by John Hersey
At the railing they pulled up huffing, and Mrs. Calovatto said, with her teeth set close together and in a low voice, as if afraid of being overheard, “Listen, you dumb bitch.”
Mrs. Plentagger said, also just above a whisper, “What do you think you are, the Columbia Broadcasting System?”
“What did I—”
Mrs. Plentagger: “Look, dummy. Wooster Square you don’t announce your comings and goings.”
Mrs. Calovatto: “In particular your goings. We don’t advertise empty apartments.”
Elaine: “I’m sorry. I was trying to be friendly.”
Mrs. Calovatto, Elaine’s friend: “Friendly isn’t such a big mouth.”
* * *
—
ELAINE kept walking her black-and-blue self-esteem around and around under the sycamores, oaks, and elms. At about ten o’clock she saw Giulio Calovatto and Homer Plentagger emerge from the house carrying between them a very large cardboard carton, of the sort movers used to carry hanging clothes. It was almost as big as a coffin. They went north on Academy and turned east on Greene at the top of the square. At the far corner, nearly to Wooster Place, they came to the Plentaggers’ Torino station wagon. Elaine wondered why it was parked so far from the house; there was plenty of parking space right in front of it. The men put the carton down on the sidewalk. They seemed nervous. Plentagger unlocked his car. Two people were walking past. The men waited until the two were well down the street, checked to see that no one else was coming, quickly opened the flap of the carton, extracted from it two suitcases, put them in the back of the station wagon, then took from the carton a large piece of canvas, which they spread over the suitcases, evidently to hide them. Then they locked the car and hurriedly carried the carton back to the house. Five minutes later the Calovattos came out of the house and walked south on Academy. A little after that the Plentaggers came out and walked north, turned right, went to their car, and drove down Greene and out of the Square toward Olive Street. Elaine watched the Calovattos turn left on Chapel Street at the foot of the square, and pretty soon here came the Torino back the other way, down on Chapel. It stopped. The Calovattos jumped in. The car went on.
* * *
—
A KNOCK in the rhythm of Shave and a haircut, two bits. Repeated, louder.
Elaine looked at her watch. Nine thirty-five. She was rocking and reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Misfit had just taken Elaine’s breath away by shooting the grandmother. She hesitated. Should she answer the door at all? Then she realized the record player was going; she could scarcely pretend she was out.
She went to the door and opened it. Homer Plentagger in a seedy terrycloth bathrobe and nothing else. Oh, God, she thought, this specimen is going to examine my terrariums and then take a lunge at me.
“Miss Quinlan?” he asked, as if he wanted to be sure he could believe his eyes.
“I saw your getaway this morning,” Elaine said, brightly blinking. “You didn’t fool me.”
But: “Would you please turn the music down? Working people”—the crying shame of unemployment shook in his adam’s apple—“have to get some sleep.”
“Oh. You’re right under me, aren’t you?”
“It’s not just us,” Mr. Pesticides said. “Giulio tells me he hasn’t been able to get a wink ever since you moved in.”
“He’ll get caught up under a tropic moon.”
Mr. Plentagger tightened the belt of his bathrobe with a sudden tug. “I understand you have a bit to learn about shouting in the streets around this neighborhood.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Don’t come running to me with your throat cut,” he said, and turned on his bare tootsies and went downstairs.
Chapter 7
MACABOY is at his workbench, and in the flow of his rituals he might be a priest at an altar, except that he hasn’t a stitch of clothing on. There is an early June heat wave. His skin glistens like a space suit. His balls are drawn up tight with work.He is making a flush door. This is to be the Prince of Doors. A pure door, an essence. First principle: Plywood sucks. Second law: Veneer is Nixonian—all cover-up. The door is being joined from the pieces of aged two-inch walnut that Macaboy chose at Medary’s, which will face the eye of the beholder as naked as Macaboy was at birth and is now. The door will be heavy in the best sense, like the facial expressions of Humphrey Bogart—tough, authentic, mysterious. Its design will follow a classic tradition: the stiles and rails are already trimmed, mortised, and tenoned, and slender wedges to lock the tenons lie ready on a tray on the bench, like slivers cut from a small wheel of cheese and laid out for drink time. There will be an extra rail at the waist, so there will be upper and lower panels. But these are to be as thick as their frame—it will be a flush door, as safe as Hoover Dam—and the beauty will be in the dance of grains, not in the play of highlights that comes from piling on frills. There’ll be none of your whorish bevels or molding, no panel freak’s chamfers or astragals or bolections or cocked beads. Just one perfect surface on which the statements of nature will fill the eye, as they do in a seascape. But this great simplicity calls for precisions as confining as those of certain great complexities on which human life hangs, such as microcentimetrically tolerant Rolls-Royce airplane engines, and this afternoon’s task may be the most exacting of all. He is gluing up the upper panel: six slim hexahedrons to be forced together, perfectly squared, without the least winding or washboarding—flat as a sheet of plate glass.
For a benchmark Macaboy now puts Mozart’s Symphonia Concertante on the record player; this entire door will have been built to Mozart. Baroque music as a conscience for the sculptor of a bare plane? Macaboy sees it this way: The fluency of genius (read: “energy,” or E) equals mc2, where m is the material, namely two-inch walnut, and c is cock-pride—or cunt-pride, it would be, if the carpenter were of another sort. It is in the squaring of that c—not easy on this earth—that high achievement for the merely talented must lie.
Now he goes in the kitchenette, sets the water for his gluepot on the stove, turns a knob, and licks at the fart of natural gas with a butane-gas cigarette lighter. The burner ignites with a fffut. For Macaboy uses good old-fashioned hot animal glue. None of your epoxies, thank you. In the screed of the headlong rush to entropy, let it be written that Macaboy at least used biodegradable materials.
He returns to the bench to check the six splines of the panel one last time. These pieces, each 38” × 3⅝” × 1⅞”, are leaning against the bench. Using a two-foot-long wooden block plane, he has shot them true along their edges in pairs, so that any slight deviations from the square in his work will be compensated, because the paired edges will fit these deviations exactly together. He has matched the grains, alternated the heart sides, and had a dream of the portals of the Baths of Caracalla: Macaboy recognizes a smarmy grandeur of scale in his visions.
He draws wooden horses from under the bench, sets up three long metal carpenter’s clamps across them, and with a spirit level and some almost paper-thin hardwood shives brings the clamps into a sweet unanimous horizontality. He lays the splines out on these clamps in the proper order; props against the bench, in readiness, two other clamps, which will be placed face down on the splines to hold them flat; and arranges on the edge of the workbench the stubs of waste wood he will use to protect the outer edges of the panel from being bruised by the clamps when he gives them their urgency.
In all his movements there is an ocelot caution. He sometimes wonders himself: What is the prey he is stalking?
* * *
—
A SHORT wait, now, for the gluepot to heat up. He goes to the phone, lifts the horn, flicks his finger roundly seven times with a kind of impatient ferocity, like that of a powerful businessman, and listens.
“Helena Beadle Real Estate.”
He disguises his voice. “Good afternoon. Do you have any listi
ngs, out like on St. Ronan Street, around there, of rabbit hutches? I was thinking of doing some breeding.”
“Silly.”
“How did you know it was me?”
“You’re about as good of an actor as James Stewart”
“Thanks a mil.”
“What do you want, Fast Eddie, more scaredycat ladies?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What about that last one I gave you? She sounded right up your alley.”
“She wasn’t interested. Tell you about her when I see you.”
“Such as when? Hey. Clockwork Orange. Tonight?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I do want to see that. Tonight? Sure.”
“Which showing?”
“Depends. You want to do it before or after? It’s usually real good after—specially after these movies with gang bangs in them. You know? You see all that slightly speeded-up film, then you can go home and haul ashes. Keen!”
“Eddie!”
“Yes, missy. So solly.”
“Come on, man. I thought we had a business relationship.”
“Look. I’m working on a champion door. Why don’t you just come over when you shut up shop, and after I’m finished we can go to Rudy’s and then take in the flicker. O.K.?”
“If you’ll at least put on a pair of pants before I arrive.”
“You know me inside and out, don’t you?”
“I know the out. I have it memorized. I don’t have to see it again…I don’t think I’ll ever know the in.”
* * *
—
DIPPING the glue from the pot and brushing it on always starts him reeling off some passage of noninstant replay. That viscid, opalescent, hot, sticky stuff—it might be a pot of jism. Ten trillion comings: what a way to get a bond! This time, mating the splines of the door panel—a groupie happening of sorts—he revisits the strangest period of all, the phase of euphoria and explosive sexuality and total generosity the Oregon group went through just after the Four Days of Rage. Almost everyone had been to Chicago. You wore a dirty gauze bandage wound around your cracked head for ten days as if it were Admiral Nelson’s boss hat. Smash monogamy! was the cry. (He rubs the two prepared splines together until, as carpenters say, they suck.) Before we build a new society we have to destroy the shit in each and every one of us. The gut-check sessions were fantastic. Everything had mellowed. Even the guy Macaboy liked the least, Dandy Hartwohl, was less of a viper than usual. People touched each other all the time: men women, men men, women women. Are you revolutionary enough to tear down every vestige of bourgeois uprightness? Can you really get to know your own body connections, headbone to neckbone, cockbone to hipbone? Can you accept homo along with hetero? Can you give up doing dope—well, for a week? Seen now, with a lift of this brush dripping with hot seminal goo, the entire phase was one in which everybody, women included, went ape-shit for every known mode of male penetration. All the words to describe the new consciousness had behind them the thrust of an erection: pushy, hard, driving, determined, energetic. Nail ’em up against the wall! It was a wild upper, like getting your first driving license: you had a license to fuck: literally and in mind-boggling metaphors.
He is ready to take up the clamps. The jism is still warm between the wooden thighs. The name Melissa Ezqueidar comes into his mind, and suddenly this hard-eyed, meticulous, bare-assed craftsman, leaning over to turn a metal crank, feels a blush climb from his neck onto the balconies of his cheeks. Melissa Ezqueidar was sixteen. She had run away from home—Alabama Avenue, Indianapolis, Indiana. She had hitched to L.A., with a head full of movie-magazine fantasies, and then like the whales offshore began drifting north along the coast on compelling currents. She wound up staying, with written permission from her mother, in Home Port, in Portland, a house for teeny-bopper crazies and runaways that some revolutionaries had got clean official papers for. Her mother, of Norwegian descent, was a checkout lady in a Safeway store. Her father, a wild-talking Basque lumber forklift driver, had everlastingly yearned for the sea and had maintained a bowling average of 192 until he was drafted and exported and killed near Lon Nai—so Melissa told Macaboy the first night they talked. Melissa was an all-American sweetie. As a sophomore in high school, the year before, she had been co-captain of the pep squad and had joined Future Nurses of America. She liked Little Richard and Johnny Cash. She left home plainly and simply because after her father was killed her mother gave her the willies. The people who ran Home Port brought her to a self-criticism session of Macaboy’s collective, thinking the group might become a new family for her. She sat opposite Macaboy in a soiled miniskirt. The skin of her neck, when she pulled her hair out from her cheek, running her fingers right out to the ends, looked delicate and overripe, like a slightly brown-turned petal of a white carnation that wished it had been pink. The insides of her thighs were like margarine—yellowish and, it seemed to Macaboy, spreadable. Right after the meeting Macaboy took responsibility for raising Melissa’s consciousness. She was so interested in political theory that she accepted the second part of the lecture upstairs, on her back, with her teacher on top of her. She trembled violently, and Macaboy thought: This chick has problems. Her main problem soon came surfing forth on the curl of a wave of tears: this son of a bitch had just split her maidenhead. She raved for several hours, keening most of her threnody not at Macaboy, whom she addressed exclusively as you jerking shithead, but at her dear dead daddy. The next day at Home Port she took all her clothes off, wrapped herself in the American flag that had been given her the previous year, neatly folded after its removal from her father’s coffin, and ran through the streets of Portland, with the little triangle of her pubis winking now and then from under the stars and stripes, shrieking, “Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!” The city police, their nerves hyperfrazzled after a series of radical student pranks, caught up with her at the corner of Freemont and Fifteenth, and gave her a demonstration of nightstickery which entailed, as a sequel, late that night, an announcement to the press from the authorities at Good Samaritan Hospital: “The patient’s condition has stabilized. Her life signs are returning to normal.”
* * *
—
MACABOY and Liz Roecake are back again at Rudy’s, after the movie. The glass surface of the pitcher of beer between them is sweating out the interminable post-mortem of yet another brace of moviegoers.
Liz took a course in film criticism at Mount Holyoke. “Kubrick,” she is saying, “has to have the clearest eye of any director ever. All that whiteness—perfect for a color film. White’s a reflection of all the colors of the spectrum. It’s the all-color of evil, huh? Huh? Like why was Moby Dick a white whale?”
“Too easy,” Macaboy gloomily says. “This guy Kubrick has gross dreams. The son of a bitch makes his victims evil. That writer, that upper-class dame. The sadist comes out the only human being you can empathize with. Shit.”
“Oh, but the way he can make you feel Alex’s face in those close-ups. Couldn’t you just reach out and touch him?” Ms. Roecake has her hands up, left higher than right, aiming a pretend hand-held camera at the pores on Macaboy’s neck.
“Beyond a certain point, technique gets to be dehumanizing in itself. I’ve been thinking about this. We got so we concentrated on the tactics of a protest…”
“———?”
“There was a turning point in the Movement,” he says. “We all got so we had those clear Kubrick eyes you were talking about. Everything looked white white white. I’ve been trying…” His voice trails off.
“Oh, God,” Liz says, feeling slippage in her film-criticism career. “Not that ancient history again.”
Macaboy stares into his beer glass.
“You’re a case,” Liz says.
“I’m sorry.” He is back on the scene, his smile is dear. “What were you saying?”
“I was—”
“Hey, that clie
nt on Academy Street I was going to tell you about Hoo, Lizzy-baby, you should hear her voice! Velvet underground!”
“But you said she turned you down.”
“Not for long. She’ll call. I planted the seed.”
“I wish I knew what you want from me.”
* * *
—
HE walks Roecake to the door of her apartment on York, then strolls down Chapel away from home. There is something contained, concentrated, pressurized about his hiproll and kneeflex as he glides down the sidewalk; he seems guided by the servos of a single hypered sense, like a field-ranging retriever informed by the radar buzzing off its nose end. Another pedestrian might think that this automated steering apparatus is heading Macaboy toward the Grove Street whores, who hang around outside the porno houses like striped bass lying off tide-pool estuaries—chippies who, because of the way their clientele have been psyched by the films, get a heavy business in what is called in the trade oral hygiene. But no, that is not his choice. He doesn’t turn on College. He goes straight down. The Green is to his left. On it, the medieval gloom of Trinity Church is pricked out by the lights of commerce across the way. He thinks of his mother dressed for church. She is wearing white cotton gloves, she has a habit of tapping the fingers of her left hand on the back of her right hand. The wax cherries on her hat vibrate with her jaw motions. She’s a talker. Bang, the memory of his mistake in putting fine chicken wire on the front of a wooden Carnation Condensed Milk box as a cage for his white mice. They easily gnawed a hole through the thin wood and got out. Found Mother’s hat. Ate the wax cherries right down to the wire stems. From that day onward Mother disapproved of everything he did. He has a slight, not unpleasant ache in his chest as he walks. Now all of a sudden he says to himself, “Well, Jesu, what do you know? Academy Street! How did I get here?”