I laughed as I prepared to obey her. How had she ever learned to say it that way? So impeccably firm and impersonal. But there obviously wasn’t any other way to say it, except, perhaps, between lovers, or parents and children. We will require a mucus specimen, please. But we said, Blow your nose. Harder. That’s better. The troubling, tyrannical, inconvenient flesh. The sacred flesh. I filled up the jar. The color seemed all right; there wasn’t any odor. But I was suddenly trembling, and cold with sweat. I might have been running for an hour. My body suddenly began to reassert its claims over me, plaintively proclaiming itself as exhausted, petulantly demanding that I do something. I had barely strength enough to wrap the towel around the bottle and place it on the lower shelf of the table. I just lay there. The basket of fruit was at my head, I wanted to know who had sent it, but it was too much trouble to lift my hand and look at the card. I began to realize that I was helpless—a big, grown, stinking man, and as helpless as a child. Perhaps, even more than most people, it is a state I cannot endure. It is terrible to depend on others, on another, for the execution of the simplest functions, terrible to see the book one wants at the other end of the room and be unable to get there. It causes one to begin to hate oneself. And, indeed, this vile, creepy, slimy, self-loathing came back as I lay there and realized that I had to go to the bathroom. I would have to use the bedpan; but I would never be able to sit up, unsupported. And I wanted to die—to drop my black carcass someplace and never be humiliated by it any more. I thought I had left this feeling far behind me, but here it was, now, as strong as ever—stronger; as I pictured the clean, apple-faced nurse supporting my back while I strained and sweated and my heavy stink filled the room. I put my hands to my woolly hair, that vile plantation, as though I would tear it from my skull. And I knew that I had felt this, in some way, all my life. But I had buried it; and made a point, certainly, of never being helpless. But if I had always felt this, then, certainly, I must have shown it, and shown it most, perhaps, when I was least aware of it. My body, after all—I told myself—was no more vile than others; my stink was not original, it had no greater resonance; the rats and the worms would find me as tasty as another. “Ah, Leo,” I said, “what a child you are.” This reflection did not mitigate my distress. The nurse came back. She picked up the bottle. There was no help for it. I said, “Nurse, I have to go to the bathroom.”
She said, “I can’t let you move. Wait just a moment.” Then she smiled a real smile. “I know it’s awful. But please don’t let it worry you. Please don’t.” She disappeared, then returned with the grim utensil. Her words hardly helped and yet I guess they helped a little. Anyway, we were still friends when it was over. I lay back. I wondered why humiliation seemed, after all, at bottom, to be my natural condition.
The doctor came in, the little nurse beside him. He was very cheerful, too, seeming to bring into the room with him the stinging air of the bay. His face was ruddy and he was immaculate, from his smooth, gleaming brown hair to his gleaming brown shoes. “You have decided,” he said, “to return to us. I thought you would, just as soon as you got a little rest. You know, I have never seen a man so tired as you. And that is very unwise.” He sat down and took my pulse. The nurse showed him my chart. He looked at it for awhile, looked at me. “Ah, yes,” he said. “How do you feel today? Any pain?” He watched me very carefully.
“No. I just feel as weak as a newborn kitten.”
“Naturally. You had quite a battle to fight. But we will get you on your legs again.” He took out his stethoscope and forced me to breathe this way and that way, he prodded me and tapped me and flipped me over once or twice, like a baby or a flapjack. He took my blood pressure. “We will be running some tests on you,” he said, “for a few days—blood, the liver—oh, a million sordid elements but I will not bore you with the details. At least not yet. This,” he said, preparing a needle, “may be a little unpleasant.”
When he was through, the nurse gathered up the needles and trays and towels and went out. The doctor pulled his chair closer to the bed. “Now,” he said, “listen. I do not know exactly all that I should know—I expect to discover more in a few days—perhaps everything.” He laughed. “Who knows? You have had a fairly serious heart attack. Not very serious—but fairly serious. It has been brought about by nervous exhaustion and overwork. Now, there is nothing wrong with your heart—yet—as, oddly enough, as far as I can tell now, there is nothing wrong with your liver. But you are thirty-nine years old, Proudhammer—you are not a boy. And you will not, from this time onward in your life, recover like a boy. If you make, as I think you say in show business, a change of pace, you will live a long time and I will be able to go and see you play many, many times more. I think you are a marvelous artist, by the way, and my wife and my daughter become speechless when your name is mentioned—so there is some selfishness in what I say. It would be a great pity to lose you. I mean that, that is true. But, you see, if you do not make a change of pace—drink less, smoke much less, and arrange your working schedule so that you have time to rest—and by rest I do not mean five minutes in the dressing room—then you will have another attack, and then another, and by then you will be seriously damaged, and then”—he grimaced—“it will be too late and one of your attacks will carry you away. And that would be too bad, a terrible waste, it is not necessary. You understand me?”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand you.”
“You do not need to push yourself so hard,” he said. “You have enough money. Oh! I know we never have enough money.” He laughed. Then he said, in a different tone, “But it is not really money with you, anyway. It is an impertinent question—but what is it? I simply would like to know. You have been extraordinarily successful for more than a decade—you see, I know, I did not hear of you yesterday. I should guess that the odds against you were fantastic. So—indulge me, if you please? I should like to know.”
I did not know how to answer. I had never put the question to myself—at least not in that way. I said, “I don’t know if I know. I’m an actor—I think I’m a pretty good actor”—I was listening to myself and I sounded very lame and defensive—“I’ve always tried not to repeat myself. I mean—I’ve always tried to do things I wasn’t sure I could do. If I knew I could do it, then there didn’t seem much point in doing it. And then you just do the same thing over and over again and pretty soon you’re not an actor, you’re just a kind of highly paid—mannequin.” I coughed. “Manipulated.” And then I said, surprised, rather, at the vehemence with which, in spite of myself, it came out, “And in my own case, after all, it’s been both easier and harder. When I say easier I guess I mean that I’m not at all—likely—so when I get on a stage, people notice me. But I’m what’s known as a hard type to cast—and a hard type to cast has got to be better, about thirty-seven thousand times better, than anybody else around—just to get on a stage. And then, when you start getting jobs—when they start casting you”—I subsided—“well, you’ve got a certain kind of advantage. But you can’t afford to lose it.”
“I see.” He smiled. “You are what a friend of mine would call—an obsessional type.” His face suggested, and I also felt, weakly, that there was more to it than anything I had said. But I did not know how to say more; I felt, inexplicably, on the brink of tears; and I decided that this was due to my weariness.
But I forced myself to smile, I forced myself to be together. “Is there anything wrong, doctor—with being an obsessional type?”
“Most artists,” he said discreetly, “are obsessional types. There is nothing to be done about that. I will leave you now and I will see you in the morning. But you must think about what I have said.”
“I promise that I will. Thank you. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Proudhammer.”
He went out. But he returned almost at once. “Your friend and coworker, Miss King, has been here every day and has called every night. She will be here this evening. But I have told her that she cannot stay with you
very long.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
“Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
Now, the room was beginning to fill with twilight. I discovered a lamp near my bed, and I turned it on. I looked at the basket of fruit and picked up the card. It was not really a card, but a telegram. It read, Stop jiving the people and get yourself back here. You know you can’t get sick. And it was signed, Love, Christopher. It was very moving, though in an oddly remote way—but everything seemed remote—for Christopher and his friends had no money. It must have demanded some ingenuity, from New York, to make certain that a basket of fruit would be in my hospital room in California. Not very long ago, such ingenuity on Christopher’s part would have filled me with joy—not now; I put the telegram, folded, on the table and wondered if I would ever feel anything again, for anyone. Black Christopher: because he was black in so many ways—black in color, black in pride, black in rage. No wonder I had a heart attack, I thought. And then I thought of what the doctor had said. Leo, Barbara had sometimes said, you also have the right to live. You have the right. You haven’t got to prove it.
I thought of the years I had first met Barbara, in the Village—the grimy, frightening, untidy years. I had not imagined that I could ever feel nostalgia for those years, or that I would ever, abruptly, bleakly, see in them, and in myself, a vanished, a blasphemed beauty, a beauty which I had never recognized and which I had, myself, destroyed. None of it had seemed beautiful then, myself least of all. There we were, filthier than gypsies, more abject than beggars, our mouths open obscenely for the worm, the morsel, the crumb, which the world never dropped—but the world dropped other things, we gagged and vomited, we feared that we were poisoned!—with our stolen books, our “borrowed” records, our frail pretensions, our ignorance, our stolen food. For a time, four or five of us—or, indeed, to tell the truth, whoever would—shared two floors in a falling-down tenement on the East Side. It was hidden, for decency’s sake, from the street; one entered it through a gate, finding oneself in a courtyard where two buildings leaned crazily toward each other; a third building, at the end of the courtyard, seemed leaning upon these two—three drunken, lunatic friends, all about to go down together. We called this place Paradise Alley—odd it is, to reflect now that in some way we loved it. Nothing locked, we soon gave up any such attempt, and formed the habit of climbing in and out of each other’s windows, walking through each other’s doors. Nothing belonged to anybody, so that whatever there was (or whoever there was) could be found, and possibly collected, anywhere in the building. It was here that Barbara had become pregnant for the first time—by a hometown, childhood sweetheart, who had joined the Marines and come to visit her, emphatically to let her know what he thought of girls who ran away from respectable homes and lost their morals. She had had to have an abortion, I helped her raise the money—by waiting on tables, by hustling—and after that she became very sick and we became much closer. We went “shopping” at dawn, following a long and circuitous route. Bananas had been delivered outside the A&P. We put these in our shopping bag. (We took turns “shopping”: we couldn’t all get arrested at once.) We picked up the bread and milk and vegetables which had been delivered to the stores along Bleecker Street—sometimes we even got eggs. We were home before six, and ready for breakfast. Meat was our only problem, but we had a friend who worked in a big hot dog stand on 14th Street; to this day, I have no affection for hot dogs. We drank beer in the bars in the Village, shamelessly flattering the uptown strangers, who drank whiskey, who ordered whiskey for us, who might buy us a meal, who might, indeed—why not? it happened from time to time—buy us several; who might, in return for being allowed to lean at the candle of our ardor and our youth, in return for holding us (who desperately wanted to be held) between darkness and dawn on Saturday nights, see to it that we ate meat. What in the world had I been like in those years? But I remembered Barbara. For a time, we had both been artists’ models at the Art Students’ League on 57th Street. Barbara lasted much longer than I. She was rather more round-faced then, with very high color, and with very long, brown, curly hair, which she wore in bangs and pigtails. She had a marvelous laugh—she looked very much like what she was, a refugee schoolgirl from Kentucky. She had a very boyish figure, small breasts and not much of a behind—she was still in her teens—and wonderful long legs. She almost always wore pants, which got her in some trouble in some quarters, sometimes, but every once in a while she would put up her hair and put on lipstick and wear a dress. And it was astonishing what a difference this made. She became extraordinarily pretty, vulnerable, glowing. Then she looked like the rather proud daughter of proud Kentucky landowners. I was always delighted and secretly intimidated when she dressed, for I could not meet her on that ground at all. It made me wonder what she, really, in her secret heart, thought of me, what she thought of us all. The world in which we lived threatened, every hour, to close on the rest of us forever. We had no equipment with which to break out—and I, least of all. But she could walk out of it at any instant that she chose.
I remember going with Barbara to an uptown party one summer night. It turned out, in fact, to be my first theatrical party. I was not supposed to go. A friend of ours, Jerry, who also lived in Paradise Alley, was supposed to take her. But when the time came, he was nowhere to be found. I had been sitting in my—quarters, I suppose I must call them—for the last hour, reading, and listening to Barbara, in the room across the hall, humming, and slamming drawers. I heard her call up the steps:
“Jerry!”
She had a big voice for such a little girl, too. There was no answer. She called again. This time the voice of the old Russian lady sculptress who lived on the top floor answered:
“Barbara, he is not up here. There is no one up here but me.”
“Thanks, Sonia.” Then, “Damn!” She knocked on my door, simultaneously opening it, and leaned there, glowering at me. “Have you seen Jerry?” She was wearing a light blue dress, and high heels.
“I haven’t seen him all day. Where’re you going?”
“To a party. To an uptown party. Jerry was supposed to come with me.”
“Well—maybe he’s with Charlie.”
Loosely speaking, we operated in pairs. One became a pair by sharing the same quarters—in my case, a mattress on the floor, and a victrola—and the half that was out was technically supposed to remember that the half at home was certainly hungry. Which I was. But Charlie hadn’t been seen since the day before.
“I don’t think so. Jerry’s probably gone to see his mother. He can’t seem to stay away from her, although he keeps me up all night, every night, telling me how much he hates her.”
“We both seem to have been abandoned. But you’re in luck. You’re going to a party. Will they feed you?”
“There’ll be lots of food. Come with me.”
“I can’t come with you!”
“Why not? I’ve got enough money for a taxi, Leo, honest. And I can borrow some money up there. Really. Come on. You’re not doing anything down here. And you’d be doing me a favor.”
She mentioned the taxi because we had had terrible trouble, many times, trying to get through the streets of my hometown together, black and white. Nothing would ever induce us to take a subway again together, for example. But I admired Barbara for her unsentimental clarity. Lots of other girls I had known before her had been very sentimental indeed, and had almost got me killed.
“Just put on a clean shirt, and tie. And your dark jacket.”
“What about these pants?”
“They’re all right. They’re not torn, or anything. They just need to be pressed. Keep smiling, because you’ve got a wonderful smile, you know, and don’t stand too long in one place and nobody will notice anything. Now, hurry up, we’re supposed to be there right now.”
She sat down on my mattress, not that there was anyplace else she could have sat, and leafed through my book.
“Leo, why are you sudde
nly reading Swinburne?”
I said defensively, “Because I never read him before, that’s why.” I was very ashamed of my lack of education, and, in those days, I was reading everything I could get my hands on.
“Well. I think he’s pretty silly. Eliot’s the only great poet. Leo, your hair looks perfectly all right. Leave it alone and put on your shirt.”
“I was only brushing it. And I need a haircut.”
“Why, oh why,” crooned Barbara philosophically, “do we never like ourselves as we are? I love your hair, it goes with your face. But you probably wish you had silly stringy hair like mine.”
“Shut up.” I put on my shirt. “Who’s giving this party?”
“Well, one of the instructors at the League used to do set designs years ago, for the people who’re giving the party. Nothing big—summer theater, little things, you know—and, well, he knows I want to be an actress and he thought that they might give me some ideas about how to get started—especially where to study, that’s my problem. Oh. You see, his friends went on to become part of The Actors’ Means Workshop. So—it might be interesting.”
“For you. He doesn’t know I’m coming.”
“He knows a friend is coming. If they’re shocked, well, you can take it, and the hell with them. They’re so goddamn liberal, anyway, they make me want to puke. God, give me back my old Kentucky home, where a spade”—she began to laugh, and I laughed with her—“is called a spade!”
We walked down the stairs and crossed the quiet yard and walked out through our gate, into the streets. I always had to force myself to walk through the gate, especially if I was with Barbara. But, today, there were not many people in the streets—mainly the elderly, in windows, or on stoops. They seemed not to notice us. Avenue A was completely deserted, and we walked up to 14th Street before we found a cab. It was about seven in the evening, a marvelous summer evening. Barbara gave the driver the address. I leaned back, with my hand in hers.
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