The Complete Roderick (60 page)

‘Usually follows food,’ Vitanuova said.

‘These kinaesthesic ideas grabbed me more and more, until finally I got a chance to resign and start a new career in dance.’

‘Yeah I remember your firm going broke on research costs, you got squeezed out when Katrat Fun Foods took over Dipchip International, as I recollect. Excuse me, I better have a word with my employee there.’

Hatlo immediately enjoined conversation with Mrs Doody, who was borrowing a cigarette from the man in dark glasses.

‘My hubby’s got all mine,’ she explained, tearing off the filter and accepting a light. ‘He always does this, goes off with my ciggies – thanks. What did you say your name was?’

‘Felix. Felix Culpa.’

Hatlo, holding on his toupee, said, ‘Hiya, Felix. I was uh just telling Joe there how I got around to dedicating my life to the dance you might say. The name’s Harry Hatlo.’

‘Dedication,’ said Felix Culpa. ‘Discipline. The ultimate cruelty of precise articulation – the curve of arm like a scorpion’s tail.’

Mrs Doody spat out a crumb of tobacco. ‘Thanks for the ciggy, Felix. See you.’

Culpa nodded, apparently looking elsewhere. ‘Take
Les Noces,
almost a celebration of rape there, and starts off with that cruel hair-brushing scene –’

Hatlo said, ‘Well see most of my work is more in the line of therapy, I work for the city see and —’

‘But the point is, Stravinsky actually scored it for pianolas. It’s like a demonstration of the marriage of pain and precision. Machine cruelty.’

Judi Mazzini turned around. ‘I think I read something like that not long ago,
The Machine Dances
by some sociologist named Rogers.’

Culpa hesitated a second. ‘Yes, yes I’m familiar with that. And it does sum up a fascinating overview –’

‘Not very well thought out,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to point out a lot of machine arts stuff in the Twenties. I mean we all know George Grosz with his pictures of leering automata and their sexy brides.
We’ve all seen
Metropolis
starring a steel girl with doorbells on her chest. But so what, it doesn’t mean you can really compare the Rockettes to an assembly line, or Isadora Duncan to a Chrysler Airflow – that’s anachronistic anyway.’

Culpa said, ‘Well I think his central concern was the er depersonalization pressures of modern societal parameters, people into robots, dancers into machines, wouldn’t you say?’

Judi Mazzini said, ‘I grant you they did a lot of mechanical ballets around then, like
Machine of 3000
with the dancers all dressed like water boilers, and George Antheil’s
Ballet Mécanique
scored for airplane props, anvils and car horns. But are they anymore significant than other stuff? Plays, there was
R.U.R. and The Adding Machine
– why single out dancing?’

‘Isn’t that Allbright who just staggered in?’ someone said, and heads turned to watch a shaggy, hollow-eyed man in an old torn storm-coat limp into the living room and set down his large briefcase. His heard was iced, and his dirty hair blended into the fake fur on his coat collar. One lapel of the coat was torn and hung down like a withered breast.

‘Goddamnit, where’s the Christmas of it?’ he shouted in the sudden silence. After a pause to pick yellow ice from his moustache, he shouted again:

‘I said where’s the Christmas of it? Where’s the holly and
the
ivy, the running of
the
dear Saviour’s birthday to you, Merry gentlemen upon a Christmastime in the city, silver bells jingle all the way in a manger no crib for Santa Claus comes tonight – where is it?’ There was an oil-slick of grime on the hand with which he snatched a drink from the nearest tray. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you – birth!’

Francine Moxon was beside him quickly, shoving him firmly into an armchair. ‘Allbright, we’re not hiring any Dylan Thomas acts today. Now you sit here and shut up and I’ll see you get enough to eat and drink. But behave yourself!’

‘Merry Christmas, you gorgeous piece on earth,’ he murmured, and tried to kiss her ear, before she swept away to a group where someone was explaining the difference between a lay analyst and a lay figure.

At the piano the blue-haired man sang:

Talkin’ ’bout the pyramids

Talkin’ ’bout the pyramids, baby,

Of the Old

And Middle

Kingdoms, yes yes.

They was Zoser and Sekhemkhet,

Khaba and Seneferu …

Other voices rolled on, full of pride in a new vehicle, scorn for an untried idea, trust in a dubious therapy. A waiter brought a frothy drink to Mrs Fleischman, who tasted it and waved it away. ‘No, Toy. No, Toy …’

Father Warren settled himself beside Mrs McBabbitt, his leather cassock rustling like batwings. ‘Yes I guess you could say I’m in the camp of the enemy here, heh heh, I am the
pro tern
chairman of the local branch of the New Luddites. And I realize almost everyone here is connected with computer science in some way. But where else can I find converts? Our Lord made his mission among evil persons.’

She broke a pose slightly to look at him. ‘You think computer people are really evil?’

‘Not necessarily. I just meant –’

‘Because I’ve got this real good friend, he’s very big in computers, and he says the only evil is being poor. And when you look at that guy over there with the dirty beard, you kind of get the idea – just look at him!’

Father Warren craned around, only to catch General Fleischman staring at him with a look of distaste.

Someone else glowered at Indica. ‘I knew her when she was plain old Indica Franklin, just another faculty wife who wanted to be a dancer. She made it, too. Got to be a dancing pizza-flavoured taco on TV.’

‘Maybe he is a priest, maybe he ain’t,’ the General said to Roderick. ‘You can’t hardly tell the clergy from anybody else these days, they go around wearing drag and smoking pot just like human beings.’

‘I guess they are human beings, General.’

Fleischman looked at him to see if this was a joke. ‘Yeah. Last
priest I listened to was good old Father Cog on the radio. Before the war.’

‘The war?’

‘Okay, sure, maybe he went a little far, using Goebbels’s speeches for his own sermons. You ain’t Jewish, are you, Rod?’

‘I’m not anything.’

‘Good boy. If you ever need a job, we can always use a smart young fella like you at the bank. You just see Personnel, tell ’em
I
said to give you a job. Now what was I saying?’

‘Before the, er, war …’

‘Crazy times, Rod, crazy times. You know somebody even kidnapped Charlie McCarthy? In 1939 that was I always wondered if maybe Father Cog knew something about that, only they wouldn’t let him speak out, you know? Then, well the war came along and they shut him up. You can’t go around telling people the truth in wartime.’

Edd McFee, who was across the room talking to Francine, turned to glower at Roderick. ‘Who is that guy, anyway? He’s been talking to old Fleischman a hell of a long time.’

‘What do you care?’

‘Me?
I
don’t care. Only I wanta get the general to back my new project, I figured I’d get a chance to soften him up a little here. He brushed out a wrinkle in his new Army fatigues. ‘I wanted to explain to him how important it is for his bank to get deep into the visual arts, to really communicate the visual the impact of the visual –’

‘Don’t give me the sales talk,’ she said laughing. ‘What’s the project?’

‘I want to set up this satellite link between a dozen different artists all painting in different locations, see? Like one can be in the desert and one even in the middle of the ocean on a raft, one in the mountains, one in New York and so on – and all of them have two-way visual and audio all the time. So all of them just paint what they feel – the total group experience.’ He paused. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘Where do you come in, Edd?’

‘I direct. I tell everybody what to do and I watch them do it. So the whole thing becomes really my work, see?’ He looked over at
Fleischman again. ‘I got a really good story for the general. Did you know that Whistler went to West Point?’

‘No.’ Francine sneaked a look at her watch.

‘He did. And he flunked out on chemistry. He said. “If silicon was a gas, I’d be a major general.”’

Nearby the piano thundered and a ragged chorus took up ‘Frosty the Snowman’ as a waiter passed bearing a frothy pink cocktail which he conveyed down the room to the dumpy woman in purple, who was speaking to an astrologer.

‘No kidding? The same day as Monet, well there you are! Talent is talent. You know I was just talking to some young smartass kept trying to tell me Rodin’s works were like cheap Jap movies, how do you like that? I mean,
Gate of Hell,
how can you compare that to a cheap –’

She paused to sip the drink. ‘That’s better, Toy. That’s the ticket. Now just keep ’em coming.’

Allbright heaved himself to his feet nearby and, smiling at everyone with bleeding gums, made his way along the room, pausing to collect a drink, to lend a cigarette to Mrs Doody, and to confront Felix Culpa.

‘Hello again!’

‘What?’

‘I said hello again. I met you before didn’t I? Aren’t you some kind of – pet-food market research was it?’

‘Mistake,’ said Felix Culpa hoarsely, keeping a glass in front of his face. ‘I’m in satellite leasing, on the educational side. We network to school systems, linking them on a broad spectrum of, of achievement-based multifaceted synergies, excuse me.’ He almost knocked over Judi Mazzini in his hurry to escape.

‘I’ve scared him off. Funny.’

‘Maybe if you took a bath now and then, people would find you nicer to be near,’ said Judi Mazzini. ‘We were just talking about
The Machine Dances.
Know it?’

‘I ought to, I wrote it.’

‘Oh come on, Allbright.’

‘I did. Ghosted it for a guy named Rogers, that’s why it’s the only book of his anybody reads. Rest of his stuff is so loaded with sociological jargon it moves along like the shoes of Boris Karloff. Matter of fact he writes a little like your friend here talks.’

‘Felix? I think he only talks that way when he’s nervous.’ She looked at Allbright. ‘You’re disgusting, why don’t you ask Francine if you can take a bath here, maybe borrow some clothes from Everett?’

He swayed a little, looking into his glass and trying to frame an answer, while behind him someone complained about sinus trouble in Prague.

‘What were you saying about my book, then?’

‘I said it wasn’t very well thought out. I mean, it’s kind of easy to just make a list of all the ballets with mechanical people or dolls or puppets in them, from
Coppélia
to
Petrushka –’

‘Satie’s
Jack-in-the-Box
and Bartok’s
The Wooden Prince –’

Yes and
The Nutcracker,
but isn’t it all kind of easy? Why does it have to be significant that people wrote “robot” ballets? The fact is, they were just interested in setting up problems in movement,
Coppélia
was just –’

‘They started to think of people in terms of machine movements, that’s the whole point. Once you reduce a man to a gesture, you can set up assembly lines, that’s the whole point! People reduced to therbligs, goddamnit, that is the – !’

‘Shh! Okay, okay.’

‘And the Rockettes are an assembly line, assembling a gesture, a pure gesture.’

Harry Hatlo, though forgotten, stood by, still holding his toupee in place. ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘My own work is more like pure therapy I guess, I choreograph routines to work over postural and coordination problems; right now I am working with some young people who as kids some time ago got brain damaged from mercury poisoning, it leaves you with a little parasthesia, some weakness and tremors. So what we been trying …’

His monotone was lost in the general surge of voices arguing over stale politics, declaring faith in a rising stock market, seeking reassurance about a cancer cure, or wondering whether Frosty really had a very shiny nose.

‘Indica!’

She turned, preparing a smile for a friend, to find the masklike face of a stranger. No one. No one important, but these eyes … something about the eyes made her uneasy.

‘Do I know you?’

‘Don’t you?’

She dropped the smile. ‘No. No, I don’t know you.’ The eyes held her for a moment before she managed to turn away – hadn’t she seen these eyes before? Where, not in this false face with its v-shaped smile. Not in this, not in any face. The eyes she was beginning to recall had no face to them.

‘I’ll give you a hint. I used to follow you.’

‘You still here?’ She spoke without looking at him, frightened now, feeling the chill gaze on her neck.
Following her.
That was it, the nightmare came back to her so suddenly and clearly that she almost staggered; covered by banging her glass on the bar.

‘Like another drink here,’ she said. ‘And please tell this gentleman to –’

But he was gone. Only the revived nightmare remained.
She was sitting in the kitchen talking to her mother on the phone when she looked under the pine table and saw the eyes glittering, something ready to pounce
…
Then she was up and running through a dead woods, some trees charred by lightning, and behind her the faint clank of tank treads, the beast that could not be killed, the eyes that would not close, endless, endless pursuit
…

General Fleischman said to Norm, ‘Poetry, I got nothing against poetry, it’s poets I can’t stand. Like that creep over there in the storm-coat, never had a bath or a shave in his life. Afraid it’d spoil his poetry if he got clean once. I don’t mind telling you, when Moxon asked me to invest money from my bank in poetry, I laughed out loud. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Uh, right, sir.’

‘But this turns out to be real educational and kinda synergistic, so I think it might just develop into a nice little media package. See Moxon is going to market these Home Art Kits, each one is like a little complete art package with music, visuals, prose poetry what-have-you, all wrapped up together – here, let me show you.’

He produced a pocket recorder TV. ‘Course on this bitty screen everything gets diminutified, but here. This card is, see, Number Fifteen of the Nutshell Poets Series, John Keats. Like it says here how he liked birds and all. Animals are a plus in this line, kids like to hear how Shelley liked birds too, how Elizabeth Browning liked her dog Hushpuppy –’