“Dung!”
. . . that he was now sticking in Livia.
Candy suddenly felt very tired; and beyond the fatigue was an aching uneasiness which wasn’t due solely to her resentment at seeing Livia occupy her place on the tilting-table. . . . I feel as if something were coming to an end, she thought. My childhood perhaps. . . .
“Tch’ou!” Krankeit said, and sat back.
In a minute though, he was forward again with another pin. Back and forth he went, like someone giving artificial respiration very slowly; and the pins grew into clusters like two little bouquets, one on each of Livia’s handsome tushy. . . .
“Moung!”
How defenseless Aunt Livia looked! . . . Strapped to the table, naked and unconscious . . . and a few hours ago it had been her. Of course Krankeit was a doctor, Candy reflected, but he was also a man! And Livia was beautiful. It seemed so unfair somehow, and Candy had a momentary impulse to take off her own things and rush into the amphitheater.
“Ping!”
Oh I just wish that it would stop happening! she thought, cross and weary. I just wish I were someplace else. . . .
“Meeow!” (There was a note of tense excitement in Krankeit’s voice now which grew stronger with each pin.)
. . . someplace far from Racine. . . . I’m tired of that darn old college too.
“Fu!” Krankeit cried. “Feng! Jao!” (putting in three pins in quick succession).
“I don’t care,” Candy said to herself, “I don’t want to see Aunt Livia anymore . . . or Dr. Krankeit either.”
“Wowee!”
One of Krankeit’s hands, Candy noticed, was briskly engaged in his lap. Why—why he’s abusing himself, she thought, her eyebrows shooting up.
At that precise moment, she thought of New York City, and decided to go there . . .
“Wu Shih! Wu Shih!” Krankeit yelled.
. . . someplace where she knew no one, and where no one knew her . . .
“POW! FANG DANG POW!” Krankeit screamed triumphantly, dropping forward from his chair, to lie utterly spent, face down and apparently unconscious, on the floor of the great amphitheater.
. . . where she could lose the old Candy in the nameless city streets, she thought, where she could finally . . . be herself.
10
THERE WAS ONLY one tree on Grove Street. This was the sort of thing Candy was quick to notice, and to love. “Look,” she would say softly, squeezing someone’s hand. “Isn’t it too much! I could just hug myself everytime I pass it!”
And that was where she met the hunchback.
It was late one airless summer day, when the sky over Greenwich Village was the color of lead. It had just begun to rain, and Candy was standing back in a shallow doorway, waiting for her bus. Dreamily humming a little Elizabethan tune, feeling fresh and quietly joyful in her new mandarin rain-cloak, hugging it to her—she saw him. He was out in the midst of the downpour, leaning against the tree, staring into the window display of the men’s shop on the corner. He was standing very still, though from time to time there seemed to be a slight movement of his back, as if he might be consciously pressing his hump against the tree.
Candy’s humming softened as she watched him, and her heart beat a little faster. Oh, the fullness of it! she thought, the terrible, beautiful fullness of life! And a great mass of feeling rose in her throat at the pity she felt for her father so shut away from it all, never to know life, never even to suspect what it was all about. She put her arms around her delightful body and hugged herself, so glad at being alive, really alive, and her eyes brimmed with shimmering gratitude.
Just then two boys passed the corner, dark coats turned up, heads half hidden out of the rain. One of them noticed the hunchback and gave a derisive snort:
“Wha’cha doin’, Mac—gittin’ yer nuts off?”
He kept nudging his companion, who wouldn’t even bother to look.
“The guy’s gittin’ his nuts off fer chrissake!” he shouted again as they walked on.
The hunchback gazed after them oddly.
“Rubatubdub!” he said. “Rubadubtub!”
Candy hadn’t heard either one of them distinctly, but there was no mistaking the tone of contempt, the obvious effort to hurt and humiliate. “The ignorant fools!” she said half aloud, and gave a little stamp of impatience. At that moment the bus rounded the corner beyond; she frowned as she watched it approach, but just before it reached her, she took a deep breath and walked away from the stop, then casually over to where the hunchback was standing.
“Hi!” she said, giving him a wonderfully warm smile and tossing back the hood of her cloak to feel the fresh rain on her face. . . . Wasn’t it just too much, she thought joyfully, standing here in the rain, in Greenwich Village, talking to a hunchback—when she should have been at her job ten minutes ago! . . . She considered the explanation she would have to give, the attempt to make them understand, and she was so happy and proud of herself she could have wept.
“That’s my tree, you know,” she said instead, smiling like a mischievous child, then laughing gaily at her own foolishness. “I pretend that it is,” she admitted, almost shyly. “The only tree on Grove Street! Oh, I do love it so!” She leaned forward and touched it gently, half closing her eyes, and then she gave the hunchback another tender smile.
The shop on this corner of Grove was a man’s underwear shop, and the hunchback’s eyes devoured another crotch or two before he looked up. He was also smiling. He supposed she was a policewoman. “Rubatubdub!” he said, agitating his hump vigorously against the tree. Getting run in was part of his kick.
“Three men in a tub!” cried Candy, laughing in marvel at their immediate rapport. How simple! she thought. How wonderfully, beautifully simple the important things are! And how it had so completely escaped her father! She would have given twenty years of her life to have shared the richness of this moment with her father—he who had said that poems were “impractical”! The poor darling dummy! Why only a poem could capture it! Only a poem could trap the elusiveness, the light-like subtlety, the vapor-edge of a really big thing, and lead it, coax it past . . . a poem, or music perhaps . . . yes, of course, music. And she began to hum softly, swaying her body a little, her fingers distractedly caressing the tree. She felt very relaxed with the hunchback.
And he was still smiling too—but that first gray glimmer of hope had died from his eyes, and they narrowed a bit now as he decided, quite simply, that she was a nut.
“Hungry,” he said, pointing to his mouth, “hungry.”
“Oh!” cried Candy, suddenly remembering, and she reached into the pocket of her cloak and took out a small paper bag. It was a bag of bread crumbs; she carried it often for pigeons in Washington Square. “I have this,” she said, her wide eyes beautifully blue and ingenuous. She helped herself first, to show that it wasn’t mere charity, but rather a human experience, simple, warm, and shared.
There was something disconcerting though in the way this hunchback sniggered, rolling his eyes, and squirmed against the tree, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand; but, after a moment, he took some of the crumbs too.
“Rubatubdub!” he said.
Candy laughed. She heard a wisdom and complex symbology in the hunchback’s simple phrases. It was as though she were behind the scenes of something like the Dadaist movement, even creatively a part of it. This was the way things happened, she thought, the really big things, things that ten years later change the course of history, just this way, on the street corners of the Village; and here she was, a part of it. How incredibly ironic that her father would have thought she was “wasting her time”! The notion made her throat tighten and her heart rise up in sorrow for him.
“You got quarter, lady?” asked the hunchback then, nodding his head in anticipation. He held out his hand, but Candy was already shaking her curls defensively and fumbling in her purse.
“No, I don’t think I have a cent, darn it! Here’s an Athenean florin,” sh
e said, holding up a lump of silver, then dropping it back into the purse, “550 B.C. . . . that won’t do us any good, will it? Not unless we’re Sappho and Pythagoras and don’t know it!” And she looked up, closing her purse and shaking her head, happily, as though not having any money herself would actually make them closer.
“Are you Pythagoras?” she asked gaily.
“You get your rubadub, don’t you lady?” muttered the hunchback as he started shuffling away. “Fuckashitpiss! Fuckashitpiss! Rubadub, rubadub!”
This struck Candy with such anxiety that for a moment she was speechless. She could not bear the idea of his going away angry, and also in the back of her mind was the pride she would feel if, in a few days, she could be walking down the street with Ted and Harold, or with one of the people from International House, and the hunchback would speak to her by name; they might even stop and chat a bit, and she would introduce him:
“Ted, this is my friend Derek,” or whatever; it could certainly be as important as Blind Battersea, the sightless beggar in Washington Park, being able to recognize Ted’s voice.
“Listen,” she cried, hurrying after him, “if you don’t mind potluck, we could have something at my place—it’s just past the corner here—I know there are some eggs. . . .”
When Candy had slipped out of her cloak and kicked off her shoes, she went into the bathroom. “Won’t be a minute,” she said, and very soon she reappeared, rubbing her hair with a towel, fluffing it out, her head back, eyes half closed for the moment as she stood there in the middle of the room.
“I don’t know which is best,” she said with a luxurious sigh, “the freshness of rain . . . or the warmth of fire.”
She had changed into a loose flannel shirt and a pair of tight-fitting faded bluejeans which were rolled up almost to the knee. She had another towel draped across her shoulder, and she laid this on the arm of the hunchback’s chair as she crossed the room.
“Take off some of your things if you want,” she said airily, “let them dry by the radiator,” and she sat down on the edge of the couch opposite him and rubbed her feet with the towel, doing this carefully and impersonally, as though they were pieces of priceless china which belonged to someone else, yet silhouetting the white curve of her bare legs against the black corduroy couch-cover, and exclaiming genially: “My feet are soaked! Aren’t yours?” She didn’t wait for an answer, nor seemed to expect one, only wanting to maintain a casual chatter to put the hunchback at ease; she took care not to look at him directly, as she stood up and crossed the room again, indicating with a gesture the magazine stand near his chair: “There’s a PR and Furioso there—if you feel like light reading. I’m afraid there’s not much else at the moment—I’ll just get us a drink.” And she disappeared then into the tiny kitchen.
The hunchback had been sniggering and squirming about in the chair, and now finally he picked up the towel and wiped his face, then blew his nose into it and spat several times.
“Rubatubtub!” he muttered.
Candy’s gay laugh rang from the kitchen.
“Wish we had something stronger,” she called out, “we could use it after that rain.” Then she came in with a large bottle of Chianti and two glasses already filled, and set these on the table. “Help yourself to more,” she said, taking a sip of hers. “Umm, good,” she said, and went back into the kitchen, “won’t be a minute . . . well, not more than five, anyway.” She had turned on the phono—some Gregorian chants—and hummed along with the music now as she busied herself, coming in and out, setting the table, and keeping up a spritely monologue the while.
The hunchback had a sip of the wine and spat it in the towel.
Through the open door of the kitchen, Candy could be seen moving about, and now she was bending over to put something into the oven. In the tight jeans, her round little buttocks looked so firm and ripe that any straight-thinking man would have rushed in at once to squeeze and bite them; but the hunchback’s mind was filled with freakish thoughts. From an emotional standpoint, he would rather have been in the men’s room down at Jack’s Bar on the Bowery, eating a piece of urine-soaked bread while thrusting his hump against someone from the Vice Squad. And yet, though he had decided that she was nutty (and because of this she was of no use to his ego), he was also vaguely aware that she was a mark; and, in an obscure, obstacle-strewn way, he was trying to think about this now: how to get the money. He wasn’t too good at it, however, for his sincerity of thought was not direct enough: he didn’t really feel he needed money, but rather that he should feel he needed it. It was perhaps the last vestige of normalcy in the hunchback’s values; it only cropped up now and then.
“Onion omelet,” Candy announced with a flourish as she entered, “hope you like tarragon and lots of garlic,” and she put it on the table. “Looks good, doesn’t it?” She felt she could say this last with a certain innocent candor, because her friends assured her she was a very good cook.
Aside from an occasional grunt and snort, the hunchback kept silent throughout the meal and during Candy’s lively commentary, while into his image-laden brain now and then shot the primal questions: “Where? No kill! How? Without kill! Where?”
This silence of his impressed Candy all the more, making her doubly anxious to win his approval. “Oh, but here I’m talking away a mile, and you can’t get in a single word!” She beamed, and nodded with a show of wisdom, “Or isn’t it really that there’s nothing to say—‘would it have been worth while after all, et cetera, et cetera.’ Yes, I know . . . oh, there’s the tea now. Tea! Good night, I’m still on Eliot—the darling old fuddy, don’t you love him? It’s coffee, of course. Espresso. I won’t be a minute. . . . Have some of the Camembert, not too bien fait, I’m afraid, but . . .” She rushed out to the kitchen, still holding her napkin, while the hunchback sat quietly, munching his bread. It was hardly the first time he had been involved in affairs of this sort.
When the darling girl returned, she suggested they move over to the couch to have their coffee. There she sat close beside him and leafed through a book of Blake’s reproductions.
“Aren’t they a groove,” she was saying, “they’re so funny! Most people don’t get it at all!” She looked up at the wall opposite, where another print was hanging, and said gleefully: “And don’t you just love that one? The details, I mean, did you ever look at it closely? Let me get it.”
The print was hanging by a wire placed high, and Candy had to reach. She couldn’t quite get it at first, and for a long moment she was standing there, lithe and lovely, stretching upward, standing on the tiptoes of one foot, the other out like a ballet-dancer’s. As she strained higher, she felt the sinews of her calf rounding firmly and the edge of her flannel shirt lifting gently above her waist and upward across her bare back, while the muscles of her darling little buttocks tightened and thrust out taut beneath the jeans. Oh, I shouldn’t! she thought, making another last effort to reach the print. What if he thinks I’m . . . well, it’s my fault, darn it!
As it happened, the hunchback was watching her and, with the glimpse of her bare waist, it occurred to him suddenly, as though the gray sky itself had fallen, that, as for the other girls who had trafficked with him, what they had wanted was to be ravenously desired—to be so overwhelmingly physically needed that, despite their every effort to the contrary for a real and spiritual rapport, their beauty so powerfully, undeniably asserted itself as to reduce the complex man to simple beast . . . who must be fed. By the time Candy had the print down and had reached the couch with it, the eyes of the hunchback were quite changed; they seemed to be streaked with red now, and they were very bright. The precious girl noticed it at once, and she was a little flustered as she sat down, speaking rapidly, pointing to the print: “Isn’t this too much? Look at this figure, here in the corner, most people don’t even . . .” She broke off for a moment to cough and blush terribly as the hunchback’s eyes devoured her, glistening. In an effort to regain composure, she touched her lovely curls a
nd gave a little toss of her head. ‘What can he be thinking?’ she asked herself. ‘Well, it’s my own fault, darn it!’ The small eyes of the hunchback blazed; he was thinking of money. “I love you!” he said then quickly, the phrase sounding odd indeed.
“Oh, darling, don’t say that!” said Candy, imploring, as though she had been quite prepared, yet keeping her eyes down on the book.
“I want very much!” he said, touching her arm at the elbow.
She shivered just imperceptibly and covered his hand with her own. “You mustn’t say that,” she said with softness and dignity.
“I want fuck you!” he said, putting his other hand on her pert left breast.
She clasped his hand, holding it firmly, as she turned to him, her eyes closed, a look of suffering on her face. “No, darling, please” she murmured and she was quite firm.
“I want fuck—suck you!” he said, squeezing the breast while she felt the sweet little nipple reaching out like a tiny mushroom.
She stood up abruptly, putting her hands to her face. “Don’t. Please don’t,” she said. She stood there a moment, then walked to the window. “Oh why must it be like this?” she beseeched the dark sky of the failing day. “Why? Why?” She turned and was about to repeat it, but the voice of the hunchback came first.
“Is because of this?” he demanded. “Because of this?” He was sitting there with a wretched expression on his face, and one arm raised and curled behind his head, pointing at his hump.
Candy came forward quickly, like a nurse in emergency. “No, you poor darling, of course it isn’t! No, no,” and the impetus of her flight carried her down beside him again and put him in her arms. “You silly darling!” She closed her eyes, leaning her face against his as she stroked his head. “I hadn’t even noticed,” she said.
“Why, then?” he wanted to know. “Why?”
Now that she had actually touched him, she seemed more at ease. “Why?” she sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. Girls are like that, never quite knowing what they want—or need. Oh, I don’t know, I want it to be perfect, I guess.”
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