Dead Babies (8 page)
Dear Sir/Madam: The Editor regrets that he is unable to use the contribution kindly submitted to him and returns it herewith.
Quentin never bothered to cross out the Sir or the
Madam,
and yet he always bothered to write on the back:
I've seen some shitty pieces in my time but by Christ
your —— really takes the cake. Unimaginative,
sloppily written, poorly reasoned, ill-informed—I could go on. Were you drunk when you wrote it, or is the whole thing a joke? Either way, I shan't be needing any work from you. QV. Return the book immediately.
Two months later the review would appear, usually in the Round-Up columns, partly reshuffled and totally rewritten. The contributors often suspected malpractice but they were too young, baffled, and ashamed to take the matter further. The fierce esteem in which Quentin was held quickly silenced any direct complaint to the university and in most cases the only reprisals Quentin received were sheepish letters asking for another chance.
As regards the political side of the paper Quentin filled his pages with hate pieces too scabrous and extreme to be printed elsewhere; his correspondence columns were acknowledged to be the most compelling in modern journalism. The writers didn't care about payment, and besides Villiers explained that
Yes
was nonprofit-making. The remainder of the magazine was bulked out with vicious gossip about imaginary persons ("Anthea K. tells me that Henry W.'s erection problems continue to torment them"), rather good satire, exposes culled from celebrity acquaintances, Andy's erudite though often loosely argued contemporary music page
(unpaid,
but he wanted the records and concert tickets), and Quentin's excellent film and theater reviews. Production was handled, for a derisory wage, by little Keith, who had been brought several times to physical collapse with printers' errands and whose eyesight had been reduced from 20-20 to partial blindness by the speed-perpetuated galley-reading sessions that Quentin forced him to complete.
Yes
was an astonishing success. Quentin charmed the big names into contributing and everyone else into subscribing. Circulation tripled, and, after a turquoise-suited Quentin was photographed on the front cover (caption: Yes
Editor Quentin Villiers talking at conference to James Altman and Professor English Hoenikker, both off camera),
the magazine won out-
:
spoken praise from William Burroughs, Gore Vidal, Angus Wilson, and a quorum of distinguished intellectuals.
Quentin is a superman. The versatility of the fellow I He can talk all day to a butcher about the longevity of imported meats, to an airhostess about safety regulations in the de Gaulle hangars, to an insurance salesman about postdated transferable policies, to a poet about nontypographical means of distinguishing six-syllable three-line stanzas and nine-syllable two-line ones, to an economist about pre-war counterinflationary theory, to a zoologist about the compensatory eye movements of the iguana. Just so, he can address a barrow boy in rhyming slang, a tourist in yokel French, a Sunderlander in Geordie, a Newmarket tout in genteel Cambridgeshire, a gypsy in Romany. He can mimic not only types but intimates too. He can bring Giles out of his room calling "Mother?" send Whitehead scurrying into the garage with a cackle from Mrs. Fry, cause Andy to rebuke the wordless Diana from going on at him, convince his own wife that it is not he who sits in a darkened room. These imitative gifts are matched by the astounding versatility of his physical presence. Quentin can silence a cocktail party just by walking into it or, alternatively, cruise around the room for half an hour and listen to people complain about his nonarrival. He can swank into the Savoy in T-shirt and jeans or sidle dinner-jacketed through the Glasgow slums. He can halt a conference with a movement of his little finger and yet sit so invisibly that directors start to discuss his salary without realizing he's there. "Or so it seems," Quentin is fond of saying, "—and that's all it needs to do."
Watch Quentin closely. Everyone else does. Stunned by his good looks, proportionately taken aback by his friendliness and accessibility, flattered by his interest, struck by the intimacy of his manner and lulled by the hypnotic sonority of his voice—it is impossible to meet Quentin without falling a little bit in love.
11:
THE
Human wigwam
Does he know, for instance, what I'm feeling now? wondered Whitehead, as Quentin, glancing back into the kitchen before
unbolting the front door, favored him with an oddly piercing, oddly meek, smile, the corners of his fine mouth curving downward at either end.
Did he know what it was like to be introduced to a girl a foot taller than oneself, the dwarfish humiliations involved in shaking hands with somebody practically twice one's height, the sneaky web of tensions that obtain when a person measuring four-foot-eleven (or "five-one," in Keith's parlance) meets a fellow human being who has cleared the magic divide of five-foot-six? For the Americans, Whitehead had established by peering in tiptoed apprehension out of the kitchen window on the way to the hall, seemed to have been selected to illustrate the elementary differences possible in the standard Earthling hominid: one rangy pale giant with cropped white hair and plasticene limbs; one tuft-faced goblin whose plaited brown braids extended to his waist; and . . . Roxeanne, it must have been, one of those terrifying, genetics-experiment, centerfold American girls—well over six feet in her platforms, a bonfire of lambent red hair, breasts like zeppelins, large firm high backside, endless legs. During his buildup to the ordeal, Keith had had a prayer that he would be able to suffer it in a sedentary, and thus unexposed, posture. Now, watching Quentin gambol out with a cheer to embrace the newcomers, and watching Celia approach the four in a solemn, formalized step, Whitehead began to see the full horror of what was in store for him.
Quentin held out a hand to his wife and turned to his friends. "Marvell . . . Skip . . . Roxeanne," he said huskily, gazing from one face to another, ". . . take my wife in."
There was a pause. Celia then moved forward to join the circle of arms, where she was embraced by each in turn and kissed on either cheek by Roxeanne and firmly on the mouth by Skip and Marvell. Grouping in a circle, the quartet leaned inward and touched foreheads. Besting his emotion, Quentin looked toward the porch, within which Andy, Diana, and Whitehead were uncertainly arranged. Quentin's voice was lusty, brave: "Come on!"he cried.
"Fuck this," sighed Diana.
"C'mon, it's only tender," Andy told Diana before striding
out into the drive.
Queasily Keith watched Andy kiss Roxeanne—with indecorous relish, he thought—and link arms crossways with
:
Marvell and Skip. Five foreheads touched. Whitehead looked up at Diana. "To hell with this, eh?" he pleaded.
Diana, more out of a reluctance to be with the loathsome Keith than a desire to be with the others, glanced at him in tired contempt and left him alone at the front door. A rather stiffer version of the Celia ritual was enacted, then the entire pyramid of legs, arms, and faces turned expectantly toward the tiny boy.
Keith was still reviewing various gambits—run screaming to his room? fall on his face? start crying? go mad again?— when he found himself skipping corpulently across the drive, piping out, "Room for one more inside?"
"Right here," said Marvell immediately; "There you go," said Skip, separating his arm from Celia's to allow him entry; "Oh, you're so
small!"
shouted Roxeanne in evident delight. As Keith craned his puckered mouth up at the seven grinning faces, Roxeanne, supported by Quentin and Andy, craned hers down to kiss it. She never got there: Quentin's foot slipped on the gravel, Roxeanne's right brick was whipped out from beneath her, the human wigwam swayed, wheeled round a quarter circle, tottered, and collapsed to shrieks of mirth on the ground.
Gradually they staggered laughingly to their feet. ". . . Drugs now," said Quentin, still trying to catch his breath, laughing again. "Much drugs."
The Appleseeders' stance on that topic found eloquent recapitulation and support a few minutes later from Marvell Buzhardt, the small, owlish American, postgraduate in psychology, anthropology, and environment at Columbia University, underground journalist, filmmaker, and pop-cultural entrepreneur. Dr. Buzhardt sat rolling joints at the kitchen table with Quentin and Andy, sliding round a bottle of duty-free liquor, while the girls made snacks for the projected picnic. Skip was unloading the Chevrolet, Whitehead running errands to the mini-market. Marvell had, in fact, recently published a short monograph on this theme in conjunction with the Berkeley Alternative University Press, a copy of which he promised to dig up for them before he left.
"What's the book got to say, man?"
"Simplistically, Andy,
The Mind Lab
has this to say," Marvell began. "For some time now it's been clear to all the
genuine people studying this thing that the brain is a mechanical unit and that its aberrations aren't down to environmental, psychological contexts but to purely
chemical
reactions—that's all, nothing more. This idea has had a lot of trouble getting through because people won't let go of the belief that
no
part of us is divine. You go crazy, right? It's because you've got shit in your head, lousy chemicals. Anyhow, that's just the lead-in to the main polemic of my book."
At this point the Doctor ceased all activity with grass and cigarette papers in order to clench his hands pensively on his crown—to the secret boredom of Andy, who was less interested in talking about drugs than in getting a lot of them down him in the shortest possible time.
"Okay. So if you go crazy now," Marvell went on, "they give you good chemicals to counteract the bad ones in your head. Or electrics. The only mysterious thing about the brain is its complexity. Nothing cerebral about it, man, just one mother of a terminal of chemicals and nerve ends, and science can keep up with it now. So: why not apply this positively?"
"I don't know," said Andy, in moonish response to Marvell's interrogative, though in fact rhetorical, stare.
"No reason! Look—fuck—we're agreed that life is a rat's ass and that it's no fun being yourself all the time. So why not do with your brain what you do with your body?
Fuck
all this dead babies about love, understanding, compassion—
use
drugs to kind of ... cushion the consciousness, guide it, protect it, stimulate it. We have a fantastic range of drugs now, Andy. We have drugs to make you euphoric, sad, horny, violent, lucid, tender. We have drug combinations that will produce any kind of hallucination or sense modification you want. Alternatively, we have drugs that can neutralize these effects instantaneously. Not the old Leary line—no 'religion,' no false promises. We have chemical authority over the psyche—so let's use it, and have a
good
time."
"Piss," said Diana. "What about brain damage? False memory, street sadness?"
"Well . . ." Marvell rocked his hairy head from side to side. "There's kind of an appendix dealing with—"
"And anyhow, most of that," said Roxeanne, "is media hysteria."
Quentin: "How was the book received, Marvell?”
:
"Pig
and
Smeg Sunday
raved. The only straight press things I've seen, of course, tried to dismiss it as psycho agit-prop."
"Of course," said Andy, picking up Marvell's grass kit. "They would. Well, what have you got in mind for us today, then?"
The Doctor smiled. "Uh-uh. What have
you
got in mind?"
12: TALL AND GOOD
Quite overwhelmed by the colossal impression he seemed so far to have made on the guests, Whitehead stole tremulously across the garden. Keith's mission was to consolidate his feelings of well-being, and he proposed to do this by paying a call on the only people he had so far encountered in his life who made him feel flash, cool, grand, a pop-star, a Mohawk, one-up, stylish, sexy, brilliant, rich, tall and good. They were the Tuckles.
The Tuckles?
The Tuckles. If Quentin and Andy were at a loose end—or if they were under the auspices of some particularly electrifying drug—they used often to race out across the lawn to give a bad time to Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Tuckle, the wrecked dotard pair whom they were trying to evict from the Appleseed annex, a single-storied, two-room structure built into the corner of the garden wall and screened from the house by a bank of flowerless rhododendrons. The Tuckles had been installed there half a century earlier as factoti to some previous owners and had, insufferably, refused to budge since. Legally they were immovable, but Quentin and Andy, claiming to have dreams of converting the lodge into a studio/guest house/rumpus room, argued that if they could make life nasty enough for the couple they would leave of their own accord.
