Sexus (44 page)

When eventually I went to the landing outside and stood embracing her for the last time, she whispered that she needed money for the rent, begged me to bring it to her on the morrow. And then, as I was about to descend the stairs, she pulled me back, her lips glued to my ear.
“He won't last another week!”
These words came to me as if through an amplifier. Even today, as I repeat them to myself, I can hear the soft whistling rush of air that accompanied the sound of her almost inaudible voice. It was as if my ear were a dandelion and each little thistle an antenna which caught the message and relayed it to the roof of my brain where it exploded with
the dull splash of a howitzer.
“He won't last another week!”
I said it all the way home, a thousand times or more. And every time I commenced this refrain I saw a photogenic image of fright—the head of a woman sawed off by the frame of the picture just below the scalp. I saw it always the same—a face looming out of darkness, the upper part of the head caught as in a trap door. A face with a calcium glow about it, suspended by its own dreamlike effort above an indistinguishable mass of writhing creatures such as infest the swampy regions of the mind's dark fears. And then I saw Georgie being born—just as she had related it to me once. Born on the floor of the outhouse where she had locked herself in to escape the hands of his father, who was blind with drink. I saw her lying huddled on the floor and Georgie between her legs. Lying that way until the moon flooded them with mysterious platinum waves. How she loved Georgie! How she clung to him! Nothing was too good for her Georgie. Then north on the night train with her little black sheep. Starving herself to feed Georgie, selling herself in order to put Georgie through school. Everything for Georgie. “You were crying,” I would say, catching her unawares. “What is it—has he been treating you badly again?” There wasn't any good in Georgie: he was full of black pus. “Hum that tune,” he would say sometimes, the three of us sitting in the dark. And they would begin to hum and croon, and after a time Georgie would come over to her, put his arms around her, and weep like a child. “I'm no goddamned good,” he would say, over and over. And then he would cough and the coughing never stopped. Like hers, his eyes were large and black; they peered out from his hollowed face like two burning holes. Then he went away—to a ranch—and I thought maybe he would get well again. A lung was punctured, and when that healed, the other one was punctured. And before the doctors had finished their experiments I was like a bundle of malignant tumors, rearing to explode, to break the chains, to kill his mother if necessary, anything, anything, only no more heartaches, no more misery, no more silent suffering. When had I ever truly loved her?
When?
I couldn't think. I had been searching for a cozy womb and I had been caught in
the outhouse, had locked myself in, had watched the moon come and go, had seen one bloody pulp after another fall from between her legs. Phoebus! Yes, that was the place! Near the Old Soldiers' Home. And he, the father and seducer, was safely behind the bars in Fortress Monroe. He
was.
And then, when no one any longer mentioned his name, he was a corpse lying in a coffin a few blocks away and before I ever realized that they had shipped his body North, she had buried him—with military honors! Christ! What all can happen behind one's back—while you're out for a walk or going to the library to look up an important book! One lung, two lungs, an abortion, a stillbirth, milk legs, no work, boarders, hauling ash cans, hocking bicycles, sitting on the roof watching pigeons: these phantasmal objects and events fill the screen, then pass like smoke, are forgotten, buried, thrown in the ash can like rotted tumors,
until
. . . two lips pressed against the waxen ear explode with a deafening dandelion roar, whereupon August Angst, Tracy le Crève-cœur and Rigor Mortis sail slantwise through the roof of the brain to hang suspended in a sky shimmering with ultraviolet.

The day after this episode I do not go back to her with the money, nor do I appear ten days later at the funeral. But about three weeks later I feel compelled to unburden myself to Maude. Of course I say nothing about the whispering fuck on the floor that night, but I do confess to escorting her to her rooms. To another woman I might have confessed everything, but not to Maude. As it is, with only a thimbleful spilled out, she's already as stiff as a frightened mare. She's not listening any more—just waiting for me to conclude so that she can say with absolute finality—NO!

To be fair to her, it was a bit mad to expect her to consent to my suggestion. It would be a rare woman who would say yes. What did I want her to do? Why, to invite Carlotta to live with us. Yes, finally I had come to the extraordinary conclusion that the only decent thing to do would be to ask Carlotta to share her life with us. I was trying to make it plain to Maude that I had never loved Carlotta, that I had only pitied her, and that therefore I owed her something. Queer masculine logic! Dingo! Absolutely dingo. But I believed
every word I uttered. Carlotta would come and take a room and live her own life. We would treat her graciously, like a fallen queen. It must have sounded terribly hollow and false to Maude. But as I listened to the reverberations of my own voice I had the distinct sensation of hearing those sound waves quell the horrible gurgle of the toilet box. Since Maude had already made up her mind, since no one was listening except myself, since the words bounced back like eggplants ricocheting against a gourd, I continued with my transmission, growing more and more earnest, more and more convinced, more and more determined to have my way. One wave on top of another, one rhythm against another: quell against beat, surge against gush, confession against compulsion, ocean against brook. Beat it down, sink it, drown it, drive it below the earth, set a mountain on top of it! I went on and on, con amore, con furioso, con connectibusque, con abulia, con aesthesia, con Silesia . . . And all the while she listened like a rock, fireproofing her little camisoled heart, her tin crackerbox, her meat-loafed gizzard, her fumigated womb.

The answer was No! Yesterday, today, tomorrow—NO! Positively no! Her whole physical, mental, moral and spiritual development had brought her to that great moment when she could answer triumphantly: NO! Positively No!

If she had only said to me: “Listen, you can't ask me to do a thing like that! It's mad, don't you see? How would we get along, the three of us? I know you'd like to help her—so would I. . . but———”

If she had spoken that way I would have gone to the mirror, taken a long cool look at myself, laughed like a broken hinge and agreed that it was utterly mad. Not that only, but more . . . I would have given her credit for really desiring to do something which I knew her meager spirit was incapable of imagining. Yes, I'd have chalked up a white mark for her and topped it off with a quiet insane fuck à la Huysmans. I'd have taken her on my lap, as her father in heaven used to do, and cooing and billing, and pretending that 986 plus 2 makes minus 69 I'd have delicately lifted her organdy cover-all, and put the fire out with an ethereal fire extinguisher.

However, and instead of which, pissing in vain against a
wall of fireproofed sheet metal, I got so infuriated that I burst out of the house in the middle of the night and started walking to Coney Island. The weather was mild and when I got to the boardwalk I sat down on a ramp and began to laugh. I got to thinking of Stanley, of the night I met him after his release from Fort Oglethorpe, of the open barouche we hired and the beer bottles piled up on the seat opposite. After four years in the cavalry Stanley was a man of iron. He was tough inside and out, as only a Pole can be. He would have bitten my ear off, if I had dared him to, and perhaps spat it in my face. He had a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket and he wanted to spend it all that night. And before the night was over I remember that we had just enough between us to share a room together in some broken-down hotel near Borough Hall. I remember too that he was so stinking drunk that he wouldn't get out of bed to relieve his bladder—just turned over and pissed a steady stream against the wall.

The next day I was still furious. And the following day and the day after. That NO! was eating me up. It would take a thousand Yeses to bury it. Nothing vital occupied me at the time. I was making a pretense of earning a living by selling a shelf of books which were supposed to contain “the world's best literature.” I hadn't yet sunk to the encyclopedia stage. The rat who had put me on to the game had hypnotized me. I had sold everything in a posthypnotic trance. Sometimes I awoke with bright ideas, that's to say, slightly criminal or definitely hallucinatory. Anyway, still hopping mad, still furious, I awoke one day with that NO! still reverberating in my ears. I was eating breakfast when I suddenly recalled that I had never canvassed cousin Julie. Maude's cousin Julie. Julie was married now, just long enough, I figured, to want a change of rhythm. Julie would be my first call. I'd take it easy, pop in just a little before lunch, sell her a set of books, have a good meal, get my end in and then go to a movie.

Julie lived at the upper end of Manhattan in a wallpapered incubator. Her husband was a dope, as near as I could make out. That's to say he was a perfectly normal specimen who earned an honest living and voted the Republican or Democratic ticket according to mood. Julie was a good-natured
slob who never read anything more disturbing than the
Saturday Evening Post.
She was just a piece of ass, with about enough intelligence to realize that after a fuck you have to take a douche and if that doesn't work then a darning needle. She had done it so often, the darning-needle stunt, that she was an adept at it. She could bring on a hemorrhage even if it had been an immaculate conception. Her main idea was to enjoy herself like a drunken weasel and get it out of her system as quick as possible. She wouldn't flinch at using a chisel or a monkey wrench, if she thought either would do the trick.

I was a bit flabbergasted when she came to the door. I hadn't thought of the change a year or so can work in a female, nor had I thought how most females look at eleven in the morning when they are not expecting visitors. To be cruelly exact, she looked like a cold meat loaf that had been spattered with catsup and put back in the icebox. The Julie I had last seen was a dream by comparison. I had to make some rapid transpositions to adjust myself to the situation.

Naturally I was more in the mood to sell than to fuck. Before very long, however, I realized that to sell, I would have to fuck. Julie just couldn't understand what the hell had come over me—to walk in on her and try to dump a load of books on her. I couldn't tell her it would improve her mind because she had no mind, and she knew it and wasn't the least embarrassed to admit it.

She left me alone for a few minutes in order to primp herself up. I began reading the prospectus. I found it so interesting that I almost sold myself a set of books. I was reading a fragment about Coleridge, what a wonderful mind he had (and I had always thought him a bag of shit!), when I felt her coming towards me. It was so interesting, the passage, that I excused myself without looking up and continued reading. She knelt behind me, on the couch, and began reading over my shoulder. I felt her sloshy boobs joggling me but I was too intent on pursuing the ramifications of Coleridge's amazing mind to let her vegetable appendages disturb me.

Suddenly the beautifully bound prospectus went flying out of my hand.

“What are you reading that crap for?” she cried, swinging me around and holding me by the elbows. “I don't understand a word of it, and neither do you, I'll bet. What's the matter with you—can't you find yourself a job?”

A witless-shitless sort of grin slowly spread over her face. She looked like a Teutonic angel doing a real think. I got up, recovered the prospectus, and asked what about lunch.

“Jesus I like your crust,” said she. “What the hell do you think I am anyway?”

Here I had to pretend that I was only joking, but after putting my hand down her bosom and twiddling the nipple of of her right teat a while, I deftly brought the conversation back to the subject of food.

“Listen, you've changed,” she said. “I don't like the way you talk—or act.” Here she firmly stuck her teat back, as if it were a ball of wet socks going into a laundry bag. “Listen, I'm a married woman, do you realize that? Do you know what Mike would do to you if he caught you acting this way?”

“You're a bit changed yourself,” said I, rising to my feet and sniffing the air in search of provender. All I wanted now was food. I don't know why, but I had made up my mind that she would dish me up a good meal—that was the least she could do for me, lopsided moron that she was.

The only way to get anything out of her was to handle her. I had to pretend to get passionate mauling the cheeks of her tumorous ass. And yet not too passionate, because that would mean a quick fuck and maybe no lunch. If the meal were good I might do a hit-and-run job—that's what I was thinking to myself as I foozled around.

“Jesus Christ, all right, I'll get you a meal,” she blurted out, reading my thoughts like a blind bookworm.

“Fine,” I almost shouted. “What have you got?”

“Come and see for yourself,” she answered, dragging me to the kitchen and opening the icebox.

I saw ham, potato salad, sardines, cold beets, rice pudding, apple sauce, frankfurters, pickles, celery stalks, cream cheese and a special dish of puke with mayonnaise on it which I knew I didn't want.

“Let's bring it all out”, I suggested. “And have you any beer?”

“Yeah, and I got mustard too,” she snarled.

“Any bread?”

She gave me a look of clean disgust. I quickly yanked the things out of the icebox and set them on the table.

“Better make some coffee too,” I said.

“I suppose you'd like some whipped cream with it, wouldn't you? You know, I feel like poisoning you. Jesus, if you're hard up you could ask me to lend you some money . . . you oughtn't to come here and try to sell me a lot of crap. If you'd been a little nicer I'd have asked you out to lunch. I've got tickets for the theater. We could have had a good time. . . . I might even have bought the fool books. Mike isn't a bad guy. He'd have bought the books even if we had no intention of reading them.
If he thought you needed help. . . .
You walk in and treat me as if I were dirt. What did I ever do to you? I don't get it. Don't laugh! I'm serious. I don't know why I should take this from
you.
Who the hell do you think you are?”