“Psychokinesis,” the used bookstore proprietor blurted out upon Beckman’s entry. “I spent most of the day looking. I knew I’d seen it somewhere.”
The old man shook his gray, fleshy jowls. The skin seemed to be running off him in great, highly viscous drops.
“Is it important, young man?”
“Very important.”
The old man smiled, and Beckman had to momentarily turn away to keep from looking into the primeval cave of his mouth.
“I thought it might be. Is there a number I can call if I find it?”
Beckman gave him the public library’s number. The old man snorted with joy.
“Don’t worry, son. I’ll find it if it’s the last thing I do.”
Beckman thanked him and moved to the back corner where Malany sat among her books, talking quietly with a tall, broad-shouldered man. Beckman leafed through a shelf of mysteries and watched the man with a cyclopoid eye. The two seemed previously acquainted. The man was considerably older than her and enveloped in an aura of wealth and power. Beckman could not understand the conversation, but he concentrated, leaving his mind open for stray thoughts. The man handed her a white envelope, bulging at the sides, then reached down and picked up one of the books. Beckman focused both eyes on the mystery titles in front of him. The man passed, trailing an atmosphere of sweet cigars.
“Big sale?” Beckman asked.
Malany grimaced, then in jolted transfiguration asked, “Have you got a place I can stay? I’m not from around here.” She asked Beckman with a tone of mild desperation.
Beckman, taken off his feet for a moment, felt his chin drop as his mind went temporarily blank. It took a few seconds for his mind to recycle. He rationally suspected that Malany’s sudden and impulsive request had something to do with the older man. The poetry books filled up only one whiskey box, and he was unexpectedly pleased to discover that Malany owned a car which, thankfully, she had parked close to the bookstore.
The car, a 1970 Oldsmobile, was pockmarked from inestimable collisions, each victim having left a smear of its own body paint at the point of impact, but that wasn’t what worried Beckman. Actually, Beckman wasn’t sure what the source was of his mushrooming fear. Malany sensed the tension immediately.
“I just want to stay low for a few days, and don’t think it’s because I want that wasted carcass you use for a body,” she said. “I haven’t had physical sex in years, and I don’t anticipate having any in the foreseeable future.”
“I would not have thought that, judging from your poetry. Don’t you ever get lonely?” Beckman asked, feeling a bit ridiculous by the question.
“My poetry is the only satisfactory cycle of emotion I need.”
“What about the man I saw you talking to?”
“He’s just a man, that’s all. He’s nothing, really, and he’s in the ludicrous condition of not even knowing it.”
“Is that why you asked me if you could stay with me?”
“Look, whoever you are. I . . . ”
Beckman sensed that she, too, was projecting. He blanked his mind quickly, but not before he thought he saw a warning arc of electric energy pass through the darkness.
“All right. I won’t pry,” he interrupted. “You’re welcome to stay, but you’ll have to sleep on the floor.”
“I prefer it, actually.”
“But there are other things,” Beckman said.
“What other things?”
“I get up early to write before I go to work. It isn’t a pleasant job.”
“No job is,” she said. “Now, let’s get out of here.” She started throwing her stack of poetry books into the whiskey box. “I’m not going to sell any books here. Nobody comes in here. It’s a crypt. Everything’s old and crumbling and useless.”
She motioned for Beckman to pick up the box of books and follow her out. He did, although wondering all the while why he did it. Did she have some mystical power of authority? Did everyone obey her will? He gently placed the box in the trunk of her car and noticed that everything in her trunk was somehow broken or torn including her spare tire, which was flat. She handed him the keys.
“You drive,” she said.
“I haven’t driven a car in years. I don’t even have a license, and besides, the diner is within walking distance.”
“Can you carry my books that far?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” Beckman said.
“I’m not letting my books out of my sight,” she said, taking the keys away from Beckman.
It only took five or six minutes to reach the diner. Malany parked her car in the alleyway, which frightened the cats away from their domain. She shut the engine down and looked at him with a mild expression of disgust. They got out of Malany’s car and walked up the back stairway to Beckman’s apartment.
Once inside, Beckman went over to a stack of wooden crates in a corner of the room and unpacked a loaf of crumbly bread, four potatoes, an onion, and a can of corned beef. “I’m relieved to hear that you don’t rely on food to fuel your imagination.”
“What is your job here?” she asked.
Beckman hesitated then said, “I clean up, pretty much everything. What I mean to say is, it’s dirty and smelly.” At that moment he decided not to tell her about Herschel. Chances were, she would never meet him, and if she did, Herschel would probably run, screaming.
“I may have to come in sometimes in a hurry and take a shower.” Beckman continued.
She looked out of the dirty window, bored and disinterested. “What time?” She asked.
“Usually around seven. Will you go out at all?” Beckman asked.
“Probably not. I have some things I want to write, and I don’t like to eat.”
She appeared not to have heard a word. Beckman had only meant it as a harmless touch of conventional humor, something banal and standardized.
“But conventionality is meaningless and irrelevant,” she said. She immediately left the window where she had been standing, gazing down at the ally, and went over to his books, which he had stacked against the wall next to the window.
“Paperbacks from the used bookstore, a few college textbooks, nothing very highbrow,” he said.
But she was looking at the titles intently, weighing and sifting each for meaning, even the mysteries. Beckman left her for his two-burner hot plate to boil two potatoes and warm half the can of meat. He was beginning to realize, already, the shadowy complexities of two people sharing the same things. It was understandable that food and space had to be drawn in half, but there were other problems, considerations, or demons as he instantly labeled them.
“You strike me as a privileged little rich kid running away from Mama,” Malany said.
“Almost correct,” Beckman said. “Well-to-do rather than rich, and I’m running away from my father. He’s a partner in a Washington law firm. He wants me to go to law school and join his firm.”
“And you want to show him that you don’t need him?” Malany said.
“I want to be a successful writer. I believe I have something to say.” Beckman offered her his sleeping bag. She accepted, immediately laying it beside his books. The act unexpectedly challenged Beckman’s sense of territory. He felt in some primeval way dispossessed in one important corner of his room.
She consumed her portion of the food with bewildering indifference. After eating, they read for several hours, sharing the lamp. Beckman was hardly able to concentrate, before she stood up and began to undress. She ignored his stare, and Beckman thought the disrobing was a simple, deliberate declaration of freedom; getting down to the basic fact of nudity, the human body in its natural state with nothing left to the torments of curiosity. Nevertheless, he couldn’t stop admiring her long, silken dark hair and the way it flowed around her neck and shoulders.
“Do you have a clean towel?” she asked.
Beckman pointed to the heavy cardboard box at the head of his cot where he kept all his clothes and linen. He watche
d her as she walked over and stooped beside the box. She was Eve stooping next to one of Eden’s cool, lush streams. Beckman began to feel the tingling fingers of lust, that hated animal, which raised its spiny head, independent of his will. Malany found her towel and noticed his annoyance.
“You remember what I said about sex?”
Beckman nodded.
“It’s a power I developed so that I could devote myself to poetry.”
“I know, I know.” Beckman said with a note of frustration in his voice.
“I won’t object to masturbating you, if you want.”
The suggestion completely evaporated his desire, not that he was against masturbation when intercourse was ruled out, but Malany had an unfair advantage.
“It sounds like perverted, orthodox Freudianism,” Beckman said.
“Label it what you will, but it works.”
“Pragmatism diluted?”
“How much have you written lately?” Malany asked.
“I confess not much, but it hasn’t been because of my overactive sex life, which isn’t active at all.”
“Yes, but subconsciously, it takes its toll,” Malany said.
“You may have a point, but suppose I don’t want to cease to be a sexual being.”
“Then you must be prepared to accept the fate of the common man, the common denominator of existence, enslavement by all of the servile, ego-generating forces which drive people into such symbolic acts of self-destruction as sex. Why do you think that the Renaissance poets referred to sex as dying?”
“Probably because no one had derived the word orgasm,” Beckman said, thinking it might stimulate a humorous response.
“This dialogue is no longer valid,” Malany declared.
She turned for the shower stall, her long, thin body bending like a delicate sprig. The sound of the water in the shower made him overwhelmingly drowsy. He couldn’t resist stretching out on his uncovered mattress.
He slept until the next morning, well past the time he usually arose. Malany was coiled up in the sleeping bag in a fetal position, and seemed to be sucking one thumb, wrapped neatly in a thin membrane of white sheet.
Beckman dressed quickly and decided on coffee and doughnuts in the restaurant. Before leaving, however, his body seemed to jerk convulsively toward the window. Only one of the cats had returned and lay triumphantly atop Malany’s car, surveying his Swiftian Empire with all the assurance of an oriental despot. Beckman did not have the energy to try psychokinesis, and he wondered briefly if it would be more beneficial to invert the situation and leave his mind open to receive whatever involuntary, non-directed message the cat might send out.
He spent the day avoiding Herschel, dashing out into the public area of the diner whenever he approached, being careful to lock the bathroom door, which proved to be a false security. Herschel, outraged, pulled at the door and banged against it, squealing with fury. Finally, something failed, and the door burst open with a crack. Pieces of wood were thrust outward, tumbling like small asteroids in space, expanding away and away and away.
Beckman stepped back and avoided the stream with amazing quickness, then leapt to one side and shoved Herschel. He fell back, forming a grotesque fountain. Beckman charged past and up to his room. He began throwing everything he had into his army surplus duffle bag, including the folded cot. Malany watched from her corner, expressionless.
“We have to leave!” he almost shouted.
Malany, without any visible sign that she was aware of the new tone in his voice, or that she even questioned this strange action, began to gather her few things. Beckman rushed into the bathroom for his toothbrush. There was a noise at the door and before he could warn her, she screamed. As Beckman suspected, Herschel stood framed in the doorway, twisted penis in hand, his left eye wandering to the left, his right eye staring wildly at Malany, who instantly slammed the door and flung open the window. With hawkish determination, and without a word to Beckman, Malany began throwing her few things out of the window. She climbed out onto the window ledge, glanced at Beckman for a moment, then eased herself down until she was hanging by her hands. She pushed away from the building in a suicide type leap, landing on her feet next to the garbage cans. The cat flew from his place on top of her car and disappeared around the corner. Malany was unhurt. Beckman waited until she was out of the way, then followed. Before Beckman could regain his balance after landing on the pavement, Malany had jumped into her car and had started the engine. Beckman, hesitating, couldn’t process in his mind what was actually happening. Malany beckoned vigorously to him from inside the car and Beckman, still mentally paralyzed, jumped into the passenger seat.
It was some time later, after the gray-brown squares of farmland replaced the dirty, concrete blocks and red bricks of the city, that Beckman asked where they were going.
“Does it matter?” Malany inquired.
“No, I guess it doesn’t. But I need money, and I hate like hell to admit it.”
“I have money, as much as we need.”
“Let’s stop and make some decisions,” Beckman suggested; and without a word, Malany pulled the car off onto the emergency lane, bouncing with terrific bangs over deep holes in the pavement.
“Malany, I just had an idea. I think I got it when my head hit the top of the car on that last bounce. Tell me the honest-to-God truth. Do you want to make it as a poet?”
There was such frankness in the question that Malany had to acknowledge that she was vain enough to want some sort of recognition.
“Short of a felonious act, yes,” she conceded.
“It hit me just like that proverbial bolt of lightning. We’re selling the wrong thing. People don’t want poetry or literature. They want celebrities, half-crazy celebrities. They want to feel significant. So what do they do? Let others take the risks, and for those who make it, they bestow adoration and collective approval. For those who don’t make it, ridicule and condemnation. The point is, what is defined as success straddles a line between illusion and non-illusion. People don’t care, it’s all the same to them. They want newsmakers, not people of unquestionable credentials.”
“So, what are you advocating?”
“That we make ourselves overnight successes. Hit every hick town in the South East. You, a famous Californian poetess living in sin with a young novelist, me. I could do things like start bar room fights, and you could slip foul-mouthed quotes to the newspapers. They’ll love it! I could play all of the popular stereotypical roles which say ‘writer’. The lion hunting, heavy-drinking stud for the Elks Club or the cynical, wisecracking hipster for the college set or the lovesick romantic for the neglected and underappreciated housewife. Even the handwringing effete for the tea-drinkers of the Junior League. You could be bitchy and foul-mouthed, big-eyed and innocent, or weak and vulnerable—whatever image the situation called for.” Beckman settled back with his feet resting on the dashboard, grinning for the first time in months.
“But isn’t that fraudulent representation?”
“No, not at all. Although I admit it’s open to interpretation.” Beckman sat up, dropping his feet. “You’ve been to California, haven’t you?”
“Once, when I was a child,” Malany answered.
“And you are a poetess, aren’t you?” Beckman didn’t wait for a response. “And I am a struggling young novelist, even though I haven’t finished my first novel yet.”
“What about the stud part?” Malany was deadly serious.
“That, my dear, will be in the mind of the beholder. And, if asked, we will deny it vehemently.” Beckman laughed.
“Beckman, I don’t need these shenanigans. I can do quite well on my own.”
“Come on, Malany. Those books of yours are vanity published. It must have cost a fortune. And you weren’t doing so great in the bookstore.”
Malany turned away, and Beckman was overcome with a sudden rush of remorse.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said. Malany turned back around. “Look, let
’s just give it a big try.”
Malany didn’t move. There wasn’t a blink or twitch in her elegant profile. Even her eyes seemed glazed over, painted in white vinyl. Her only indication of concern was to jerk the car’s shift lever in drive and pull back out on the highway. Beckman slumped back in his seat. After some time, and after he had some control of his fear of Malany, he asked in his most gentle voice if she would take the next exit and stop at the first phone booth in sight, even though public phone booths seemed to be disappearing. No sooner had Beckman asked this than Malany swerved onto an exit ramp twenty miles per hour faster than the recommended speed.
The heavy Oldsmobile leaned and fishtailed on the ramp. Malany pumped the brakes, rocking the Oldsmobile back and forth with waterbed fluidity. Beckman watched, horrified, as the car skidded to a stop only an instant before crashing into a glass phone booth. Trembling, Beckman slipped out of the car and smiled apologetically at the service station customer, who had stopped cleaning his windshield to watch.
In the phone booth, Beckman felt that he had sealed himself eternally into a hermetic display case, and that the last thing he would see, before being placed on public view, would be Malany’s wrathful countenance. This was only momentary, however, and Beckman started to punch the numbers. Some moments, as he knew, had all the qualities of eternity.
“Whom did you call?” Malany asked, ignoring the heavy truck and outraged driver who swerved into the next lane to avoid her.
“The newspaper in the next town.”
“What for?”
“To inform them of our coming. I figured any small-town newspaper would like to have the story of the famous California poetess stopping overnight in their town with her young novelist friend. Oh, and I also made reservations at the Hilton Inn.”
Malany looked disinterested and drove on.
It was after eight and not a sign of a reporter. Beckman picked up the phone in the motel room and dialed the newspaper office.
No Birds Sing Here Page 2