Cain’s Book (23 page)

Coming to New York for the second time I came to see Moira who was right or wrong about Jody or who was simply concerned for me. When Moira left me to go to America I suppose I wanted her to go.
After that I was with no other woman for long. Her image always came to me when I was with another woman, so that I was aware of something of myself fatally withheld, a corrosive element, which
infected my passion with irony. I came to America not because I identified this something with the ghost of Moira – I don’t suppose she would ever have left if she hadn’t felt I
withheld something even from her – but because the doubt which affected me came clothed in her image, the memory of her obscuring the more impalpable and graver ghost. I made the journey to
have done with the prevarication.

There was more than a year’s experience we had lived apart, more than a year during which I had lived even more precariously than we had done together in Paris and during which, Moira, in
America, hadn’t. The apparent change in her attitude disconcerted me.

“What are your plans?”

“Plans?” On shipboard I had felt like a flood victim marooned on a raft.

“I mean you can’t stay here, not permanently,” Moira said.

“Couldn’t we eat first?”

“I’m sorry, Joe. Of course we can! I didn’t mean to be like this... I wanted you to come... I really did... we’ll worry about all that later, in a week or two when you
decide what you’re going to do...”

Moira had met me at the boat but had gone back to work leaving me to go alone to her apartment. Waiting for her to come, fingering the objects that had been ours when we were together in Paris,
playing with the Siamese cat we bought in a pet shop on the Champs Elysées, I wondered at her returning to work. It had all happened so quickly at the taxi that I hadn’t, with all the
confusion at disembarkation, had the opportunity to question her about it. It was only when I got to the apartment that I began to wonder. It wasn’t exactly anger I felt, it was a kind of
frustration, almost disgust. I had travelled three thousand miles and Moira couldn’t take the afternoon off. I went out for a drink, walking for the first time in my life down Bleecker Street
which many friends in Paris had spoken of. By the time she came home I had decided I was being unreasonable. After all, we were no longer lovers. What did I know about her affairs? She had her own
life to live.

I looked at her now and said: “What made you go back to work this afternoon? It must have been nearly four by the time you got there.”

“I have a job. I have to earn my living,” Moira said in the voice an adult sometimes adopts to answer a child.

I know now that she had a more cogent reason. She was demonstrating to someone that she was no longer involved with me. But I didn’t know that then. “Fuck work,” I said,
bringing us to the edge of an old difference.

“You’ll find New York different, Joe,” Moira said, nervously lighting a cigarette.

Watching the little scowl on her face as it bunched forwards towards the match, I felt exasperation. Her proprietory tone as she spoke of New York struck me as ludicrous and angered me at the
same time. She had already deprived me of my welcome, and now she was excluding me from the city. And yet I felt sure she didn’t intend to wound me.

“I mean it’s not like Paris,” she went on, and behind the familiar top-heavy voice I sensed her uneasiness. “Some of the things we used to think...”

“I don’t want to hear your recantations. I haven’t changed.”

It was becoming dark in the small apartment. Moira reached over and turned on a small table lamp. I got up and stared uncertainly out of the window which gave onto a small yard. I could still
make out the silhouette of an old-fashioned water tower over one of the buildings a few blocks away. The tinge of blue in the twilight gave it an enchanted look.

“Moira, do you remember the view from the little
chambre de bonne
near Bastille?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “But, Joe, I
have
changed. It makes me mad to think of all those Americans in Paris always talking against America.”

“What do you expect them to talk against, Egypt?”

“You know what I mean!”

“Yes, I know. But as a foreigner I didn’t get the impression that they were anti-American nor that they were always talking against America. And when they did it was usually an
understandable reaction to the ugly monolithic mug that America was turning towards the rest of the world at this or that particular time; they, as Americans, wanted Europeans to know that all
Americans didn’t have the same attitude. I hope they were right.”

“They were bums! All they did was talk!”

“Some of them talked in French,” I said wearily, “and anyway, you don’t have to study in Paris. It’s a liberal education just to be there. Moira, I wonder if you
ever thought about what I think.”

“I don’t want to argue, Joe. We’ll go out and eat. I’m sorry about today. We’ll go out and eat. We’ll probably meet some people you know.”

“Oh? Has another flying saucer arrived?”

For a man of imagination, of tentative will, it is not simple to adapt to the rude government of modern times. Extreme predicaments, if I do not bore the reader with such a frivolous topic, call
for extreme measures of adaptation, significantly at an individual level. Hymns to democracy will not eliminate human differences, or will do so only when they incite murder, and then at our peril.
After all the cant,
I
am the ground of all existence. God said it. Say it after him. All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them
today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.
³⁷
It is a kind
of transcendence, it involves expression, and a symbolic object; the latter by the way. The critics who call upon the lost and the beat generations to come home, who use the dead to club the
living, write prettily about anguish because to them it is a historical phenomenon and not a pain in the arse. But it is pain in the arse and we wonder at the impertinence of governments, which by
my own experience and that of my father and his father before him have consistently done everything in their power to make individuals treat the world situation lightly, that they should frown on
the violence of my imagination – which is a sensitive, responsive instrument – and set their damn police on me who has not stirred from this room for fifteen years except to cop
shit...

The Way of the Black One is crooked and full of a Curse! Ayeeh! Ayeeh! Og, escaped from the ordeal of the Bitter Waters, and come through Thunder and Lightning to Sheridan
Square, took shelter under a Traffic Light, under lancing Blue Rain which washed away the left leg of his Abominable Trousers, leaving him
exposed
. Nevertheless, Og, a man of Experience,
to whom both Mandala and Chaos were as an Open Book, and who had felt upon his Lewd Lip divers Nymphets with the Intimacie of a Moustache, hoped in his present disguise as a Tibetan Prayer Wheel to
pass still for an Innocent Pedestrian. To distract his attention from the Fact of his Inadequate Shelter, he practised a Surprised Smile and shifted his Dirty Spike from his Crotch to his
Surgically Elongated Nostril. Fuzz ran to Arsehole too frequently these days, he reflected, caressing the Innocent Nostril with the smell of his Bad Balls.

Fink saw him where he stood, turning his Prayer Wheel and leering with Assumed Innocence at bystanders. Fink’s Toothless Lower Jaw cupped his stubbly Upper Lip like a Treacly Spoon or Hot
Snatch and he pressed himself like a Rampant Fungus to the Wall.

Fay’s Blue Thighs trembling under her Black Fur Coat were aware of themselves all the way along West 10th.

In a Nearby Cinema, Berti Lang, the Manager, was standing in the Velvet Foyer, invoking Impure Thoughts of Beryl Smellie’s Bum. Berti’s Wife, Chrissie, was the Cashier at the same
Cinema, but she was presently in St Vincent’s having her Operation. Agnes Bane, the Senior Usherette and his wife’s Informer, was at that moment out of the Cashbox where she was
deputizing for Chrissie and at the Ladies’ Toilet for her Evening Pee. Thus Berti was detained in the Foyer.

When Agnes returned she reported the Presence of an Undesirable Woman in the Ladies’ Toilet but Berti was quite short with her much to her Astonishment. He even took off his Glasses and
polished them and that as Agnes Knew was something he did only when he was hot and bothered. He left her and went like a Bent Hairpin towards the Auditorium.

Meanwhile, in the Ladies’ Restroom, Fay was probing the back of her Ice-Blue Hand with her Dirty Spike. She was intent on her Bloody Work.

In the Auditorium Berti watched Beryl Smellie where she stood in the Half-Darkness against tall red Velvet Curtains. That was how he had imagined her, a White Stain on the Red, caressed with the
Body Smells and Scents of the Auditorium, and when he moved down the aisle towards her with his Official Step his penis prickled against his Miami Beach Underpants and grew hard. Close to her,
Unseeing Eyes following her Profile to the Screen, he stood, and against her Fair Meat his forefinger wiggled like an Obsequious Worm.

If I let him feel my Seemly Snatch, calculated Beryl, I can get away at once, meet Fay in the Can, and split.

She did.

“Fay!” she called in the Ladies’ Toilet. “Fay!”

“Dbaeioug eukuh...”

“Fay!”

“Dbaeiou...”

At that moment, as the door from the Foyer was pushed open to admit a Stream of Ladies, Beryl was aware of Music which signified the End of a Feature.

I had just finished my third blood-drawing, a small sketch of a schizoid white phagocyte. I thought three would be enough to constitute evidence if I were ever hauled into court for marks. I
doubted if the Supreme Court would go along with the impertinent counsel that a man should not be allowed to draw his own blood for the purpose of painting pictures.

I
T
’
S NOT FAR FROM
Flushing to the Village. There’s a train as far as 42nd Street, but
again I won’t go in. There’s nothing for me to go there for now. It is as if plague struck my shadow city... and the rest fled. Only the citadel remains, for those who aren’t
behind bars.

The citadel, centre everywhere, circumference nowhere; lethal dose variable. It happens to many that they can no longer go outside the citadel. For one reason or another.

I remember nights without, cold streets, unfriendly saloons, great distances. Fear. Nine hours until daylight (not that that made much difference, except that you can sit in the park amongst
people who play), no reason for being anywhere rather than anywhere else, and without. (There is no one in this city before whom I can weep.) Noticing things like traffic signals and lights in
porches and on empty lots; the failure to notice would bring back the reality of being without the citadel. The alien city. The hostile faces. The bars blared and the automobiles were particularly
like spaceships. A corner drugstore opened its crocodile jaws and exhaled yellow light. Four crooked figures set wide apart at the counter, four men, and a stand of bright paperbacks. (The
dispensary, like the vault of the old lady of Thread-needle Street, was in the rear.) Walk along 8th Street after midnight and feel the men lean towards you. – Some other time my dears, some
other time.

“I regret everything,” I say aloud to the typewriter. And mentally I draw blinds. But I forget, or adapt, or metamorphose. The persistence of bodily process does
for the resolve.

A cigarette. I operate the roller to see better what I have written:

Reading what I have written, now, then, I have a familiar feeling that everything I say is somehow beside the point. I am of course incapable of sustaining a simple narrative...
with no fixed valid categories... not so much a line of thought as an area of experience... the immediate broth; I am left with a coherence of posture(s). I thrust my chair back from the table and
stand up in the small wooden cabin. – Moreover, what’s not beside the point is false. Two steps across the cabin to the little mirror splashed with toothpaste and the viscid remains of
mosquitoes, greeting my own sudden reflection: “
N’est-ce pas
, motherfucker?”

I need a shave. A smear of soot on my right cheek. I move closer until my nose is almost touching the glass and stare vacuously at the pupils of my eyes.

Butter I forgot to put on ice has melted to a state of sticky semi-transparency in its soot-flecked saucer. With a movement of distaste I lift it from where it lies on a spread
copy of Dahlberg’s
The Sorrows of Priapus
.
³⁸
Something in the text catches my eye:

Cain. Third profligate, first poet-adventurer, he creased her massive centrale, moved his carcassonne through her pairoknees into her soft spain before Moses engraved tablets.
Not enough to lament, Jeremiah, even the decay of symbols. The butter, where to put it... the cabin seems abnormally cluttered up with all manner of debris, crunch, a damn eggshell pushed gently by
the toe of my boot under the battered cast-iron coal stove... there. I place it carefully on a small shelf beside scissors (so that’s where they are!), jam and insect spray; then sit down
with relief and look again at the paper in the typewriter.

– The trouble with me, I reflect, is that I look pruriently over my own shoulder as I write and I’m all the time aware it’s reality and not literature I’m engaged in.