Humboldt's Gift (26 page)

  I said, “Well, thanks for dropping in, Mrs. Palomino. You’ll have to excuse me, though. I’m being called for and I haven’t shaved or eaten lunch.”

  “How do you shave, electric or steel?”

  “Remington.”

  “The electric Abercrombie & Fitch is the only machine. I think I’ll shave, too. And what’s for lunch?”

  “I’m having yoghurt. But I can’t offer you any.”

  “We’ve just eaten. Plain yoghurt? Do you put anything in it? What about a hard-boiled egg? Polly will boil you an egg. Polly, go in the kitchen and boil Charlie an egg. How did you say you were getting downtown?”

  “I’m being called for.”

  “Don’t be upset about the Mercedes. I’ll get you three 280-SLs. You’re too big a man to hold a mere car against me. Things are going to be different. Look, why don’t we meet after court and have a drink? You’ll need it. Besides, you should talk more. You listen too much. It’s not good for you.”

  He relaxed even more conspicuously, supporting both arms on the round back of the sofa as if to show that he was not a man I could shoo out. He wished also to transmit a sense of luxurious intimacy with pretty and fully gratified Polly. I had my doubts about that. “This kind of life is very bad for you,” he said. “I’ve seen guys come out of solitary confinement and I know the signs. Why do you live South, surrounded by the slums? Is it because you have egghead friends on the Midway? You spoke about this Professor Richard What’s-His-Face.”

  “Durnwald.”

  “That’s the man. But you also told how some pork-chop chased you down the middle of the street. You should rent near-North in a high-security building with an underground garage. Or are you here because of these professors’ wives? The Hyde Park ladies are easy to knock over.” Then he said, “Do you own a gun at least?”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Christ, here’s another example of what I mean. All you people are soft about the realities. This is a Fort Dearborn situation, don’t you know that? And only the redskins have the guns and tomahawks. Did you read about the cabbie’s face last week, blown off with a shotgun? It’ll take a year for plastic surgery to rebuild. Don’t you want revenge when you hear about that? Or have you really become so flattened out? If you have, then I don’t see how your sex life can be any good either! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be thrilled to waste the buffalo that chased you—just turning around and shooting him through the fucking head. If I give you a gun, will you carry it? No? You liberal Jesuses are disgusting. You’ll go downtown today and it’ll be more of the same with this Forrest Tomchek and this Cannibal Pinsker. They’ll eat your ass. But you tell yourself they’re gross, while you have class. You want a gun?” He thrust his quick hand under the raglan. “Here’s a gun.”

  I had a weakness for characters like Cantabile. It was no accident that the Baron Von Trenck of my Broadway hit, the source of the movie-sale money—the blood-scent that attracted the sharks of Chicago who were now waiting for me downtown—had also been demonstrative exuberant impulsive destructive and wrong-headed. This type, the impulsive-wrong-headed, was now making it with the middle class. Rinaldo was ticking me off for my decadence. Damaged instincts. I wouldn’t defend myself. His ideas probably went back to Sorel (acts of exalted violence by dedicated ideologists to shock the bourgeoisie and regenerate its dying nerve). Although he didn’t know who Sorel was, these theories do get around and find people to exemplify them— highjackers, kidnapers, political terrorists who murder hostages or fire into crowds, the Arafats one reads of in the papers and sees on television. Cantabile was manifesting these tendencies in Chicago, wildly exalting some human principle—he knew not what. In my own fashion I myself knew not what. Why was it that I enjoyed no relations with anyone of my own mental level? I was attracted instead by these noisy bumptious types. They did something for me. Maybe this was in part a phenomenon of modern capitalist society with its commitment to personal freedom for all, ready to sympathize with and even to subsidize the mortal enemies of the leading class, as Schumpeter says, actively sympathetic with real or faked suffering, ready to accept peculiar character-distortions and burdens. It was true that people felt it gave them moral distinction to be patient with criminals and psychopaths. To understand! We love to understand, to have compassion! And there I was. As for the broad masses, millions of people born poor now had houses and power tools and other appliances and conveniences and they endured the social turbulence, lying low, hanging on to their worldly goods. Their hearts were angry but they put up with the disorders and formed no mobs in the streets. They took all the abuse, doggedly waiting it out. No rocking the boat. Apparently I shared in their condition. But I couldn’t see what good it would do me to fire a gun. As if I could shoot my way out of my perplexities—the chief perplexity being my characterl

  Cantabile had invested much boldness and ingenuity in me and now he seemed to feel that we must never part. Also he wanted me to draw him upward, to lead him to higher things. He had reached the stage reached by bums, con men, freeloaders, and criminals in France in the eighteenth century, the stage of the intellectual creative man and theorist. Maybe he thought he was Rameau’s nephew or even Jean Genet. I didn’t see this as the wave of the future. I wanted no part of it. In creating Von Trenck of course I had contributed my share to this. On the
Late Late Show
Von Trenck was still often seen fighting duels, escaping from prison, seducing women, lying and bragging, trying to set fire to his brother-in-law’s villa. Yes, I had done my bit. Possibly, too, I continually gave hints of a new interest in higher things, of a desire to advance in the spirit, so that it was only fair that Cantabile should ask me to tell him something of this, to share with him, to give him a hint at least. He was here to do me good, he told me. He was eager to help me. “I can put you into a good thing,” he said. He began to describe some of his enterprises to me. He had money in this and money in that. He was president of a charter-flight company, perhaps one of those that had stranded thousands of people in Europe last summer. He had also a little abortion-referral racket and advertised in college newspapers all over the country as a disinterested friend. “
Call us if this misfortune occurs. We will advise and help free of charge
.” This was quite accurate, said Cantabile. There was no charge but the doctors kicked back a percentage of the fee. It was normal business.

  Polly did not seem bothered by this. I thought her far too good for Cantabile. But then in every couple there is a contrast-gainer. I could see that he amused Polly, with her white skin, red hair, fine legs. That was why she was with him. He really amused her. For his part he pushed me to admire her. He also boasted about his wife’s education—what an achiever she was— and he showed me off to Polly. He was proud of us all. “Watch Charlie’s mouth,” he told Polly. “You’ll notice that it moves even when he isn’t talking. That’s because he’s thinking. He thinks all the time. Here, I’ll show you what I mean.” He grabbed up a book, the biggest on the table. “Take this monster —
The Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics
—Jesus Christ, what the hell is that! Now Charlie tell us, what were you reading here?”

  “I was checking something about Origen of Alexandria. Ori-gen’s opinion was that the Bible could not be a collection of mere stories. Did Adam and Eve really hide under a tree while God walked in the Garden in the cool of the day? Did angels really climb up and down ladders? Did Satan bring Jesus to the top of a high mountain and tempt him? Obviously these tales must have a deeper meaning. What does it mean to say ‘God walked’? Does God have feet? This was where the thinkers began to take over, and—”

  “Enough, that’s enough. Now what’s this book say,
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
?”

  For reasons of my own I wasn’t unwilling to be tested in this way. I actually did read a great deal. Did I know what I was reading? We would see. I shut my eyes, reciting, “It says that psychotherapists may become the new spiritual leaders of mankind. A disaster. Goethe was afraid the modern world might turn into a hospital. Every citizen unwell. The same point in
Knock
by Jules Romains. Is hypochondria a creation of the medical profession? According to this author, when culture fails to deal with the feeling of emptiness and the panic to which man is disposed (and he does say ‘disposed’) other agents come forward to put us together with therapy, with glue, or slogans, or spit, or as that fellow Gumbein the art critic says, poor wretches are recycled on the couch. This view is even more pessimistic than the one held by Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor who said: mankind is frail, needs bread, cannot bear freedom but requires miracle, mystery, and authority. A natural disposition to feelings of emptiness and panic is worse than that. Much worse. What it really means is that we human beings are insane. The last institution which controlled such insanity (on this view) was the Church—”

  He stopped me again. “Polly, you see what I mean. Now what’s this,
Between Death and Rebirth
?”

  “Steiner? A fascinating book about the soul’s journey past the gates of death. Different from Plato’s myth—”

  “Whoa, hold it,” said Cantabile, and he pointed out to Polly: “All you have to do is ask him a question and he turns on. Can you see this as an act in a night club? We could book him into Mr. Kelly’s.”

  Polly glanced past him at me with full and reddish-brown eyes and said, “He wouldn’t go for that.”

  “It depends how they sock it to him downtown today. Charlie, I had another idea on the way out here. We could tape you reading some of your essays and articles and rent the tapes to colleges and universities. You’d get a pretty nice little income out of that. Like that piece on Bobby Kennedy which I read at Leaven-worth, in
Esquire
. And the thing called ‘Homage to Harry Houdini.’ But not ‘Great Bores of the Modern World.’ I couldn’t read that at all.”

  “Well, don’t get ahead of yourself, Cantabile,” I said.

  I was perfectly aware that in business Chicago it was a true sign of love when people wanted to take you into money-making schemes. But I couldn’t lay hold of Cantabile in this present mood or get a navigational fix or reading of his spirit, which was streaming all over the place. He was a highly excited and, in that Goethean hospital, a sick citizen. I wasn’t perhaps in such great shape myself. It occurred to me that yesterday Cantabile had taken me up to a high place, not exactly to tempt me, but to sail away my fifty-dollar bills. Wasn’t he facing a challenge of the imagination now—I mean, how was he going to follow such an act? However, he seemed to feel that yesterday’s events had united us in a near-mystical bond. There were Greek words for this—
philia
,
agape
, and so on (I had heard a famous theologian, Tillich the Toiler, expound their various meanings, so that now I was permanently confused about them). What I mean was that the
philia
, at this particular moment in the career of mankind, expressed itself in American promotional ideas and commercial deals. To this, along the edges, I added my own peculiar embroidery. I elaborated people’s motives all too profusely.

  I looked at the clock. Renata wouldn’t be here for forty minutes yet. She would arrive fragrant painted fresh and even majestic in one of her large soft hats. I didn’t want Cantabile to meet her. For that matter I didn’t know that it was such a good idea for her to meet Cantabile. When she looked at a man who interested her she had a slow way of detaching her gaze from him. It didn’t mean much. It was only her upbringing. She was schooled in charm by her mama, the Señora. Though I suppose that if you are born with such handsome eyes you work out your own methods. In Renata’s method of womanly communication piety and fervor were important. The main point, however, was that Cantabile would see an old guy with a young chick and that he might try, as they say, to get leverage out of this.

  I want it to be clear, however, that I speak as a person who had lately received or experienced light. I don’t mean “The light.” I mean a kind of light-in-the-being, a thing difficult to be precise about, especially in an account like this, where so many cantankerous erroneous silly and delusive objects actions and phenomena are in the foreground. And this light, however it is to be described, was now a real element in me, like the breath of life itself. I had experienced it briefly, but it had lasted long enough to be convincing and also to cause an altogether unreasonable kind of joy. Furthermore, the hysterical, the grotesque about me, the abusive, the unjust, that madness in which I had often been a willing and active participant, the grieving, now had found a contrast. I say “now” but I knew long ago what this light was. Only I seemed to have forgotten that in the first decade of life I knew this light and even knew how to breathe it in. But this early talent or gift or inspiration, given up for the sake of maturity or realism (practicality, self-preservation, the fight for survival), was now edging back. Perhaps the vain nature of ordinary self-preservation had finally become too plain for denial. Preservation for what?

  For the moment Cantabile and Polly were not paying a great deal of attention to me. He was explaining to her how a convenient little corporation might be set up to protect my income. He spoke of “estate-planning,” with a one-sided grimace. In Spain working-class women give themselves a three-fingered prod in the cheek and twist their faces to denote the highest irony. Cantabile grimaced in the same way. It was a question of keeping assets from the enemy, Denise, and her lawyer, Cannibal Pinsker, and maybe even Judge Urbanovich himself.

  “My sources tell me the judge is in the lady’s corner. How do we know he isn’t on the take? There’s plenty of funny business at the crossroads. In Cook County is there anything else? Charlie, have you thought of making a move to the Cayman Islands? That’s the new Switzerland, you know. I wouldn’t put my dough in Swiss banks. After the Russians have gotten what they want out of us in this détente, they’ll make their move into Europe. And you know what’ll happen to the dough stashed in Switzerland—all that Vietnam dough and Iranian dough and Greek colonels’ and Arab oil dough. No, get yourself an air-conditioned condominium in the Caymans. Lay in a supply of underarm antiperspirant and live happy.”