Man Who Was Not With It

by Gold, Herbert

  She went.

  “But don’t try to use the perc, you’re too stupid,” he said, smiling to us and putting us in chairs. “Comfortable?”

  Still wrapped in his overcoat, Scardini sank heavily with a sigh into the softest cushions. “Just swell,” he said.

  And so we settled amid the dust rising from fancy auction-house furniture, genuine louie for sure. Another conference, another friendship. Was all business like this? I asked myself as Scardini spread his thighs and Nancy riptickled onward with little pleasing sounds and I breathed the factory soot from the flats, drifting against the windows, wriggling through the blinds and the drapes. It was hot with head-drawing furnace heat: granulations of bad coal inside, brown oily slush in the street outside, a game but exhausted sun. It had to pierce too many elements to reach us—smoke, clouds, exhaust fumes, smudged panes of glass, the drainage and secretion of a city and Nancy’s household. Even in the day-light I could see how Nancy, come nightfall, transformed this parlor for the performance. A false fireplace with plastic bricks, a turning electrical trick, red and sparkling, with a tinsel crackling made by gears—this was almost genuine fire and almost real sparks for almost virile men. A good living from that type John, Scardini had commented. If not greedy, he didn’t have to sell mainline sugar in addition.

  I knew what this sick dark room recalled to me—my father’s flat. And yet I had to pass through both of them before I would be free for Joy.

  “My son’s picture, died,” Nancy said, passing us the framed snapshot of a pink, rosy, curly child. “Maybe was the prettiest little baby boy in the world, I wouldn’t say yes and I wouldn’t say no. What do you think?”

  “A rotten shame,” Scardini said. “Taken off by the polio like that. A dirty rotten shame. And just when they got an injection for it now. They could have stopped it, couldn’t they, Nancy? But they were saving it for the rich kids, the doctors’ friends, those brats.”

  “You got that coffee yet?” Nancy trilled to the kitchen. “You let it boil over again and I’ll mop it up with your hair.”

  “Mind your company, I’m watching it,” his wife answered sleepily. I knew with a pang of regret the slow hill drawl and the drowsy hill face. She might have been a pretty girl three years ago, pretty in the hill way, calico and blushing at the fair, the kind that Grack used to love to pinch. Nancy’s dwelling brought back the fair, partly the smells of coffee and grease, partly the destroyed prettifications of it. Ever see an abandoned fairground, that one in Orlando, Fla., for instance? The dead gilt, the moldering wood sweating its paint, the rickets of pleasure sprawled out in rain and sun, washed clean, silted over, washed again. Nancy’s place of entertainment was like that, with more overboiled coffee than a carnie, less pop, but the smell of hotdogs, yes—and I could even imagine the banging of skillets to attract the trade. And the grease and fatty pork. And Scardini with the gristly, bloated face of the spice-blooded cooks.

  Repetitions! Even to the sad young woman, so recently pretty, watching the coffee in the kitchen. But I missed Pauline.

  “Haven’t had a good cup a coffee since the kid died,” Nancy explained. “Nothing I ever say helps, always, always boils over. Bought her a perc, no good. Nothing. She uses the pot anyway.”

  “Shame,” Scardini said. “And they still try to collect money from me for that polio racket. I threw one of them out of the hotel, bad for business to do it, too. I was thinking of my pal Nancy.”

  “But the wife was a sweet kid,” Nancy went on, “I can’t complain, always nice to me, do whatever I say. The least I can do is be nice to her right back.”

  Scardini agreed with shaggy throbbings of his cheeks.

  “Don’t you think we better get back to Grack?” I asked.

  Scardini closed his eyes. “Terrible, terrible, the polio.… Well, sure is nice to drop in on a friend like this, Nancy. Otherwise it’s hurry, hurry, hurry.” He folded his hands across his belt and put one inside his pants.

  “Come into the kitchen, she got another picture of the kid there. You too, Mr. Williams. Or maybe it’s in the bed-room. She takes it to bed with her.”

  We sat again, this time in the kitchen, because this had to be a social call which included Mrs. Nancy, all coffee and grits, dishes in the sink, windows more dim than her eyes.… And surely Mrs. Nancy had been pretty. The thin faded face and lanky limbs troubled me. She sprawled in a kitchen chair, watching the coffee, scratching herself and dozing and must once have been almost as sweet as Joy. She had fine pale hair, country sunlight burnt into it, and golden eyebrows over the perishing eyes.

  Scardini described his delicate organs which took neither whiskey nor coffee. He drank a great deal of soda. It spoke frequently. The two, Scardini and Nancy, managed to get me between them, at the long end of a chipped and enameled kitchen table, facing Nancy’s wife, who scratched and stretched and sighed. I had learned my patience from waiting out the marks. I waited. I counted the brown chitlings in the sink and the soap and the white bread from the A & P and the old slippers and the dust in the corners and the way the G and the D in blue on a Grand stove were loopingly joined by the artist. Mrs. Nancy took her coffee in an enormous white dimestore cup and gave me a smile with her new bridge. Scardini and Nancy gossiped without looking at me.

  “You like kids?” Mrs. Nancy said.

  “Sure do, Mrs. Nancy.”

  Nancy interrupted me. “Belle, that’s her name.”

  “Sure do,” I repeated.

  “You just come on then,” she said, “let me show you a picture.” Scardini and Nancy looked up together, grinning, and said with limp waves of hands, Go ahead, what diff, she’s nuts anyway. Maybe it helped her to show pictures. While studying and refilling our cups, she had prettied herself for the trip down the hall to her bedroom. Only natural. I knew that Nancy ran an advanced hookshop, so maybe his wife had learned from the advanced hookers.

  She showed me the picture and I sank deeper and deeper into a sprung armchair. Poor rosy kid, poor mama. She sat on the bed and cried and I tried not to look at her. She had a soft and pretty drawl despite the fading and wanness, the caught breath and the tears. I stared and stared at the tinted photograph of a fat little two-year-old, Remembrance Home Portraits, Call On Us, stamped on his blouse at the navel. The tinting, performed too rapidly, had run the pink of cheeks over into the chinablue of eyes.

  “Oh you can’t know, you’re only a boy yourself,” she said. “He was so cute and warm and mine. He was an accident. I didn’t have the right to him. All I had was Nancy, now all I have is Nancy. He suffered so! He died and they wouldn’t let me see him until after he was dead. Nancy cried too, but right away he started to fight with me because I wanted a little silver coffin for him. Oh I know coffins don’t help none, but I didn’t want the worms to get to him—”

  The worms come from inside, ma’m, I wanted to tell her, polite as can be. The only way to keep the worms down is to live them out.

  “Oh I don’t know anything now. I don’t remember anything, I don’t want anything. I don’t care. I only want him back. But you know, I got it figured out. I tried to talk with him in outer space, but I couldn’t get to him. I know why. His soul isn’t there. It’s here, here, in this room here. He’s waiting to come back. He will be born again. I feel it. I know it. Look at him, don’t he look back at you? Don’t you feel his eyes on yourn? He needs a young father, a strong young boy, not all that nastiness Nancy made me do before I could have a baby. Before he would give me. Look at him.…”

  She was moaning and rocking and the springs of the bed were creaking. I was stifling in that room. An echo of her rocking was taking me. I could hear the furnace laboring below. I tried not to look at Belle, I tried straining my neck every which way, away from her, to the picture, everywhere, but her chanting and moaning took me to it.

  And I dropped the picture. The glass cracked, splitting across the infant’s face.

  “Now you’ve got to!” she cried.

  And I ha
d to look, dizzy and the black coffee stinging in my mouth and Belle smiling, smiling for me to fumble with myself. She was on her knees and arms in the bed, pushing at her clothes, her bottom straining at panties, all satin and pink and creamy at the edges, and rocking and saying, “Baby baby baby.” I wanted to help her as best I could. I dreamed that I obliged: she was skinny and long and hanging, with small long breasts and hard red sore nipples that would hurt when I touched them. Asking me to hurt them, hurt them, please.

  One minute it would be?

  Less of my valuable time?

  Joy was obligations beyond dreams of obliging this misery. The fury of temptation, of course, had nothing to do with Joy. Maybe it had something to do with that Phyllis I had known, but maybe not much. I watched Belle’s shut-eyed face slowly compose with fatigue in the early evening light. She had not closed the door. She opened her eyes and smiled. “You’re not vexed with me?”

  “No.”

  The dreamy trusting smile did not change. “You don’t mind how I wanted—?”

  “I don’t mind,” I said, “why should I?”

  In the distant whirl of my ideas, it made no difference what she asked or answered. “I told Nancy I had to, but he couldn’t look. He said yes, he promised me. I told him Mr. Scardini couldn’t look either.” She reached to touch me in the chair where I slumped. “I see you,” she said. “I thought if you saw how I could love you, maybe you would believe … Nan doesn’t …”

  It was this I see you which awakened me to all the plans about me, and the cunning of Scardini and Nancy, and what was there in it for them? Pleasure? But they knew this about Belle. I jumped up, still sticky with the love’s slime with which they had intended to glue me down, and said, “Yes! yes!” to her plaint:

  “Ain’t you even going to kiss me goodbye, not even once?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “You won’t even do anything else for me after all Nan and Scardini and their little Belle wanted to do for you?”

  No, I wouldn’t. I never even said her name, Belle.

  “You ready to go?” Scardini called down the hall. “We been cutting up old times, friend Nancy here and me. You feeling better now, boy?”

  Stiff with fury, I waited at the door.

  “Coming, coming in just a sec,” Scardini said.

  Nancy accompanied him. “She says you cracked the picture. Pretty kid, wasn’t he? Now she likes it too much, I can’t make her happy a-tall noways, Bud. I need friends for helping me out.”

  Scardini smiled and pulled his sleeves.

  “I gave friend here the sugar for your other friend,” Nancy said. “Byebye, and come around any time.”

  Why didn’t I figure it all out in advance? Who knows when he is being put in purgatory or a wife made to suffer for him? How do you see these things when the moment is hot and sad and a creature once pretty, with golden hair, says, Look at me, I need?

  It is a duty not to oblige all the suffering in the world. That way lies madness, sainthood, and no wedding or fathering.

  “Wait a sec, wait up,” Scardini said, puffing. “I’m driving you, so wait. Don’t hurry. Donkeydust, eh? Ain’t that what all women are? All wives? You’re no holy joe yourself, but that Nancy’s wife is really a pip, ain’t it? Every woman alike. They don’t sell out, they buy in. You like it with her? You enjoy? She used to work for Nancy as a pro exhibit-it. All women the same. Who can ever tell what they like to do? Now take our Grack, all nervous, so nervous for his sugar, and that little Joy of yours, also nervous—who are we to judge?”

  Without time for the pleasure of hitting him, I jumped into a cab and said, “G. Washington Motel on Prospect, fast!”

  Thinking: No. No. No. Please Joy, please Grack, please God, no.

  31. A child is forever

  I COULDN’T see out my eyes. I could not see through them; I saw something in them. Cleveland was scarlet and dripping in haze.

  I rubbed my face and crouched behind the cabbie for the few minutes it took. “Paint it any color you like, so long as it’s red,”—Grack’s carnie motto. The storefronts of Cleveland were red. The December evening sky was red. My innards tasted red in my mouth. Monotonously all the long history of Grack echoed in my head, singsong, memorized, that metallic voice of the mind-made-up, the changeless spirit, determined on death before life: “I got me a daughter up there with the Kiskeedees, want to see her picture?” O Come all ye faithful, it was Christmastime for late shopping. Trees, tinsel, tinkle, snow in the oily gutters, muddied cars waiting, the city procession home after work. Prospect Avenue was longer going back! Grack had gotten humpbacked and meanlipped with knowing himself. He was ready for anything. He was ready for anything. He had arranged with Scardini, Scardini had arranged with Nancy, Nancy had arranged. And only Nancy’s wife meant anything, poor Belle, she meant it.

  I should have said Belle to her!

  What about Grack’s habit? I was Grack’s habit.

  And yet once he had been the man who saved my life, strong he had been in that world where the dodgem has funny accidents, jolting and wheezing and spitting electricity, where almost every night someone’s kidneys let go—that’s how funny it was. The tent got to smelling bad. “We’re in business for fun,” Grack had said.

  “That why we’re with it?”

  “With it and for it.”

  But you can’t do everything, no baby. Enticements are for the refusing: just look and admire. Exercising the rejection muscle makes the body strong. Pinch me and see if I yell. Wink of lights and shouts and climb of laughter—but you can’t have everything. The boys and girls, heavy-legged, tussling, refusing, consenting, ran off to their lonesomeness after banging dodgem car against car. They shared their fun, they were lonely together, they came back to play skillo. And in this world it was all true about Grack’s giant shadow over the lip of stage—Grack the talker, that fine old prince of con. It was a world which really signified, too, although it soon stopped meaning.

  “The roily-coaster, Mama.”

  “You just came out of the Funhouse, Laff Yourself to Death.”

  “But I want it!”

  “I’ll tell your paw to give you a hit, where’d he sneak off to?”

  “The roily, roily, roily coaster!”

  “Here’s a dime, you brat, just leave me in peace.”

  “It costs twenny cents, Mama!”

  Step up for this, for that, for love and forget. And Grack was the king of it, not Stan, not Pauline, not anyone else. In the hey-rube it was Grack who was king. Afterwards Joy repaired me and I snorted blood and was brave for her. Pauline, a heart-reader, a palmster, should have known it for love: so much exasperation! so much sullen bravery!

  “Women all slime!” Grack said. How frayed that song. “Now take that little trick of yours, let me give you a for-instance—”

  And Grack hated each town we passed through, hated the people who fed the pigeons in Southern squares, hated the cute tricks, hated the houses and steeples and their careful ways. Once we had driven through together in the cab of a circus truck. He refused to look at this pleasant Utah place (it was that time). “Notice,” he drawled, flashing the single finger, single eye, pulling down the lid. Without looking upon the town, he gave it his evil eye. “Notice, friend, these are homes where the marks breed—chow, dodo, wiggle between the legs, that’s how you make a mark. Do you see one looking out at you?”

  I stuck my nose out the window into a fresh spring morning, peachy, too early for a town of grandfather farmers. “No,” I admitted. It was truth. “No, they’re minding their own business. But I would like to peek in and see their breakfast.…” And I dreamed of missus plucking the toast from the Toastmaster, buttering it, blowing kisses and handing toast across the table to mister. He would have a masterful profile, even eating buttered toast, and gracious and flowered with a print dress and cheeks still pink from bed she would be. Their identical children, differing only in that the girl was blond and the boy dark, stamped from a s
et of cookie cutters which they received by saving boxtops, busily did the housework as a surprise for mommy. Then … But no, the point exactly was my knowing that no cookie cutter made them, although I could not yet guess at the sense of these living souls in a sleepy town in Utah or wherever else we passed through. I tried and tried. Grack knew how I yearned toward them.

  “Not me!” he said. “Not on your life! Just let me get away without looking, just let me give them my eye and make their fists come loose. Sheep with pig heads! They don’t have the right to spy on me that way, they all got larceny in the heart—”

  “But they don’t, Grack. You think they care about us? You hardly ever see anyone at all in those windows.”

  “Worst of all! They hide behind the curtains. They feel themselves and see me. No, it’s the houses, the lots, the porches, the rent and the bills looking and looking at me and asking, Why not you? No, no, no, they never get me. Nowheres! No-one! Not for me to stand still and be looked at! Well, they say screwing is better when you move, too.”

  I laughed and broke it up. “Have to try it that way someday, friend.”

  And another time he knocked over a girl, just walking, a kid, bowled her over and left her crying. Oh yes, he picked her up again, he dusted her off, he kissed the top of her head. But it doesn’t stop the truth that he knocked her over and laughed because she was in his way.

  He was John Peel? I wasn’t. I had Joy. What would he have done for that mark Andy? Rolled him for his marbles, that’s all.

  Cleveland was stuck in traffic now. I was pounding the cabbie’s window and he was saying how he didn’t care about the tip, I had better just quit goosing him or he’d throw me out right where we was, here next to a chicken shop with a familiar sign:

  BUY ME IN PIECES.

  I AM FRESH TODAY.

  Okay, okay. I fell back and waited.