William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (92 page)

“Let me tell you, Peter,” he went on, “I’ve cased this tub from stem to stern and although about half of them are a bunch of randy-looking Limeys who look like they take it in the elbow, or somewhere, I saw a couple of broads, American girls, who look ready for anything. ’Course, I had a couple of pals in England during the war said these British dames are positive
cormorants,
jazz you till your ears drop off. But I don’t know.
Chacun à son gout.”

Another giggle floated up from the shadows. “Man, dig that crazy Frenchman.”

Mason wheeled about, looking down at the colored boy, upon whose blue eroded features now dreamed a sleepy smile. “Well, look here now, Petesy,” he said very loudly, grinning. “I thought when I smelled that tea burning I’d discover a couple of lotus eaters.” He began to laugh at the top of his voice. “Leverett in Bopland!”

Turning to my shipmates he said: “Boys, you’ve got a square on board, but he’s a good man. Don’t put him down. Where you off to? What are you going to do—set the Left Bank on fire? Where the hell’s your beret?”

“Right here, man,” said the colored boy, pulling drowsily from his pocket a floppy Basque headpiece the size of a pie plate, which he set in rakish slant on his brow, all but obscuring his eyes. “Groovy,
n’est-ce pas?”

“Look at it,” his companion giggled. “Like, man, it’s the absolute most.”

Mason burst out in a roar of rollicking amusement. “Bless your bulletproof head,” he cried. “Give my regards to Sidney Bechet. Come on, Peter, it smells like swampfire in here. Let’s go up topside and get some air. In the meantime, boys, keep your fingers out of that caviar. My friend here is Prince Peter of Yugoslavia and he eats hipsters for breakfast.” Clutching my arm with one hand, and a champagne bottle in the other, he propelled me toward the door, where Carole—forgotten by me for these past moments—now stood with a forlorn, distraught look on her creamy face, and with a pinkish hue around her eyes, as if she had just stopped weeping and was about to begin again. She gave me a wan, apologetic smile and her lips parted on the breath of a greeting. But before I could reply Mason said, “Excuse me a second, Peter,” and moved her briskly aside to the end of the companionway, where I watched him for a moment deep in agitated colloquy with her, his words muffled but clearly annoyed, his head pressed down close to hers, his arms buttressed against the wall and hemming her in like those of a top sergeant as he chewed out a fractious recruit. Escape was high in my mind; I felt rotten enough as it was, and with a kind of insane clarity I knew that if I had to participate, this morning, even as a bystander, in one of Mason’s delirious scenes I would surely end up babbling and sobbing myself. Yet something held me there, and I watched in fascination as his face grew red as an apple, the veins like tiny throbbing pipes rampant at his brow, and as finally, with an outraged toss of his hair, he bellowed: “Then
go,
you lousy bitch! Back the hell to Coney Island … or whatever dump—” I thought for an instant that now with his hand drawn back he was going to strike her, but he didn’t, allowing his palm as if carried forward by the momentum of an arrested then rejected idea to fall with a sharp crack against the wall. “Go!” I heard him say again. “Go!” And then Carole simply collapsed. She gazed up at Mason in dismay, with piteous amazement.

“Ah please,” I moaned aloud and turned away.

“I’m fed up!” I heard him say behind me, and again I awaited the sound of his clobbering hand. But when I turned back now, Carole was beating a sinuous, big-hipped retreat down the corridor, keening like a Hindu, sending through the bowels of the ship ponderous, contralto moos of despair which brought heads popping out from a dozen doors. When these sounds diminished, finally dying out, I turned back to Mason. His brow was propped against the wall, and the single word he uttered—over the celebrant noise of tourists and the distant throbbing of engines—seemed laden with a burden of ten thousand years. “Women!” he said.

“Now what’s the matter, Mason?” I asked impatiently, as he came near me.

“I don’t know,” he said with a grunt. “I don’t know!” he repeated, looking seriously into my eyes. “I seem to have a run on woman trouble recently. Carole! The bitch. Oh, she’ll be back. She’ll be back. I’m not worried about that. Peter, I’ll tell you, women are another
race!
They’re like cannibals. Turn your back and they’re ready to eat you alive.”

“What happened, Mason?” Again, it was none of my business but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He seemed to me ineffably tiresome.

“Come on,” he said, steering me down the companionway, “let’s go topside. Oh nothing.
Nothing,
really. We’ll be mooning at each other by noontime. She’s got the curse or something and she decided to take it out on me. Yak, yak. Wants me to make her a movie star. Wants me to buy her a Jaguar or something. Thinks I’m Darryl Zanuck. I don’t know, every time she gets the rag on she gets positively
moon-struck.
It’s the worst thing about women —that really screwed-up plumbing of theirs. A big jumbo sewer flowing through the Garden of Eden.”

To this sort of poetry I am the type of person who usually mutters a complaisant “Yeah.” That’s what I said. “Yeah.” And still, for the life of me, I could not bring myself to mention Celia.

But, “Really, Peter,” he blurted suddenly. “I’m sorry as hell.” His voice as we bustled along became worried and solicitous, almost beseeching. “Really I am. About last night, I mean. You must think I’d gone absolutely bobo after last night with Celia and all. She came home just a while ago. We made it up all right. Mean trick of hers, making you patch her up like that. On the other hand, I sure as hell should have kept my paws off her. I was all nerves, that’s all, with the play. And she was yammering about kids. I’ll
give
her kids some day, but can’t she understand that the play comes first? First time I ever laid hands on her! I don’t know what made me do a thing like that!” There was a lack of conviction in his voice, as if he realized I knew better. “Anyway, I sure didn’t expect to impose on you something like just now. Oh, Peter, women! Sometimes I think I’ll switch to beavers. Or moose. Or Rotarians. I don’t know. Or maybe go back to Merryoaks and have Wendy rub me down with Baume Ben-Gay.”

But when, gaining the outside deck, we pushed up toward the bow through a tourist group of Portland Oregonians, he had recovered from his depression and chattered away at me with jolly gusto. It was a balmy day with a hazeless and sapphire sky across which two planes had sketched straight white trails of vapor, like scratches from phantom fingernails. Erect against the blue, the towers of Manhattan rose up in monolithic glitter, and before this backdrop Mason posed me, talking the whole time as he fiddled with his Leica. “What
seized
you, to go tourist class?” he said. “I mean for kicks a couple of guys like that are fine, but a week in the same room—murder. Oh, Peter! I can tell you already just who you’re going to share a table with. I saw the list. A chiropodist from Jackson Heights and a hideous old Lesbian with a hearingaid. Why didn’t you fly?”

“I’m trying to save dough, Mason,” I said. “What do you mean you saw the list?”

He snickered and clicked the camera. “I was just kidding, doll-baby. Don’t worry. The trip’s going to be a dream.”

For a minute, without speaking, we drank champagne from paper cups at the rail. In the silence I was embarrassed, but I felt a slow, intolerable hardening of my heart toward Mason, not in spite of his generosity but almost because of it, and because now, singled out so uniquely for his grotesque affections, I felt no rare warmth or gratitude but only resentment, a soiled and debased feeling, as if I were the receiver of bribes. Anyway, something—my pride, or only an outraged sensibility—refused to let me speak, and it was Mason finally, in solemn, even sorrowful tones which surprised me, who broke the silence. “Well, Peter, I’m going to miss your homely face. Drop me a line every now and then, will you? I’m going to miss you, boy. I don’t know why. You’re really outrageously dull and prissy as an old biddy of seventy-two. But you know, I guess, how fond I’ve always been of you. Celia put her finger on it, I think. She said, ’He understands people,’ whatever the hell that means. You probably conned her into that thought by nodding gravely and stroking your whiskers and nonchalantly scratching your ass at the right time. Anyway, Pierre—anyway, I’m going to miss you.”

“What are you going to be doing now, Mason?” I said idly.

He was silent for a moment. It was a peculiar and meaningful silence, one that I had learned to arm myself against. It involved an amount of deep rumination, a sparkle in the eye: and by now I felt I knew him so well that I could almost hear the crafty currents of his brain at work, regimenting those shamelessly naked falsehoods which when made vocal—made glib and honey-smooth by his expressive tongue—would wear the illustrious garb of truth. Inelegantly, he spat over the side. “Oh, I don’t know, Petesy. Finish the play, I guess. That’s first on the agenda. Whitehead’s about to go out of his mind, he wants me to finish it so badly. But, you know, a play isn’t something you can do right off the top of your head, like a Ford commercial. You’ve got to think and think and suffer and suffer and think. Then there’s that eternal problem of accuracy—verisimilitude, I should say. For instance, this play of mine—well, I might as well tell you. It’s about those experiences I had during the war in Yugoslavia. Did I tell you that? The fact just in itself slows me down from the very beginning. Because in order to get this—this verisimilitude I need so badly—well, for instance, details about the Serbian language, and certain street names in Dubrovnik, and various partisan passwords that I’ve forgotten, things like that—well, in order to get these things really down pat the way I should, I’ve been having to carry on this endlessly long correspondence with old Plaja. Remember the old guy I was telling you about—”

“You mean that old
hoax?”
I said. “That old
fraud?”
To have to contain myself any longer, to continue to allow myself to be stuffed with his forgeries and fictions, with his crooked inventions, with all the other indigestible by-products of his peerless quackery, was a prospect which at this moment I couldn’t bear. I felt that at least he should have spared me the degradation of a final lie; but he hadn’t, and I was bursting to tell him so. “You mean that figment!” I said.

He hadn’t caught on. “You remember old Plaja,” he said, “the old guy’s still hale and hearty. Plans to come over for a visit soon. He’s been sort of my technical advis—”

“Look, Mason,” I said, “why do you feel you have to lie to me? Do you think I’m a—a
fool
or something? An idiot?
Do you?”

His face went pale. One shoulder pitched upward and he raised his hands, fingers outstretched placatingly toward me. “Now I don’t understand, Petesy. Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t said—”

“What do you mean you haven’t!” I said. “You tell me these creepy cock-and-bull stories, standing there with a solemn look on your face like a Baptist deacon, and expect me to believe them! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You think I’m a moron? You think I wouldn’t eventually somehow learn what’s true? You call me your confidant, your pal, your dollbaby, and pull all this buddy-buddy stuff and every time I turn around you’re telling me a dreary
lie!
You were never in Yugoslavia! You were a draft dodger! That play of yours is a
soap bubbler
I was choking with fury, the dreadful callow American prep-school words ( “creepy,” “pal,” “buddy-buddy”) I uttered with the hysteric rage of a fifth-former, and, aware of all this even as I shouted at him—aware of how stupidly and impossibly and absurdly young we remain in this land—I thanked God I was leaving Mason and going to Europe, and I felt tears compounded of rheum, of indignation, and of an old weary worn-out pity and love for him brimming up in my eyes. I turned away from him.
’What,
Mason?” I cried, my voice growing loose and incoherent. “Do you think I’m that much of a fool? You’d better get your goddam head looked at!”

Above us at the funnel’s mouth a plume of steam exploded forth, followed by the whistle’s horrendous blast. As it went off, booming thunder around us, I felt his hand on my shoulder and turned, deafened, to see his gray, stricken face and his lips mouthing the contours of words. Around us, people with fingers in their ears moved slowly forward toward the gangways. “—hurts me!” he cried, in a sudden silence that was profound and astounding. “That hurts me, to hear you say stuff like that.” His lips trembled; he looked on the verge of tears. “Stuff like that,” he said bitterly, “stuff like that is—it’s
irremediable.
I mean, to think that you—you of all people—can’t make the subtle distinction between a lie—between an out-and-out third-rate lie meant maliciously—between that, and a jazzy kind of bullshit extravaganza like the one I was telling you, meant with no malice at all, but only with the intent to edify and entertain.” His shoulder was twitching badly now, a wide arching seesawing movement; I could almost hear the ligaments snapping with the strain. “Jesus sake, Peter!” he burst out in a voice that was indeed hurt—hurt and aggrieved. “Don’t you have enough
prescience
to see that I was telling it all to you under the guise of truth only to see your reactions? To see if it would stand up as a play? To see if it was convincing to, say, someone like you whose sympathies I trust and whose aesthetic orientation—”

“And that dear, fantastic wife of yours!” I broke in. “What’s the matter with you? Lay off her! Lay off her, God damn you!” And then I stopped, my mouth agape, rattled by the sudden knowledge that this was the first time I had ever really talked back to Mason—my first outburst, my only reprimand. For a moment I had no words. Then after a breath, I went on more amiably, “Really, Mason, maybe we’re all a bit neurotic and all that, but for heaven’s sake—”

He was not to be deflected. In shaken tones he added: “If I can’t have any faith in your reactions, Peter, then the Lord knows —” But then he made a futile gesture with his hand, turning back toward the rail, and wrenched from his throat a few awkward words that hurt me to the core. “Lord knows I’ve
tried
hard to be decent and sociable enough. But every time I open my mouth it seems I turn into a great pile of …” He paused, lips trembling. It was awful. “I just always end up with everybody using me. Or hating my guts.”