Atop an Underwood (25 page)

Bob Duluoz stepped out of the sleek new car turning to make a pretense of politeness to Diana. She stepped out with her long legs and smiled with blank swiftness. They were parked at the front of the Iridium Room, West side, fashionable New York. Kenneth Barton-Bascome slammed shut the front door of his racy auto. His companion, Vera, stood impatiently preening with a preoccupied woman's smile.

“I'll park it across the street,” said the doorman in the golden light of the foyer front. Kenneth Barton-Bascome handed over the keys and then opened the door of the Iridium Room before the imperious footman had a chance to dart forward his eager services.

The four of them marched in. Vera turned fullbody toward a mirror and fawned approvingly, preoccupied. Diana strode loosely, chattering in her child's voice:

“Oh I really adore this place, it's so .. it's so ... restrained!”

Sardonically, Duluoz tilted his head and said to himself: “Yes!”

Kenneth Barton-Bascome toddled along beside Vera, his blond hair waved and clean, his white collar prominently correct over the broad back of his fine gray topcoat. Kenneth never walked; he toddled. He was unofficious.

As they reached the well-lit entrance to the Iridium Room itself, Duluoz remembered the Frontiersman Club in Galloway, Mass.

“Bored! Bored! Bored!”

When they made their entrance, it was most likely Duluoz who attracted the larger portion of attention. Vera strode statuesquely with her high hair-do. Kenneth toddled unobtrusively. Diana floated and her eyes shone. Duluoz glided in, bored, wearing an expression of indulgence and indifference. He realized, halfway to their table, that he had walked into the fashionable Iridium Room with blase suaveness. With the worldliness of a John Milton!

Ha!

Restrained music bubbled about the room in burgundy measures. The electric organ soared about like falling veils of silk. Restrained faces glanced up from tables. What restraint! Hanging from the gold ceiling was an enormous chandelier of gold; the music was like gold; golden scotch and sodas sat before goldlit faces. A pair of golden shoes darted below the electric organ at the end of a pair of golden legs. It was a blonde with golden hair, playing. An eager-jawed Latin sang over the mike, saying: “Pichiketa-keta-pichiketa-keta!”

People glanced up and admired the suave, sleek-hair youth as he slid back Diana's chair, a ring flashing on his playboy hand. Duluoz, the drunken writer with a thousand mistresses and an apartment on midtown Madison Avenue. Duluoz sat and surveyed the room disinterestedly.

Wow! What careless poise ...

“Isn't it restful!” declared Diana turning to Duluoz with a theatrical amazement. She fluttered her hands like Davis. Duluoz nodded with restrained approval, then glanced away in utter boredom. My Gawd!

Nothing solid here.

“Diana,” said Duluoz. “There's nothing solid here ... no foundation. No pyramid.”

“Oh” sang Diana, “but how do you mean?” She fixed her glittering eyes on Duluoz as though she were looking beyond him. Make no mistake! He noticed it! He was a sensitive artist, very sensitive! He was a bored Boyer, Duluoz!

“Here,” said Duluoz quietly, “there is nothing. No meaning. None of the real solid things in life. Empty! Empty!”

“Empty!” repeated Diana, glancing around to appraise the emptiness.

Dense clouds of cigarette smoke had long ago driven away the pure ether, so that now even the air to be breathed was necessarily evil, furious, and passionate. The blanket of smoke obscured the three-piece band, which was perched on a platform in the corner. From its general direction came the solid bounce of a bass-pedal, the scratchy, hot flutings of a clarinet, and the terrific interplay of a pianist who knew what jazz was all about. On the floor, weird figures whirled, bounced, bowed, laughed, smoked. The music grew louder. There was a din, which, though muffled by the foggy effect of the smoke, was enough to create the need to shout. It was marvelous.

Pete, seated at the bar with a long row of drinking gentlemen, produced another cigarette, lit it, and then thrust his obese, horn-rimmed face into the face of a fellow alemate.

“What do
you
think of the wound of living?” he asked, sheepishly drunk.

“The what? Get away, I'm not bothering you. I'll have the bartender kick you out!”

The music stopped, only to start once more at a furious, almost insane, tempo. The dancing figures gyrated madly, smoothly negotiating the favorite American swing dance, the Jive. Tall girls were held off at arm's length, scissoring their beautiful knees for an instant, and then were hurled back into male arms only to gyrate madly away once more. All the dancers bounced with the bass-pedal. Some screamed with delight.

Five soldiers from the nearby fort watched with bleary eyes. The bartender dashed about his bar, mixing drinks. Smoke clogged the low rafters. Madness ruled! Madly the dancers whirled, flinging themselves into the mist and abandon of the smoke, colliding viciously, laughing. The keen reek of beer clung everywhere. The clarinetist had picked up his tenor saxophone, hung his clarinet on a rack, and was twisting improvisations with a sweating, bursting face around the melody of “Lady Be Good.”

A sailor lay sprawled across his booth table, while his girl spoke to a tall soldier. The proprietor stood at the end of the glittering bar, watching. All things were mad in this hellhole of smoke and noise and wine. Two of the Military Police entered stiffly, looking about the misted, mad scene with stern approbation.

The pianist, cigarette waiting on piano top, talked casually, as he played, to a youngster in tweed. The drummer yawned, but his rhythm was imperishable ... his foot, with the precision of a machine, always came back to hit the bass-pedal, and the dancers, also imperishable, bounced in a body there in the rank smoke. The saxist's cheeks, blown out, glistened in the dim light. The five bleary soldiers ordered more whiskey. The little waitress dodged through the multitude. Other waitresses crossed her path, wavered and dodged on. The proprietor withdrew a fat cigar from his vest and meditatively bit off the tip. A soldier shouted something at his girl, on the floor, and had to repeat it in her ear.

“You're cute!” he informed her.

“Why corporal, what a line!” she shouted back, teeth white, eyes eager and glittering. They whirled madly, colliding with another couple, shouting pardons and laughing, inhaling the mad foggy smoke, bouncing with a rhythm.

Pete's obese face was now examining the contents of a “Zombie” drink, horn-rimmed glasses directed critically at the decorations which topped the frosted glass.

A barfly pointed, toothlessly grinning: “Talkin' to hisself. Arf-arf.”

The other barfly saw two obese faces, two sets of muttering lips, two horrid sets of horn-rimmed glasses. He heard, instead of the noise of the place, the sound of the Achaeans and the Trojans, clashing in Ilium.

“Talkin' to hisself, hey?”

“Arf-arf,” said the other barfly. “Arf-arf.”

But outside, the quiet round moon beamed upon the lonely earth of Mississippi, illuminating the woods and fields and roads with a melancholy phosphorescence. A solitary figure advanced along the side of the highway toward the mad roadhouse, in front of which, in blazing incandescent legend, was said: “Pepi Martin's.” Scores of cars were parked in the silent driveway, all of them except one bearing a Mississippi license plate—the lone stranger being from New York. The solitary figure, who now had a bottle of gin in one hand, stood swaying before the New York car and frowned at the plates.

“New York,” he breathed, swaying.

Two Military Police emerged from the roadhouse, allowing a blast of smoky madness to scream in the silent night, and then closed the door behind them, trapping the inmates. Their heavy shoes crunched across the drive. A moment later, they were bouncing away in a “Jeep” car, two sad soldiers in a little brown car, moving swiftly down the road.

Our solitary figure, whom we may know as Richard, now seated himself upon the running board of the dilapidated New York car, and busied himself to uncork the bottle. It was a pint bottle, already half emptied. The music, especially the muffled bass-foot, boomed from within. Richard smirked and threw the bottle to his lips.

“New York,” he gasped, letting down the bottle. “Little old New York.”

A car crunched into the drive, both headlamps flinging a swath across the distant field behind the roadhouse. Richard followed the lights, saw one lonely tree, a little mist, and then the lights were clicked off. Seven persons alighted from the car, and chattering and laughing happily, made their way to the door. Once more, the door opened, the night silence was burst with revelry in Pepi Martin's; and once more, the door closed, the sad summer breeze returned to Richard's ear. Far, far away, a train whistle screamed. Richard allowed his gaze to follow the winding highway, and saw, at regular intervals, the sorrowful streetlamps.

“America,” breathed the youth. “America!”

And he was lonely and alone.

Obese face, sweating over a Zombie, muttered underneath the din inside the rocking roadhouse: “Oh ... the moon never beams, ... without bringing me dreams, ... of the beautiful Annabel Lee ... and the stars never rise ... but I see the bright eyes ... of the beautiful Annabel Lee ...”

“Arf-arf!”

“Hisself!”

“... in her tomb by the sounding sea ....”

The proprietor's cigar billowed smoke. He beamed, as he saw the seven new customers; he beamed, like the moon in Poe.

The drunken sailor, sprawled across his cups, did not see his girl as she rose to dance with the tall soldier. He had come all the way from Louisiana to see her, on leave, and now she was dancing with a tall soldier, bouncing around the floor, laughing, colliding, smoking.

“What a lovely dive!” uttered one of the seven new customers.

“I have a hunch I won't be bored here,” his girl shouted to him. She was tall, her eyes sad, her brow constantly furrowed with pity.

Obese Pete saw her from his stool at the bar, forgot Annabel Lee. The five dreary soldiers drank and drank, thinking about the War. They sat erect, with drooping eyes. They were from Massachusetts, Virginia, Florida, Utah, and Massachusetts. One of the soldiers from Massachusetts, a tall thin fellow with glasses, rose from his seat with a smile and burrowed his way through the mass of humanity. The next instant, he was on the floor with a girl, and the very next instant, they were bouncing with the beat, smiling to each other, colliding, laughing, gyrating to the din. The bartender's assistant dropped a slice of orange into a Tom Collins and dashed forward with his finished masterpiece, almost colliding with the bartender, who was dashing in the opposite direction toward the Scotch.

But outside, it was America in the night. The real, true, America, America in the night. Richard sat with bowed head upon the old running board, and far across the slumbering land, he heard the flung strains of a distant engine whistle.

And now, he heard the band in Pepi Martin's strike up the quiet blues. Presently, the introduction meandered into the strains of “Blues in the Night!”

[“My mama done tol' me, when I was in kneepants, my mama done tol' me ... Son! A woman'll sweet talk ... and give ya the big eye ... but when the sweet talkin's done ... a woman's a twoface ... a worrisome thing ... that leaves ya t' sing ... the Blues in the Night ...”]

Richard looked up, and saw etched against the moon, the grief-stricken telephone wires of America. He wept in his drunkenness, alone outside of Pepi Martin's gay roadhouse in Mississippi. Wept in the Night, seated on obese Pete's old running board. Deep down in his heart, a voice tried to speak, but could not. In a welling up of tears, and music, Blues music, it said: Does the goodness of Christ shine with the moon and with the sad lamps? Does his voice moan with the train whistle? Christ returns to America, at night. Magic night is the time when wonder steals into our hearts. We know then, as never, that life is a strange and beautiful dream, and nothing else. Oh, life is bitter beauty. Oh, life is awful glory. Oh, Christ!