Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (6 page)

Just a day or two before his meeting with Keith, hearing the sounds again, this time the monotonous speaking of a young man, Bernie quietly removed the board. He recognized the occupant as a man he had seen on the street, several times on the long promenade, always at night. In daylight now he could see that his hair was red. Was it Cabot? Later that evening, looking down into the room once more, he had been caught in his observance by the occupant himself who had shouted: “You up there!
DON’T YOU BEGIN
!”

Bernie had been taken too much unawares to put back the board at once. They confronted one another between ceiling and floor, interminably. The young man, when interrupted, had been examining his face in a small hand-mirror affixed to the wall by a nail. Strangely enough, after shouting at Bernie, he lost interest in his observer, and after feeling his way about the room by touching objects of furniture, like a blind man, sat down in a dilapidated easy chair minus a cushion, and seemed indifferent to the fact that Bernie still gazed at him from above.

After putting back the board, like a sleepwalker, fearful, trembling as when one hesitates to open a telegram bearing a message that may change one’s life forever, Bernie had gone down to the vestibule in which all the mailboxes were lined up.In all the days of going in and out of the building and looking automatically at his own mailbox (the only mail he expected to see were his rent and light bills—what reason had Carrie to write him, when they spoke on the phone twice a day?), he had never before noticed the names of his fellow tenants. For the first time now he looked at each name, going from box to box and finally coming to the number of the room beneath his own. In black lettering on gold he read the seven letters: c.
WRIGHT
. Several days later Keith Princeton called on him.

AFTER BERNIE HAD
recovered from the shock of Keith’s visit enough for his hand to obey him, he managed to take the receiver off the hook joylessly and telephoned Carrie in Chicago. He wanted to scream at her that he knew all about Mrs. Bickle and the book being
her
idea, but he was in control of himself now and instead dutifully began telling Carrie his “secret.” As he quietly explained that at last he had discovered Cabot Wright’s whereabouts right in the
See-River Manor,
he realized that Carrie was not really interested or surprised and, to his incredulous certain horror, he was certain somebody was with her in their—in her—bedroom. After a very brief conversation, she made her goodbye kissing sound, but he could not bring his hand to hang up the phone. Then hearing voices and someone laughing, he realized that Carrie inadvertently had not put her own receiver back on the hook. They were still connected and he was about to shout and warn her, when what he heard silenced him…

What Bernie heard in the wedding-bower as he listened with frozen attention in Joralemon Street, was the product not only of Carrie’s own nature,but of Mrs. Bickle’s visit to her house.

Zoe’s visit had struck terror into the painter’s inmost being,and only after her neighbor’s departure did she realize how shattered she was. Carrie had not been so “down” since Harold Winternitz had told her she represented every second-rate Bohemian claptrap of a dead era. Looking in the mirror, she saw that she was certainly old in the face, and if anything older in the body. Her peculiar logic might have told her that she was through; instead it told her she required someone young and disengaged of the opposite sex, and at once.

Carrie had grown up in an age which practiced promiscuous coitus as an injunction, if not a duty. Marriage, she and her contemporaries felt, was easier and more sensible than the single state, though not laudable or noticeably rewarding in itself—a gray
faute de mieux
.The best thing about marriage was the increased opportunities it afforded to meet a number of men sexually in relaxed homelike surroundings.Being single to her would be as awkward as appearing in the street bald of pate or deprived of makeup.

Even more than her craving for “success” and “recognition” in her husbands was her incurable need for “romance.” She wanted to be married to a writer,but she also needed a permanent man in the wedding-bower. Carrie saw now, of course, after Zoe’s call, that she had not quite understood her own motives in sending Bernie to Brooklyn.Zoe’s remarks made it clear to her that she had acted rashly and that her lonesomeness, as a result of her rashness, would be an awesome problem for her.

For days after Bernie’s departure she did nothing but sit in her wicker rocker, with her hi-fi set playing for interminable hours, opening up new boxes of cleansing tissue, blowing her nose, wiping her eyes, and cursing Zoe and her first three husbands intermittently with the popular bad words of her girlhood.

Bernie’s daily long-distance telephone calls, satisfying though they were at first, since she realized she was “inspiring” him, were finally too spiritual. They did not assuage or comfort her need for romance in any palpable way.

She finally decided that perhaps the best thing to do was follow Zoe’s suggestion, and again let out her rooms to rent. Roomers in the past, often between husbands, had somehow kept up her spirits and her interest in life; when depressed, she could invite one of the boarders downstairs for a drink and a chat. Shaking off her lethargy and blues, Carrie walked over to the five and dime store just before it closed one evening, and purchased a neon-bright red sign that said
BEAUTIFUL ROOMS TO LET
.

The sign had been up only a few minutes when she felt it was “working.” Early the next morning the bell rang and on hastening to the door, Carrie had been pleased, if not thrilled, to see looking in through the frosted glass not the romantic stranger she hoped for, but something a good deal more promising, the familiar face of a friend who was a young handsome bachelor to boot.

Something snapped that evening in Carrie’s brain, she later explained to herself. The moment she opened the frosted door, all she could think of was, “He is the answer to my prayers.” Brooklyn and Bernie seemed as distant as Burma when she laid eyes on Joel Carmichael Ullay.

She had known Joel when, as a very young man, he had been part of a well-known Negro ballet group, and the husband of the woman who headed it. A Ph.D. and a beauty,this woman had danced out in methodical savagery her contempt for the white race, until she herself had become a woman of wealth and social prestige. Joel had broken with the great choreographer during her rise to eminence, and had got himself a good job in the Government. Rather light-skinned in strong light, he somehow looked beautifully dark and interestingly menacing in subdued illumination. A mole near his satin mouth increased his appeal which, after his divorce from the choreographer, he felt too unusual ever for another marriage.

Harold Winternitz, who deplored racial fraternizing unless on a strictly professional or cultural basis, often taunted Carrie during their short-lived marriage by saying he was surprised so “emancipated” a woman had never crossed the color line in bed. Stuck as she was in a Caucasian vacuum, he sneered, perhaps much of her misery had been owing to her monotonous racial diet.

If Winternitz had been a witness to her present meeting with Joel, he would have seen it was more than race which brought her this evening to full realization of her caller’s startlingly exotic but obviously available charms.

When she finally showed Joel the large double-room that was for rent, she was already aware that Bernie’s voice, which had been echoing every day from every room in the house, would now be as inaudible as one of her busted phonograph discs. She did not know how Joel felt, but his very coming and his persistent smile, the padded way he followed her up the stairs to view the room, made her assume that he felt enough. She was not wrong. Before he had made final arrangements about the rent, they were automatically in closest embrace, as if a kiss were the conventional requisite for finalizing an agreement, like strong liquor drunk by businessmen over a deal. Kissing her with warmth and generous wet lip and tongue, he had allowed his hands to rest first on her breasts, then on her buttocks, and the two clasped each other like stars before a cameraman who had shot this scene innumerable times before.

“Have supper with me later tonight?” she managed to ask, once disengaged. As he began his descent of the impressive staircase, the keys to his room in his hand, he nodded to her question without turning around or speaking.

After Joel had left, she could only sit down again in the wicker rocker, and practice calm. Had one of the Illinois tornadoes blown away the whole house, leaving her and the rocker intact, she could not have sat there more oblivious to outside happenings. She knew this was a principal, albeit spectacularly unforeseen, event of her life. All other attachments, loves, husbands, events in her life seemed faint and unreal. There had never been a Harold Winternitz, and there was certainly now no Bernie Gladhart. She cried a little as she saw Bernie disappearing. He had needed her, and probably still did, but it was a hurricane after all that sometimes made you wake up. She knew now he could never be a writer. Those querulous phone calls told her, for on a telephone one finally hears the real voice isolated from the flesh that contains it. What she heard coming to her from Brooklyn was only a mewling infant, missing its milk. It had been for her a kind of drug to believe the impossible, to believe in Bernie, but suddenly her belief was dead.

Carrie knew of course what was coming this evening, and she prepared to make herself ready. She rested, she drank bowl after bowl of nourishing clam soup, and every so often just a nip of brandy. She telephoned a fashionable Hungarian restaurant which, on being pressed, would send out a complete dinner for two.

There would be no more empty hours in the wedding-bower, she told herself, aloud. After all, she had tried the impossible with Bernie, and she was glad her punishment was over. Waiting for evening, dressed only in her foundation, but with her wired bra lifted to dizzy heights, she snuggled under a coverlet covered with lily-pads for design.

In bed with Joel late that night, Carrie scarcely was aware of the telephone’s ringing, as freeing herself briefly from her lover’s smoky arms, she achieved consciousness long enough to say a few words into the mouthpiece. She could hardly remember what she said, for her body satisfaction, akin to a coma, owing to Joel’s expert lovemaking, prevented her from either recognizing what Bernie said in his puzzled voice, or saying anything much to him in reply.

In her special physical state, and her longing to be back in Joel’s arms, she had let the phone fall to the floor, remaining connected with Brooklyn and permitting Bernie to enter the wedding-bower, and by the miracle of electronics hear everything as clearly as if he were listening at the door.

AT FIRST IT
was difficult for Bernie even to take it in, let alone believe his own ears. He felt like a man who had tuned in the radio to hear the announcement of his own death. Yet he was unable to leave off listening, and the earpiece seemed to have become attached to his face.

Carrie’s bed was always immediately adjacent to the phone, and her words to Joel Ullay came clear and merciless, leaving nothing in doubt. Bernie heard all, listening for what seemed hours at Carrie’s expense both financially (collect call) and spiritually (her soul laid bare). He heard, that is, not merely their lovemaking which in its eclipse of his own left him feeling annihilated, but toward dawn Carrie, speaking in quiet sober tones, declared that Joel was to succeed to all bower rights from now on. This was followed by her analysis of Bernie’s own spectacular failure as man and provider, then in turn by a vigorous new set of coitus, with cries of animal pleasure and yelps from an unidentified throat, at which Bernie himself seemed to lose consciousness, being awakened again by renewed cries and moans emanating from Chicago.

The last thing Bernie heard before he hung up once and for all was Carrie’s telling Joel that not only was Bernie pedestrian in bed, but he would never, even by wildest chance, finish the story of Cabot Wright.

Bernie planned immediately to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, but a headache of such exquisite pain and tender pulsation started that he could not even walk out of the
Manor
. He finally got to his bed, fell on it without taking off his clothes, and for the next few days did not know whether he was waking or sleeping. Early one morning when he came to, there was a woman sitting beside him. It was Mrs. Bickle, who had awakened him by the cool pressure of her hand on his temple.

5

ZOE SIGNS WITH PRINCETON

M
rs. Bickle had arrived in New York during the big drought, the revival of the wig and white-leadlip makeup, fellatio as the favorite subject in best-selling fiction, the campaign by the Commissioner of Markets to put palm-readers, fortune-tellers, and purveyors of the occult out of business, and world sugar irregular.

Dropping in unannounced from the Gramercy Park apartment that Keith had obtained for her, Mrs. Bickle had no idea she would find Bernie Gladhart as sick as he was or living in such squalor. She called a doctor, a young Sephardic Jew, who prescribed sedatives and told her the sick man was undergoing a minor emotional crisis. He cautioned her to sit at his bedside until he rallied.

Obeying, Mrs. Bickle listened to Bernie; incoherent mumblings through the night, their chief topics being incarceration and the noose. Early in the morning, he seemed to take a turn for the worse when he recognized her beside him. It required time and effort on her part, together with the doctor’s predilect remedy of cup after cup of warm water with lemon juice, to convince Bernie that they were not back in Chicago, and their New York career lay still ahead.