Moise and the World of Reason (19 page)

“Charlie, the trouble with you is that you mean the truth is nothing.”

I came back into the room and kicked the door shut so violently that it fell backward onto the landing.

“Don't you come near me!”

“Oh, I'm never coming closer to you again than I am now, but I want to tell you something. I happen to love LaLanga as a poet but you don't know a poem from ejaculations of sperm in your butt which is not always going to be haunch of venison, baby, nope, you'll discover that being buggered by a poet hasn't injected you with his talent and it never will and that is the truth which is something, not nothing, as in your adolescent opinion, and your opinions will not mature but simply wither on you, and you and Skates may think that you have the power to defoliate the world with your falsities and your venom, but, hell, baby, the world will defoliate you because your eyes, the look in them, is like the hiss of Skates, and you know why she did that to Moise, it was because Tony Smith has lectured on the work of Moise and has no knowledge of Skates and Skates is so invidious by nature and so aware in her bone-dry heart, I mean her hissing center of being, not to be called a heart if you live in the world of reason or beyond it, that she is an imitator of Moise but will never make it and will survive because of her sideline of newspaper illustrations of women's wear at thrift prices, and nothing will advance her in what she fancies is her creative calling, her vocation she has the nerve to call it, not fooling even herself, and as for that hiss at Moise, I can assure you,
cunt divine
, that Moise didn't hear it, she certainly didn't heed it, and I can assure you, too, that the hiss of a snake called Skates has never and could never kill anybody, even if it was heard and heeded.”

“Look,” said Charlie, “you have kicked down the door which is the only effectual gesture you have made in your life which is finished. Now get through the space where it used to be quick as you can haul your tired ass out of my life to the apparition of Moise, Christ, did any two people belong so much to each other? I belong to LaLanga and tomorrow am posing for Andy and Big Lot says that with you out of my way there is nothing can stop me!”

Of course these words rang like the fire bells and police sirens of hell as I staggered down the steps and out into the almost impenetrable iciness of the street, wondering if Moise had indeed bolted the door quite finally against the world of reason and would not hear or heed my knock and cry for admittance.

But it occurred to me then that I was not a part of the world of reason which she had announced no longer tenable to her, and besides, to wonder if she would hear me and heed me was like wondering if God, as abstraction or persona, had ever existed and I remain incorrigibly a believer.

The ice of the air softened then, and I moved east on Eleventh and crossed to Bleecker, witlessly and serenely, holding the photo snatched from the rectangle's wall like a cross above me.

For of the earth's frozen waters I wanted now only the ditch where a child crouched at dusk to release from his fingers a paper boat, as frail as a May butterfly, and if the ditch water is frozen, apologies to Rimbaud for these recurrent images of ice.

HOWEVER
, that haunting last image, somewhat paraphrased in the lifting from Rimbaud's
Bâteau Ivre
, has to be fractured now by the account of an incident, unsuitably raw and vicious as the lash of a bullwhip. I would prefer to omit it, but since it occurred I shall have to include it and accept the shattered mood of what could well have served as the curtain lines to an atmospheric play or to a composition for a well-tempered clavichord.

I don't like theater because I don't like curtains: they always seem contrived and I don't like contrivances. I guess this aversion to completion is another serious flaw in my concept of creative work. When Moise completes a canvas it is truly completed, even to the almost indistinguishable
M
that is her signature and that is worked into the painting as if it were a part of it. She believes in curtains, in completion, but she accomplishes it, this completion, as if it were there, visible to herself only, from the beginning, an instinct of a thing's fullness or perfection which has always eluded me in my course through the Blue Jays of my life.

Well, she's a visionary, she works in a state of trance that cannot be broken without shocking consequence to herself and the strictly ordered anarchy which she lives in. That is the wrong way to put it. It is making out of it something that sounds more like an aphorism than a simple truth. It is a kind of magic to which I'm not initiated, it seems, and when I try to discuss it I resort to wrong words such as “strictly ordered anarchy” which is a phrase that doesn't stand scrutiny. Lance would say “shit.” Moise would say nothing but would probably throw something at me. Or would have a spasm, one of those seizures that only come upon her when a trance is disturbed by the intrusion of something or someone that is alien to her “room” and I put the word “room” in quotes because its meaning is larger than room, it is her world and existence.

It was once only Lance and then it became Lance and me who were trusted to watch her at work.

“There is the wooden spoon, dear.”

She would point out a rather grimy-looking tongue depressor on a table by her easel with a challenging smile that Lance understood but did not explain to me.

Obviously Moise did not have these attacks when she was working under conditions entirely within her control: I think it's also obvious that she liked the presence of Lance and later of Lance and me when she was at work on a painting even though there was always the possibility that even a very familiar and loved presence might disturb the inwardly strong current of her way through a painting. It was understandable to me as an image. Her work on a canvas had the compulsive flow toward completion that a mountain stream has toward the basin it is drawn into: a cataract that emptied into a state of rest like the seventh day of Genesis, and Lance would say “shit” to that too, and I learned soon not to question or notice the point at which her initial
M
was painted onto the lower right-hand corner of a canvas in such a way that it seemed a part of it from the beginning.

I may return to this nearly inscrutable history of Moise at work later, but I have mentioned an incident that took place as I made my crazy way from West Eleventh to Bleecker.

To go directly into an account of this brutal incident would still be too abrupt. I feel that I have not yet told you enough about the room of Moise as it was when Lance and I were admitted there every night when he was not on tour with his ice show.

Almost since I first came to know Moise I've kept a Blue Jay notebook in her Bleecker Street room, usually two of them, and the contents of these Blue Jays are devoted almost entirely to the spoken reveries that she's inclined to go into while holding a brush or paint-smudged finger before a canvas. I don't think she knows she is talking since she always appears quite startled when these reveries are interrupted by my voice or much more rarely by Lance's when Lance was still with me.

In those old days Lance was far more discreet than I when she started talking while painting. He would usually be as quiet as possible, removing his shoes so that his steps on the creaky floor would be less apt to disturb her and when I would interject a comment or question he would most likely place a hand over my mouth with a warning gesture toward Moise.

“What, what, what?”
she would cry with a look of broken enchantment.

“Nothing, honey,
rien de tout, ma chère!”
Lance would whisper and she would drift into her reveries and her hesitations of finger or brush before the “The Mystery” which was her name for each unfinished painting.

I was thinking of these Blue Jays I kept at Moise's as I approached her “atelier” on Bleecker through the mist of the winter morning when the headlights of a prowl car cut through it and stopped just behind me on the street.

Needless to say I have wasted no affection on police cars, especially when I'm alone on the streets of that section at such a desolate hour.

I pretended to ignore the car slowing down close behind me till a menacingly macho voice bawled out, “Hey there, drop what you're holding, turn to the wall and put your hands against it.”

“Do you mean me?”

“I said drop what you're holding and”

“It's a framed photo with glass.”

I didn't drop it, of course, but lowered it slowly from its position over my head. With the quick and incongruous images of fever shuttling through my brain, I recognized the gesture of lowering Lance's photo slowly from over my head to directly before my face as that of a priest handling a chalice at Mass and this image startled from me something between a laugh and a gasp. I didn't hear the car door open or slam shut or the heavy officer's steps but I gasped again, this time without a laugh, as the photo was snatched from my hand.

“It's a naykid man's pitcher.”

“It isn't a naked man's picture, it's a photograph of an ice-skating star in tights.”

“Another pervert. Git him aginst that wall.”

I was wheeled roughly about to face the corner building and shoved against it and hands began to frisk me. My fever must have exaggerated their size and brutality. I hate to admit it, but the mauling was almost pleasurable, I think it must have reminded me somewhat of Lance's occasionally violent approach to lovemaking when I was sitting up with a Blue Jay too long to suit him.

“What's all these papers on yuh?”

“Literary works I'm moving to”

“You're moving to the car.”

Then I felt something hard and cold clamped about my ankles, pulling them together.

Handcuffs, on my ankles, and told to move?

“How and where?”

“You're goin' to the station.”

“Grand Central or Pennsylvania?” I shouted with a burst of hysteria.

“Nobody likes a smart ass unless he fucks it.”

He wheeled me from the building and sprawled me into the gutter with a shove.

“Christ, you've broke my wrists.”

“I'll break ev'ry goddam bone in your cock-suckin' body if you don't hop like a toad, tha's right, hop or crawl it and make it quick.”

Looking up at his face I saw it was hardly visible through the winter daybreak fog and I trusted that my face was equally indefinite to him.

“I think you should know you're molesting a minor without offense.”

It didn't make much sense and the result was a vicious kick in the butt.

I know it's incredible but it is possible to live half your life in this city and never encounter an incident of this nature without any provocation but odd behavior in public.

“I am not going to hop and I am not going to crawl and if you were on the job, the Actress Invicta wouldn't have had to scare a mugger away from West Eleventh.”

“Kick him in,” said the officer in the car.

The kick was repeated, harder.

“Heh heh heh.”

It was a guttural New York red-neck laugh that reminded me of all the unidentified bodies, young and old, some of them stripped and mutilated, discovered in empty lots and trash bins or dropped off bridges in the five furious boroughs of the city.

“Christ, oh, Christ,” I said, dropping flat onto the street.

At this moment, precisely, a tall, thin figure emerged from the Bleecker Street mist, and it was Moise, still in her transparent garment.

“What are you savages doing to my brother?” she demanded with a vocal power I didn't know she possessed.

The other officer now hopped out of the prowl car and went up to her apparitional figure.

“What are you?”

“I am still who, not what. And you are a pair of apes in public service and I am not just a member of the public but one with the highest connections.”

A window lighted across the street; an old woman's face peered out.

“Lady, lady,” I called but her response was to draw her head back in the window and switch the light off.

The officers glanced at each other. One nodded, the other shook his head.

The one who had nodded now spoke in a mock-polite voice.

“How would you and your brother like a little ride around the neighborhood, Miss?”

“Moise, a witness looked out a window,” I gasped.

“Unnecessary, not at all necessary,” said Moise, “I phoned headquarters before I came outside.”

The cops muttered together, then one said aloud, “Le's quit foolin' with this coupla nuts.”

My ankles were unshackled by one while the other attempted to give Moise a libidinous feel.

I heard a loud slap.

“Resisting. Indecent.”

“Shit, it's morning, le's go.”

Car door slam, motor starting.

We were alone on the corner.

“Jesus God.”

“Who?”

“I've lost Lance's picture.”

“There are duplicates of it.”

She had gathered up the literary properties which the officers had scattered on the street.

“How did you know this was going on, Moise?”

“Mystery but simple.”

(Perhaps she'll explain it later.)

WHEN A PLACE
contains no clock or watch, that circumstance does not dismiss my concern with the passage of time: it is more inclined to accentuate it. The winter light admitted by the large window in the back wall is the only timekeeper here, and I find myself, today at Moise's, glancing again and again that way to surmise what hour it is, but the window is frosted over and its function as timekeeper is very far from precise. Why it is frosted over I don't know, since there's no heat at Moise's except that of my fever and my anxiety and her quietly living presence.

For I am anxious despite Moise's Buddhistic calm. I am not reconciled to drifting out of existence even with her. I try to make conversation between us but she is either inaudible in her replies or monosyllabic. I know she prefers my presence to being completely alone in her retirement from the world of reason (or unreason), but she is keeping her counsel, not in a way that is catatonic, but in a way that is more like waiting for a verdict of
yes
or
no
and not wanting to be distracted from this passive waiting by my efforts to engage her in talk. She is sitting on the edge of her bed as a female deity might and she hasn't glanced once at the large frosted window, seeming not to share my concern with time-passage at all.