by Alfred Hayes
“The devil tried,” he said, “but even he couldn’t do it.”
“What?”
“To take the curl out of that.”
He was quoting a pornographic poem of Congreve’s.
26
So I had crossed over into the country of the young. I was, of course, there only on a temporary visa. But I flattered myself that I had managed to penetrate the frontier at all. I even supposed the population was friendly.
I told myself that if they seemed to burn so brightly it was possibly because the candle was so short. I told myself that it might just be that they would be the last to be young. That they were all color because the next markings of the species might be leaden or an ashen gray.
Meanwhile, I was somewhat disconcerted to find that the trips in the afternoon had begun to bore me. At first I couldn’t see why. The revived memory took shape, glowed for a moment with some meaning, and then faded again. I existed piecemeal. There really did not seem to be a pattern of any sort, and what I had looked for, or hoped to find, had been a pattern, the figure in my own carpet. There were only so many tenements to be stared at, and I found that staring at them the second or the third time did not make what had once happened in those cold-water or, as I’d acquired a measure of security, hot-water flats any more meaningful. Quite the contrary. The quick color flushing in my mind did not recur as vividly. It had less color and less warmth like a stirred coal in a fire in which really almost all the coal was already burned away.
Besides, I found myself (possibly because of Michael) touching up my past. Adding, despite my wish not to do so, a few cosmetics to the face of time. I began to realize that what had been, perhaps, not amusing at all, with the boy before me, listening, I tended to make amusing, and what may have had some significance to start with I was making more significant than it had possibly been. It was not only because I had a desire to show Michael, through what I was, what the world had been, but evidently to acquire in his eyes some value. And this disturbed me. Had I come, had I hired him, because I was in need of some judgment? Was I asking a boy, whom, somehow, I didn’t entirely trust, to assess my life for me? Oh, there was a desperation of a kind in me, I could feel that I had been shattered and the essential parts of myself scattered over a vacant lot and that I had to, more or less on my hands and knees, go about picking up or trying to pick up the scattered pieces, that at my age I was in danger of not knowing what I meant, what my own experience meant, what, if anything, the experience of my generation meant. But why should I feel that I had to come with these broken pieces and show them to a boy and ask for his judgment, or approval, or sympathy, or any damn thing at all? It was odd, wasn’t it? Surely, boys weren’t the bar at which we were going to ask to be heard? Boys who might in some family way resemble us. Who might have forgotten features of ours. Who came knocking at our hotel doors. Who sat, their sullen hands in their pockets, in suites we really couldn’t afford any more. Who were not, somehow, to be trusted.
The feeling that Michael was not to be trusted grew on me. Perhaps it was, simply, that I felt something suspect in his careful and polite rejoinders. Perhaps I kept waiting for an enthusiasm, and he wasn’t enthusiastic enough. Perhaps I merely sensed a less than complete sympathy for all the minor golgothas I thought of myself as having lived through. In short, I wasn’t sure he could become a friend, and there were moments when, like Aurora through the flicker of her eyelashes, it occurred to me that he might be an enemy. A camouflaged enemy, an enemy in abeyance, an enemy whom fifty dollars a week (I had paid Michael several weeks now and that, in itself, was quite a performance, my putting the money down as casually as I could and the somewhat protracted moment before he picked it up) seemed to have neutralized, an enemy, to put it so, temporarily in my pay. I began to find myself distrusting the attention with which he seemed to listen to me; was the attention really benevolent? I began to be uneasy about the candor with which I told him about myself: how would he use the revelation? The smile he gave me might try to be a smile of sympathetic understanding, but then why did I have the feeling that it was a smile that hesitated just this side of being a sneer?
He was just a bit too silent, at exactly the wrong moment, for my taste; his responses were just a shade too slow. When he did comment, the comment seemed too deliberate. I couldn’t see any reason why he should want to be my enemy. I had wished to create something between us; the something, I admit, involved his slipping into a category of a kind: that is, a son, or protégé, or a pupil, or simply a younger version of myself, or, in a queer way, a younger version that I hoped to become, that is, to go backward to him and therefore to be able to go forward again; even something less than that, a talent I’d nurtured, a lost or a misdirected boy who through myself was less lost and less misdirected: but he resisted all categories. I waited for something to happen between us: nothing happened. Nothing followed what I thought was the intimate talk. We met; we separated: that was all. So that, after an afternoon with him, I would always feel some peculiar depression. I’d feel flat. He seemed to contain a property that intensified my own uncertainty; that increased my own sense of emptiness. Even before we quarreled, in the Automat, later, I had made up my mind that it was useless to go on with the bogus wayfaring through the city. My past wasn’t going to come back to me, enlarged and coherent, through Michael. The best thing (I’d find another way of helping him, if he wished to be helped, loaning him money, if he asked to be loaned money) would be to end the walks.
27
But I didn’t get to do it gently or by mutual agreement. What it came down to was a quarrel: and with my rather stupidly firing him as though (God help me) I was one of my own despised executives.
One afternoon, late, we’d been on the piers watching the unloading of sheep into the slaughterhouse pens, we were in the Automat not far from my hotel. I felt pleasantly tired. Outside the big plateglass window I watched the crowds going home after the day’s work.
Aurora, of course, had told Michael what I’d said about his poems. I was to discover that nearly everything I had said to her had been relayed back to him. And not only our conversations. He’d insisted on all the details. As though, from the beginning, he’d been collecting a dossier. Anyway, he knew I’d read the poems, that the comment about them I had made earlier, that they were “interesting,” had been a politic lie, and that I really didn’t care much for them. My hostility to the poems, which of course could not help being but a hostility to him, was evident in what I’d said to Aurora.
He didn’t get to it at once. He got to it circuitously.
He began by asking me about my own work.
There wasn’t much of that to talk about.
Well, when I did work, what was it like?
Oh, mechanical, more or less. A job, more or less. The trick was getting one. I hadn’t had one in years.
“Why?”
I shrugged.
Did I consider myself good at it: the stuff I did out there?
“Yes.”
I’d automatically bristled.
“How good?”
“Good enough,” I said. I was beginning to be irritated. The thing, the ability to get work, had vanished on me; I didn’t know why. One got old. Or simply older. The jobs got fewer. The jobs got less than fewer. There were, abruptly, no jobs. You didn’t know why, certainly it was not because you had less of what you had had when you got the jobs, you were sure of that, were you sure of that, yes, you said, you were sure of that, there was no impairment, wasn’t there an impairment, then you were defending yourself, then you were furious because you had to defend yourself, then you were whining, a little, a little more, then you were desperate, a little, a little more, then the pieces started to come apart, you tried to hold yourself together, you tried to prevent the pieces from coming apart, but they came apart, a little piece, a larger piece, you couldn’t cope, you couldn’t cope any more, the work went, the wife went, the house went, the life went. I stopped. I hadn’t meant
to start on it, again, to have the whole machinery of it begin to rev up in me, again, and here he was, the little bastard, and he’d started it going in me, again.
He said, now, looking down: “Aurora said you didn’t like my poems.”
“That’s right. I didn’t.”
I hadn’t intended to be that harsh. But to hell with him. He’d started me going.
“Why?”
Measured. Casual. He fiddled with the coffee spoon.
Did I think them bad? he asked. In a most judicial. A most detached voice.
Not exactly.
What, if he might ask, did “not exactly” mean?
I thought them stupid in a peculiar way.
He seemed, at last, astonished. He evidently had expected something else than stupid. He could see me indignant about them. Or outraged. The inexpugnable Philistine about them. But stupid. That intrigued him.
“Stupid,” he repeated. He was actually smiling a little. Coldly, of course. “Stupid didn’t occur to me,” he said. “Bad, yes; stink perhaps. But stupid?” He sounded regretful. He couldn’t quite see the stupid. Of course, he wasn’t the discerning critic I was, so would I mind elucidating?
I elucidated him. He had a fine talent for getting under one’s skin, Michael had. A great talent for getting one’s hackles up.
I said what I’d said to Aurora: the insistence on all the pointless four-letter words.
Is that (he said it almost sweetly) what I meant by stupid?
“Yes.”
“I try to be as clear and as explicit as possible,” he said. “Precise.” He sounded formal now. The lecturer on his platform. “A word brings many connotations to each of us, and not necessarily the same ones.”
“How true,” I said. “Take the word fuck. To each his own connotation.”
“It’s a love word.”
“Hear! Hear!”
“Saying fuck you isn’t an insult.”
“Oh my God!”
“It’s not a hate word,” he said, pale. “It’s not a curse word. It has, when you examine it, its own beauty.”
“Oh, Michael, shut up,” I said. “You’re funnier than Abbott and Costello.”
He wasn’t detached now. Or formal. He was, if one might use the word in its non-beatific sense, plain fucking mad. He’d definitely quit fooling with the coffee spoon.
“Do you know what you sound like?” I said. “You sound like a little prig, inside out.”
“Look who was talking about being a prig.”
“Laying about on your ass all day,” I said.
Which was a mistake. I’ll admit that. Because then he started on his having a job. Yes, sir. A position of consequence. Work of historic importance. Accompanying me. Down Memory Lane. Looking at creepy tenements. Talking about dead May Days. Me, and my city. Me, and my army. Me, and my career. All that crap.
Okay, I said, grimly. He needn’t worry about that crap any more. The job was over.
“Fine.”
“If you need any money, I’ll loan it to you.”
(After all: I’d promised myself I’d do that for him.)
“I can see myself asking you,” he said.
“If you need it, it’s yours.”
“Shit,” he said. “I’d have to show up with the ravages of hunger written all over me. I’d have to stagger into that suite in the advanced stages of acute malnutrition.”
All right. He could look for another job then. A little work wouldn’t kill him. Eliot worked in a bank; Stevens in an insurance office. Unless my memory was faulting me—after all, I was past fifty, I couldn’t be expected to have all my faculties—they were pretty good poets in spite of the fact they hadn’t devoted all their afternoons to admiring the fine tits of Aurora.
Which, of course, was another mistake. I could see him seize on it. It wasn’t the poems at all. Or not entirely. Not enough for me to have gone out of my way about. I didn’t care that much about the purity of the nation’s verse. Or whether it contained all the goddam forbidden monosyllables in the language or not.
Aurora.
The little bastard actually grinned. He thought he’d hooked me.
“Well,” he said, milder now, but much deadlier, “talking about afternoons, how about afternoons spent in a bar? Haunted by celebrities? With or without their hairpieces?”
So she’d told him about Silvio’s.
The reason he bothered at all to mention the bar was that I’d brought up the subject of how to live a useful life. A life of profit. A life of high and invincible goals. Now an afternoon of booze in a bar with a young chick was I holding that up to him as illustrative of a profitable life?
My lips got thin.
Then okay tanked up we taxi to the hotel and after a relaxing bath (he winked at me, an understanding fellow conspirator) we try to slip it to the young chick even if she isn’t our young chick but somebody else’s say a relative’s young chick huh?
“Nothing happened.”
I said it stiffly.
Glaring at him now.
Well now, I hadn’t taken Aurora to my hotel to discuss Greek hexameters, had I?
She’d told him about the bath. She’d probably told him about the album. She’d undoubtedly told him of opening the lapel of my kimono. He had the dossier. Information was accruing. Against, evidently, the day he’d need it.
I wasn’t trying to take his girl. If she was his girl. Besides, I doubted if he really loved her.
“Zat so?”
That idiot game: the Visible Woman. She wasn’t the sum of seventy-nine parts. You didn’t assemble love. Maybe I did feel a thing for Aurora. I wasn’t going to deny it. Not to a little foul-mouthed snot who didn’t appreciate what he had.
And I did?
Yes.
Good old appreciator, Asher.
He hadn’t, I said, the slightest conception of what love was. Oh, he knew all the four-letter words, precise or not, but he hadn’t, I said, the slightest idea of what love was beyond the words.
“Zat so?”
“Yes.”
He was loaded with love.
“Bull shit.”
Was I acquiring his vocabulary or had he inherited mine?
Never mind the vocabulary. A little rat was a little rat.
Well: a little rattiness ran in the family, didn’t it? Scions of. Descendants from. A dynasty of them.
What in God’s name (here I shook my head, all incomprehension, all superior pity) did Aurora see in him?
Would I like him to describe, positionally, what she saw?
Oh, Christ. He was flattering himself.
“Zat so?”
Yes. He wasn’t such hot stuff, if he’d forgive my antiquated slang.
True.
A mock self-denigration.
A girl like that. As young. As beautiful. My God. She didn’t need him. Even I’d be a funnier roll in the hay.
Not funnier. Please. I wasn’t to take that away from him, too. Not funnier.
I’d had enough. I stood up. I felt old and sick; I felt helpless with rage and ashamed of myself; I couldn’t understand how or why I had permitted myself to become so embroiled with the boy. I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of trading blows as vicious as those, sitting there, myself twice his age, I had traded with him. I was shaken by hate. But I didn’t hate him; I insisted to myself I didn’t hate him. What was it then? Where had this hate, that tasted like hate but which I swore to myself was not hate, come from? What cauldron, what pit? I turned and walked out of the Automat. He sat there, eyelids lowered, thin, dark, dropping a broken cigarette into the cold coffee in his cup.
28
She howled. Oh, if she’d been there. Oh, if she’d only seen it. All the marvelous fights took place when she was somewhere else.
I said, stiffly: “I don’t see why you go on seeing him.”
Didn’t I?
No.
“But I love him, Asher.”
She always said it in a sort of bem
used way as though it fascinated her, too: that she did love him.
Of course, I couldn’t insist she didn’t see Michael: all I could really do was to rather pompously say I had no intention of seeing him again. And to hope it wouldn’t affect our relationship. She said it needn’t. I said she was important to me.
Was she, really?
Yes.
She liked that. Being important. How was she important?
Oh, being there.
“Asher?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going to bed with you, you know.”
I knew.
“I mean it.”
I knew she meant it.
“If it’s dinner, all right. Or a movie: all right. And being friends. All right?”
“All right.”
We sounded like ventriloquists.
She laughed.
“Oh, golly,” she said. “If I’d only seen it. Was Michael vicious?”
That was the least he was.
“Can he be vicious,” she said. And laughed. “You’d like to strangle him. Did he sneer?”
“Expertly.”
“Can he sneer,” she said. And laughed. “I’m going to shoot him some day. I’ve told him that. Some day he’s going to get me so mad I’m going to shoot him right in his gold-plated cojones.”
“Are they?”
“What?”
“Gold-plated?”
And laughed.
“Michael thinks they are.”
“You wouldn’t actually shoot him?”
“Ha. Wouldn’t I? I told you: I’m a classic dago. Get me mad enough I’ll do anything. Or . . .”
She stopped
“Or what?”
And smiled. Charmingly.
“Or if it’s fun enough,” she said.
I didn’t doubt it: mad enough, or fun enough: those would be the reasons.
29
I had taken to brief naps in the afternoon. After fifty, I suppose my dentist would have said, you take to napping in the afternoon. The naps, I suppose, too, get longer and longer. It probably ends in a kind of nap.