by Carson, Tom
This disconcerted me. “Were you trying to talk to your … Tom?” I asked, feeling dubious that such could be the case.
The scorn in Daisy’s laugh was as dazzling as if I had seen it, like a sudden shower of gold coins tossed from somewhere high. “Whatever for?” she demanded, pushing her hair back off her pale brow. “So he could tell me about the cheap little doxy he’s found in the afterlife, and the lovely, squalid orgies that the two of them are having in Hades?” She saw my lips trying to remember the name of the bootlegger people said had been her lover—unaided, for my brain had already given up the job—and shook her head. “No—not him, either. We had run out of things to say to each other before he died; just sat in a room, frozen like wax statues, while things went on somewhere else and we heard chairs and such being dragged back and forth in the wings.”
“Then…”I didn’t want to trespass. But I rather thought that she had wanted me to see this.
“I’ve been trying to contact my mother.” Her voice had the matter-of-factness of true sorrow, an absence of vocal decoration that turned her words from the expression of a thing into the thing itself. “You see, she died when I was quite young.”
Then I felt that we were truly sisters. “I might as well try using this to contact my father,” I said, pushing the wheeled indicator over a few letters of the Ouija board.
Daisy, too, seemed to sense that this exchange sealed our intimacy; perhaps she had expected it would. “Come upstairs,” she said gaily, in a superficial change of mood that I understood was actually the old one’s apotheosis. “I want you to meet my secret lover.”
The fantastic disorder of her lavishly appointed bedroom made the downstairs a view of a church. On her bed was a monogrammed shirt, the initials not her husband’s, in which she’d apparently blown her nose more than a few times. Placing me on its unmade edge, she rummaged among vials and stone frogs on her vanity, knocking one or two over, and returned with an oblong velvet case. Sitting down next to me, she opened it; the two silver fmger-holes on either side of the syringe stared up at me like a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles on a man with a large glass nose. “Hello, lover,” Daisy’s voice murmured, her cheek touching mine.
“Mommy? Are you home?”
For a lunatic moment, I thought the syringe had spoken. But the voice belonged to Daisy’s daughter, whose small stocky body stood fidgeting in the doorway in an attitude whose combined confusion and determination reminded me of Lil Gagni. Beside me, Daisy had already clicked the case shut: “Ot-nay in ont-fray of the ild-chay,” she said lightly.
Casually chucking the case onto the bed, she stood up, hands to knees: “Hello, precious!” she cooed. “Hello, my sweet baby. How are oo? What’s the matter?”
“SooSoo crapped in my dollhouse.”
“Oh, sweetie! We can get you another dollhouse. You didn’t really like that crummy old one, anyhow.”
“My dolls did,” the child said. “And now there’s crap on them too.”
“Well, then they’ll like the new one even better, darling,” Daisy said. “We’ll make it safe. Now run along and go find the Swede, and tell her to fix you some dinner—isn’t it time for your dinner? Or have you had it already? Well, just tell her I said to give you whatever you like, even ice cream. Now go on, go on, quick! before the ice cream melts.”
Reluctantly, the child backed out of the doorway. Then we heard her traipsing off, her small footsteps thumping on the way downstairs, one-two, one-two, until both thumps sounded at once on the final step. She’d been playing hopscotch on the stairs, I realized. By then, Daisy had gone to the door and closed and locked it. Pressing her back against it as she looked at me, she laughed with mingled excitement and relief, as if we’d both been out swimming and had been briefly caught in an undertow before batting our way back to shore.
Taking her old seat on the bed next to me again, she picked up the case—but didn’t open it, which I found frustrating. “It was right after Tom’s death,” she explained. “I didn’t love him, not anymore. But it was all just so much to have happen, in such a short time, that I think I was fairly hysterical. So a doctor gave me morphine—for the pain.”
I understood what I had to say if I wanted to see the syringe again, which I did. Even so, I hesitated—but I wanted to say it, and it also sounded as if, as soon as I did say it, it would be the truth.
“I’m in a lot of pain too, Daisy,” I finally blurted.
“I thought you might be,” she said, in an oddly grateful tone.
Eyes closed, I lay back on the bed, listening to the tiny sounds of Daisy’s preparations. For a bad moment, I imagined I was back in Jersey City, and pressed the palms of both my hands against the sheet to prove to myself it was silk. Then I felt her sit down, next to my hipbone. She’d already knotted something around my arm. Now she picked the arm up by the wrist, and startled me by giving it a couple of sharp, two-fingered taps at the crook of the elbow. As I instinctively started to pull free, I heard an amused, friendly “H’m,” and then her voice telling me relax, it was all right. Something had just pricked my arm.
“Sail away,” Daisy murmured. “This is how we sail away.”
I did. First there was fog, which turned out to be ice. But it wasn’t ice; it was the color of the world. Then Father was there. He was all around me, and soon I understood that I was finally inside him—in his stomach, behind his pocket watch, which I could hear ticking. This masculine womb, for so I sleepily identified it, was the one in whose walls I had always belonged: not Mother’s, where I had only been a passenger. Here I could live.
The ticking of the watch had begun to go in turns, to the right at first, then to the left, then to the right again. I realized that Father was a bank, and I was his money. I was glad to be his and glad to be money, for I felt loved and knew it wouldn’t be fleeting, as banks last forever. Hairily nude, an Irish woman squatted in a corner, like a dog doing its business. Don’t exist, I ordered, and she vanished. But seeing her had made me naked too, although less hairy, and my being aware that this was the case, rather than the fact of it, was what had put me in the wrong. Now I’d be cast out of Father’s womb, his bank. I would be marooned with Thurston, who did his best but had no stomach I could live in.
Since there was water all around us and no one else in sight, I tried to get in it anyway. But his was too small for me. It did have windows, though, through which morning sunlight poured. Daisy had opened the bedroom curtains before she went downstairs.
Gin having been my main guide to this sort of experience, I expected the hangover to be dreadful. But when I stood up, my brain stayed put where it belonged, and the rest of me felt as if it was where it belonged. That made me so happy that I didn’t even bother to feel relieved first, and I started humming the first song that popped into my head. “ ‘Give me your answer, do,’ ” I hummed. “ ‘I’m half crazy, all for…’ ” Then I decided I couldn’t really remember how the rest of it went.
Feeling ravenous, I found my way to the kitchen, which turned out to be sparkling clean. At the table, Daisy was already launched on her share of an enormous breakfast prepared by the Swedish nanny, who eyed me as if she had made up her mind not to comment on anything whatsoever until she found the right point of comparison to measure it by. Thus far, she had plainly found none such for a single incident since she came off the boat.
Waiting until her back was turned, Daisy put down her fork to squeeze my hand. “It’s fun to share a lover, isn’t it? If it were a man, we’d have to be jealous of each other,” she whispered in a delicious rush.
Having finished the western one first, I was wolfing down my east egg when I suddenly sat bolt upright. “Oh my God!” I said, almost clapping a hand to my forehead before I remembered that there was a knife in it. My hand, I mean. “Bruno!”
“Has been fed,” the Swede grunted. “Is on porch.” But then, unexpectedly, she smiled, as if Bruno was someone she had known a very long time; though I was sure she’d never c
lapped eyes on him until now. I suppose he was something, or rather someone, that she did have a point of comparison for.
“Is looking at horses,” she said.
Bruno gave notice two days later. “I haff been offered good job as auto mechanic,” he told me in our brownstone’s gloomy entrance hall, looking at his boots. “Here is the letter from Mr. Egan of Egan’s Garage, Rochester, Minnesota. He is owner. I must of my future think, Miss.”
“But Bruno,” I gasped, “you’ll get your clothes all dirty—and they won’t be as nice, anyhow,” I added, having just realized that of course he wouldn’t be taking his chauffeur’s uniform with him.
“Will still be working with autos,” he said stolidly. “For me, Miss, it was always the cars: never the people, although I would appreciate if you remembered me to Frau Buchanan. Will two weeks be adequate?”
“Right now will be adequate,” I told him, kicking the telephone table in frustration. He saluted and left, and neither Daisy nor I ever saw or heard of him again.
It was at her urging that, instead of hiring a new chauffeur or finding out if I could get Cheng back from China, I decided to learn to drive—although Daisy, who knew how to, always refused to take the wheel, and never did say why. Soon, feeling more thrilled about getting to scoot into the front seat than any other part of it, I was piloting the Duesenberg everywhere, out to Long Island and back and down to Greenwich Village, where we actually spent most of our time. Sometimes, as we drove around, Daisy would reach over, or forward from the back seat if she had decided to scramble in there, and clap Bruno’s old chauffeur’s cap on my head, tugging it this way and that as she giggled and I yelled at her to at least put it at an angle that would let me see out from under it. I think that there’s a fading snapshot of her—or us, I suppose—doing that, in a trunk or a hatbox somewhere; but I don’t know if she kept it or I did.
The reason that we went to the Village so often wasn’t only that it was where Daisy got her—our, rather—morphine. Since her husband’s death, she had also made herself familiar with and to a whole slew of bohemian writers, painters and simple eccentrics in that quarter, whose cramped gallery openings she went to, whose gouged-looking canvases she bought (we used to stack them in the Duesenberg’s back seat, struggling like a couple of undersized stevedores), and whose fugitive little magazines she helped fund. The eccentrics, she just bought dinners for.
Her favorites in all those categories used to congregate in a restaurant on Carmine Street called Le Perroquet de Paris—in those days, at least; I believe it’s changed its name since, perhaps more than once. There we’d hold court, with Daisy excitedly rattling on about Max Ernst and his imitators or James Joyce and his to our gang of artists in the vocabulary that she’d already acquired from them, while at my end of the table I prattled on as best I could in imitation Daisy, for she was trying to educate me in the avant-garde. But the bohemians who wound up down near me instead of up by her never seemed to mind much, if only because my monologues, however faltering, left their mouths free to wolf down food in as much quantity as they could. Our bill was always astronomical, but then we both had bank accounts the size of Jupiter, and it was nice to have so many interesting moons.
I always waited in the Duesenberg while she went to get our morphine stock. I never saw the man who sold it to us, if it was a man, or even knew the exact address she went to, since it was always dark. Then she’d come back, bright-eyed and smiling, and we’d set off.
Even though we’d feel impatient and Gramercy Park was a lot closer than Long Island, we never went to my brownstone to inject. I couldn’t get past the thought that if I ever showed up there with Daisy, silver hypo, powder and Bunsen burner in tow, the smell of cigar smoke would be back at full force in the entrance hall, and it would be sulphuric. So I would drive us out to East Egg, while the wind washed our hair and Daisy sometimes sang her favorite song—the one whose chorus started with her name repeated, and in which I never quite dared join her even when she’d pretend to pout about that and stick out her tongue at me. So I’d just hum along, not forming the words.
Leaving the Duesenberg parked for the roaming horses to sniff at, we’d go upstairs, where Daisy would leave me alone in the bedroom while she looked in on her daughter to make sure she was asleep. When she came back and locked the door, we’d usually make a joke of having a little tiff about who got to go first. Of course, we knew it didn’t really matter, since we would both sail away soon enough.
By now, I was adept enough to do for her with the syringe, just as she still did for me. But you must understand, there was nothing sordid about it. Daisy and I never stopped bathing, or dressing well, or having other interests and amusements. At the wheel of the Duesenberg, I never once nodded out. It wasn’t like it is nowadays, God knows, when any Negro with the price of a fix can stagger about Harlem with a spike hanging out of his arm, recently widowed housewives in bathrobes stuff half a medicine cabinet up their rumps in broad daylight, heedless of being observed in the act by their sons, and any adolescent with a case of melancholia—some sixteen-year-old Jackie-boy or girlegan—can inhale every last vapor from a tube of airplane glue before collapsing to dream of who knows what, levitating out of Arlington, Virginia, to invented Minnesotas, South Pacifics, Manhattans or anywhere his television-addled brain may wander.
This world has long since grown so vile that as far as I’m concerned he can do anything he likes. But in the Twenties that my own age shared with the century’s, civilization still persisted, the great unwashed hadn’t yet gotten their grimy hands on our pleasures, and everything was more elegant: the cars, the clothes, the conversation, the music, the narcotics, the—well, everything, absolutely everything.
I’m not sure how long our lovely life went on that lovely, lovely way. Certainly for months, but which and how many elude me. It was long enough for me to grow more confident down at my end of the table in Le Perroquet de Paris, and once even take issue with a claim that Daisy had made about Picasso up at hers (“Now, dearest—we don’t really know yet if his Blue Period is over, do we? It may just be in abeyance/’ I called out, amid slurps of neighborly spaghetti). But on the night I’m about to describe, Daisy surprised me by waving a braceleted toodle-oo to the crowd at our usual table and leading me to a more secluded booth in back that was lit by a single candle.
Her smile as tender as the night, she produced a flat, elegantly wrapped package from her bag and pushed it across to me. “Well, it’s a present, darling—not a bomb,” she said brightly, to my mystified look. “Happy Whatever-Today-Is.”
Even as I opened it, I knew what it must be. Inside an oblong velvet case was a syringe exactly like Daisy’s, except that, while the metal parts of hers—or, as I thought of it, ours—were silver, mine was done in gold. As I mutely gazed down at it, she made a play of holding up her napkin like a curtain to hide the case’s contents from anyone else’s eyes, although no one was nearby.
“Mind taken a powder?” she asked finally, which was one of our favorite little jokes.
“No,” I said. “It’s just—I’ve just never seen such a beautiful hypo before,” having indeed only seen one other in my life up to now and fancying gold rather better than silver. Then a new thought appeared in its glints, and I jerked my head up to stare at her. “Daisy!” I exclaimed, with what I’m sure was some alarm. “Is this goodbye?”
She laughed. “No, darling. It’s ‘hello.’ From now on, you can do for me with mine—and I can do for you with yours. It’s engraved, by the way; there, just past the last calibration mark.” Her finger tapped it.
The engraving was tiny, and difficult to read by candlelight, especially as it went all the way around the hypo and I had to keep turning it to get to the next letters. Give me your answer do, it said. I felt somewhat at a loss. “Thank you,” I finally said.
At the same time, however, I was as madly eager to try it out as she was, so we wasted no time paying the bill for the other table—we hadn’t had a
bite ourselves—and dashing for the Duesenberg as our bohemians shouted their gratitude with mouths full of food. As I got behind the wheel and Daisy slipped into the front seat from the other side, I felt that my previous response had been awfully inadequate.
“Daisy,” I said, turning to her, “I really meant it. Thank-” Before I could finish, her mouth was on mine, as it had been once or twice before when our pecks on the cheek hadn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye. But then I felt her tongue start to delve between my lips.
I have no real idea how I got back to Gramercy Park. I may have found a taxi, although it seems to me I walked. Daisy didn’t call after me or try to follow, either on foot or in the car.
The next morning, I was awakened by the sound of a horn in the street outside my window. When I looked down, there was the Duesenberg, and Daisy’s Swede was climbing out of the driver’s seat. Looking up, she saw that I had seen her; I heard a faint tinkle as she tossed the key onto the brownstone’s stoop. Without a word, or any gesture except a heave of her broad shoulders implying that the trials of Job had been puny by comparison, she set off stoutly down the sidewalk, and was almost instantly out of sight beyond the nearest tree.
Although I did manage to creep out to retrieve the keys from the top step, that was the last I saw of the world beyond my room for four days. Of course, while I was walking home in the taxi, I had sworn to myself that I would never see Daisy again, and at first I told myself that the emotional strain and upset of this decision was the reason I could neither sleep nor picture myself going down the stairs for any reason until I died.
I told myself I’d surely start to mend soon. But aside from the relative reprieves of being able to pitch a shoe at the door and holler “Go Vay!” every time Lii Gagni brought me a tray of food identical to the one she always brought for Mother—and even after, as a last resort, she tried one different from the tray she always brought for Mother—my condition grew worse rather than better. Once I started to hear mice scratching in the wall behind my bed’s headboard—and soon, impossibly, in the headboard itself, leaving me in little doubt that my skull would be next—I finally had to face what the real problem was. Pulling on some clothes, and slinking out my bedroom door past the twelve shoes piled there, I stumbled down the stairs and got into the Duesenberg.