it’s O.K. You’re kind of cute at that, with that silly grin.”

  She scrutinized me thoughtfully, feature by feature, as though totting up a column of figures. I surveyed her in the same manner, although not to arrive at an estimate of her trustworthiness. Someone, I think one of those Frenchmen who have written on the arts of love, has said that women take in a man’s face en bloc, that is as a whole, while a man savors a woman’s individual features—a sensuous mouth, suggestive eyes, etc. It’s perhaps another of those plausible aphorisms that sound valid without much basis in actual fact. I did in this instance, however, live up to its masculine half. The girl’s moist, pulpy lips were parted, showing a row of pretty white teeth flecked with lipstick. Various conflicting schools of makeup were represented cosmetically in her face. There was the white mask of the skin itself, the mouth altogether too bright for it, and the livid blue eye liner which was unsuited to both—or so it seemed to me. The effect was agreeably touching rather than not; perhaps a little childish. There was also something childlike in the way she rose halfway out of her chair, af
ter declining my offer of another beer, and pointed to a liqueur among those racked on the back bar, identifying what she wanted by the shape of the bottle. It was the tall conical bottle in which the Italian cordial Galliano comes. I told the bartender to bring us two.

  Corners could be cut by declaring straight out that I “picked her up,” not a very edifying phrase. In this case not strictly true either. At least the girl, whose name was Marjorie Wilkins, went to some lengths to make her favors appear not obtainable without some effort and even struggle on the part of the applicant—though freely given when that test had been surmounted. Not that ceremonial resistance was the only obstacle to an evening’s incidental triumph. About twenty-one or twenty-two, she lived with her parents, and though we had the dark cottage parlor on Finch Street to ourselves, there was always the uneasy specter of elders asleep in quarters overhead, if not that of a father appearing night-gowned on the stairway, in keeping with the stereotypes of the cartoon strip, to inquire if “that young man is ever going home.” But the next night, Saturday, they were in Chicago for a lodge dinner, and we had the house to ourselves for a good three hours. She led me by the hand toward her bedroom.

  “You’re quite a rascal,” she said, when we were chatting together once again, cigarettes in hand, against propped up pillows.

  “If you’re going to fall into a category it might as well be head first.”

  “And so smooth.” She laughed, running a palm over my arms and shoulders. “Like your skin. Which is probably hard to get under. Never like anybody I’ve known before.” It was apparent that she had now reverted to her original meaning. “Not just educated. Lots of fellows who’ve been through college come out not knowing anything, and some know it all. Which is just as bad. You’re in between. But you play it all so cool. Nothing does get under your skin, does it? Does it?” she inquired, peering at me in the dark. “What have you got to say for yourself?”