Plexus (80 page)

“Can she blow the trumpet?” I asked derisively.

She gave me the horse laugh. Then followed this revelation:

“She can play the drums, too. But she has to be a little high first.”

“You mean drunk?”

“No, hopped up.
Marijuana
. There's no harm in it. It's not habit-forming.”

Whenever this subject came up—drugs—I was sure to get an earful. In Mona's opinion (probably Anastasia's) everyone ought to become acquainted with the effects of different drugs. Drugs weren't half as dangerous as liquor. And the effects were more interesting. Yes, she was going to try them someday. There were lots of people in the Village—respectable people, too—who used drugs. She couldn't see why people were so afraid of drugs. There was that Mexican drug which exalted the sense of color, for example. Perfectly harmless. We ought to try it sometime. She'd see if she couldn't get some from that phoney poet what's-his-name. She loathed him, he was filthy, and so
on, but Anastasia maintained that he was a good poet. And Anastasia ought to know.…

“I'm going to borrow one of her poems one day and read it aloud to you. You've never heard anything like it, Val.”

“O.K.,” I said, “but if it stinks I'm going to tell you so.” “Don't worry! She couldn't write a bad poem if she tried.”

“I know—she's a genius.”

“She is indeed, and I'm not joking. She's a
real
genius.”

I couldn't resist remarking that it was too bad geniuses always had to be freaks.

“There you go! Now you're talking just like everyone else. I've explained to you again and again that she's not like the other freaks in the Village.”

“No, she's a
genuine
freak!”

“She's mad maybe, but like Strindberg, like Dostoevski, like Blake.…”

“That's putting her rather high, isn't it?”

“I didn't say she had their talent. All I mean is that if she's queer she's queer in the same way they were. She's not insane—and she's not a fraud. Whatever she is, it's real. I'll stake my life on it.”

“The only thing I have against her,” I blurted out, “is that she needs so damned much looking after.”

“That's cruel!”

“Is it?
Look
… she got along all right until you came along, didn't she?”

“I told you what a condition she was in when I met her.”

“I know you did, but that doesn't impress me. Maybe if you hadn't nursed her along she would have picked herself up and stood on her own two legs.”

“We're back where we started. How many times must I explain to you that she simply doesn't know how to take care of herself?”

“Then let her learn!”

“How about yourself? Have you learned yet?”

“I was getting along all right until you came along. I not only took care of myself, I took care of a wife and child.”

“That's unfair of you. Maybe you did take care of them, but at what a price! You wouldn't want to live that way forever, would you?”

“Of course not! But I'd have found a way out—eventually.”

“Eventually!
Val, you haven't got too much time! You're in your thirties now—and you have yet to make a name for yourself. Anastasia's just a girl, but see what she's accomplished already.”

“I know. But then she's a genius.…”

“Oh, stop it! We won't get anywhere talking this way. Why don't you quit thinking about her? She doesn't interfere with
your
life—why should you interfere with hers? Can't I have
one
friend? Why must you be jealous of
her?
Be just, won't you?”

“All right, let's drop it. But stop talking about her, will you? Then I won't say anything to hurt you.”

Though she hadn't explicitly asked me not to visit The Iron Cauldron I kept away out of consideration for her wishes. I suspected that Anastasia spent much of her time there daily, that during Mona's swings the two were always together somewhere. In roundabout ways I would hear of their visits to the museums and art galleries, to the studios of Village artists, of their expeditions to the waterfront, where Anastasia made sketches of boats and skyline, of the hours they spent at the library doing research. In a way the change was good for Mona. Gave her something new to think about. She had little knowledge of painting, and Anastasia apparently was delighted to act as her
mentor. There were veiled references occasionally to the portrait Anastasia intended to make of Mona.

She had never done a realistic portrait of anyone, it seems, and she was especially reluctant to do a resemblance of Mona.

There were days when Anastasia was incapable of doing a thing, when she was prostrate and had to be nursed like an infant. Any trifling event could bring them on, these fits of malaise. Sometimes they occurred because Mona had spoken foolishly or irreverently of one of Anastasia's beloved idols. Modigliani and El Greco, for example, were painters about whom she would allow no one, not even Mona, to say the wrong thing. She was very fond of Utrillo, too, but she did not venerate him. He was “a lost soul,” like herself: still on the “human” level. Whereas Giotto, Grünewald, the Chinese and the Japanese masters, these were on a different livel, represented a higher order. (Not so bad, her taste!) She had no respect whatever for American artists. I gathered. Except for John Marin, whom she described as limited but profound. What almost endeared her to me was the discovery that she always carried with her
Alice in Wonderland
and the
Tao Tê Ching
. Later she was to include a volume of Rimbaud.
But of that later
.…

I was still making the rounds, or going through the motions. Now and then I sold a set of books without trying. I worked at it only four or five hours a day, always ready to knock off when dinner time came. Usually I would look over the cards and choose a prospect who lived a good distance away, in some run down suburb, some bleak and barren hole in New Jersey or out on Long Island. I did this partly to kill time and partly to get completely off the track. Always, when heading for some dingy spot (which only a dotty book salesman would think of visiting!), I found that I would be assailed by the most unexpected memories of dear, beloved places I had known as a boy. It was a sort of inverse law of association at work. The more drab and
commonplace the milieu, the more bizarre and wonderful were these unbidden associations. I could almost wager that if I headed of a morning for Hackensack or Canarsie, or some rabbit hole on Staten Island, by evening I would find myself at Sheepshead Bay, or Bluepoint, or Lake Pocotopaug. If I didn't have the carfare to make a long haul I would hitchhike, trusting to luck that I would run into someone—“some friendly face”—who would stake me to a meal and the fare back. I rode with the tide. It didn't matter where I ended up nor when I got home, because Mona would be sure to arrive
after
me. I was writing things down in my head again, not feverishly as before but calmly, evenly, like a reporter or correspondent who had oodles of time and a generous expense account. It was wonderful to let things happen as they would. Now and then sailing along on even keel, I would blow into some outlandish town, pick a shop at random—plumber or undertaker, it made no difference—and launch into my sales talk. I hadn't the least thought of making a sale, nor even of “keeping my hand in,” as they say. No, I was merely curious to see the effect my words would have on a complete nobody. I had the feeling that I was a man descended from another planet. If the poor victim felt disinclined to discuss the merits of our loose leaf encyclopedia I would talk
his
language, whatever it was, even if it were nothing but cold corpses. Like that I often found myself lunching with a congenial soul with whom I hadn't a thing in common. The farther away from myself I got the more certain I was to have an inspiration. Suddenly, perhaps in the midst of a sentence, the decision would be made and off I'd scoot. Off searching for that spot which I had known in the past, a very definite, a very marvelous past. The trick was to get back to that precious spot and see if I could reconstitute the being I once was. A queer game—and full of surprises. Sometimes I returned to our room as a little boy dressed in men's clothes. Yes, sometimes I was little
Henry through and through, thinking like him, feeling like him, acting like him.

Often, talking to utter strangers out there on the fringe of the world, there would suddenly leap to mind an image of the two of them, Mona and 'Stasia, parading through the Village or swinging through the revolving door of a museum with those crazy puppets in their arms. And then I would say a curious thing to myself—
sotto voce
, of course. I would say, and smile wanly as I did so:
“And where do I come in?”
Moving around on the bleak periphery, among zombies and dodoes, I had gotten the idea that I was cut off. Always, in closing a door, I had the impression that the door was locked behind me, that I would have to find another way to get back.
Get back where?

There was something ridiculous and grotesque about this double image which obtruded at the most unexpected moments. I saw the two of them garbed in outlandish fashion—'Stasia in her overalls and hobnailed boots and Lady Precious Stream in her fluttering cape, her hair streaming loose like a mane. They were always talking simultaneously, and about utterly different things; they made strange grimaces and wild gesticulations; they walked with two utterly different rhythms, one like an auk, the other like a panther.

Whenever I went deep enough into my childhood I was no longer outside, on the fringe, but snugly inside, like a pip in the fleshy heart of a ripe piece of fruit. I might be standing in front of Annie Meinken's candy shop, in the old 14th Ward, my nose pressed against the windowpane, my eyes aglitter at the sight of some chocolate-covered soldiers. That abstract noun, “the world,” hadn't yet penetrated my consciousness. Everything was real, concrete, individuated, but neither fully named nor wholly delineated. I was and things were. Space was limitless, time was not yet. Annie Meinken was a person who always leaned far over the counter to put things in my hand, who
patted me on the head, who smiled at me, who said I was such a good little fellow, and sometimes ran out into the street to kiss me goodbye, though we lived only a few doors away.

I honestly think that at times, out there on the fringe, when I got very quiet and still, I half expected someone to behave towards me exactly as Annie Meinken used to. Maybe I was running off to those faraway places of my childhood just to receive again that piece of candy, that smile, that embarrassing parting kiss. I was indeed an idealist. An incurable one. (An idealist is one who wants to turn the wheels back. He remembers too well what was given him; he doesn't think of what he himself might give. The world sours imperceptibly, but the process begins virtually from the moment one thinks in terms of “the world.”

Strange thoughts, strange meanderings—for a book salesman. In my portfolio was locked the key to all human knowledge. Presumably. And wisdom, like Winchester, only forty miles away. Nothing in all the world so dead as this compendium of knowledge. To spiel it off about the foraminifera, about the infrared rays, about the bacteria that lie bedded in every cell—what a baboon I must have been! Naturally a Picodiribibi would have done far better! So might a dead jackass with a phonograph in its guts. To read in the subway, or on an open trolley, about Prust the founder of Prussia—what a profitless pastime! Far better, if one
had
to read, to listen to that madman who said: “How sweet it is to hate one's native land and eagerly await its annihilation.”

Yes, in addition to the dummies, the bindings, and all the other paraphernalia which crammed my brief case, I usually carried a book with me, a book so removed from the tenor of my daily life that it was more like a tattoo mark on the sole of a convict's left foot. “WE HAVE NOT YET DECIDED THE QUESTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD AND YOU WANT TO EAT!” A sentence like this
jumping out of a book in the dreary wasteland could decide the whole course of my day. I can see myself all over again slamming the book shut, jumping up like a startled buck, and exclaiming aloud:
“Where in hell are we?”
And then bolting. It might have been the edge of a swamp where they had let me off, it might have been the beginning of one of those interminable rows of all-look-alike suburban homes or the very portals of an insane asylum. No matter—on, on, head down, jaws working feverishly, grunts, squeals of delight, ruminations, discoveries, illuminations. Because of that blitz phrase. Especially the “and you want to eat!” part of it. It was ages before I discovered who had originated this marvelous exclamation. All I knew then, all that mattered, was that I was back in Russia, that I was with kindred spirits, that I was completely possessed by such an esoteric proposition as the debatable existence of God.

Years later, did I say? Why yes—only yesterday, so to speak, I found out who the author was. At the same time I learned that another man, a contemporary, had written thus of his nation, the great Russian nation: “We belong to the number of those nations which, so to speak, do not enter into the structure of mankind but exist only in order to teach the world an important lesson of some sort.”

But I am not going to speak of yesterday or the day before yesterday. I am going to speak of a time which has no beginning nor end, a time moreover which with all the other kinds of time that filled the empty spaces of my days.…

The way of ships, and of men in general, is the zigzag path. The drunkard moves in curves, like the planets. But the man who has no destination moves in a time and space continuum which is uniquely his own and in which God is ever present. “For the time being”—inscrutable phrase!—he is always there. There with the grand cosmocrator, so to speak. Clear? Very well, it is Monday, let us say.
“And you want to eat?”
Instanter the stars begin to chime, the
reindeer paw the turf; their blue icicles sparkle in the noonday sun. Whooshing it through the Nevsky Prospekt, I make my way to the inner circle, the brief case under my arm. In my hand is a little bag of candy, a gift from Annie Meinken. A solemn question has just been propounded: