V. (3 page)

Some dozen ex-Scaffold sailors wanted a reunion. Pig, appointing himself social chairman, decided on the Susanna Squaducci, an Italian luxury liner now in the last stages of construction in the Newport News yards.

"Back to Newport News?" (Deciding not to tell Pig about the disagreement with Teflon.) So: yo-yoing again.

"This has got to cease," he said but nobody was listening. Pig was off dancing the dirty boogie with Paola.

III

Profane slept that night at Pig's place down by the old ferry docks, and he slept alone. Paola had run into one of the Beatrices and gone off to stay the night with her, after promising demurely to be Profane's date at the New Year's party.

Around three Profane woke up on the kitchen floor with a headache. Night air, bitter cold, seeped under the door and from somewhere outside he could hear a low, persistent growl. "Pig," Profane croaked. "Where you keep the aspirin." No answer. Profane stumbled into the other room. Pig wasn't there. The growl outside turned more ominous. Profane went to the window and saw Pig down in the alley, sitting on his motorcycle and racing the engine. Snow fell in tiny glittering pinpoints, the alley held its own curious snowlight: turning Pig to black-and-white clown's motley and ancient brick walls, dusted with snow, to neutral gray. Pig had on a knitted watch cap, pulled down over his face to the neck so that his head showed up as a sphere of dead black. Engine exhaust roiled in clouds around him. Profane shivered. "What are you doing, Pig," he called. Pig didn't answer. The enigma or sinister vision of Pig and that Harley-Davidson alone in an alley at three in the morning reminded Profane too suddenly of Rachel, whom he didn't want to think about, not tonight in the bitter cold, with a headache, with snow slipping into the room.

Rachel Owlglass had owned, back in '54, this MG. Her Daddy's gift. After giving it its shakedown cruise in the region around Grand Central (where Daddy's office was), familiarizing it with telephone poles, fire hydrants and occasional pedestrians, she brought the car up to the Catskills for the summer. Here, little, sulky and voluptuous, Rachel would gee and haw this MG around Route 17's bloodthirsty curves and cutbacks, sashaying its arrogant butt past hay wagons, growling semis, old Ford roadsters filled to capacity with crewcut, undergraduate gnomes.

Profane was just out of the Navy and working that summer as assistant salad man at Schlozhauer's Trocadero, nine miles outside Liberty, New York. His chief was one Da Conho, a mad Brazilian who wanted to go fight Arabs in Israel. One night near the opening of the season a drunken Marine had showed up in the Fiesta Lounge or bar of the Trocadero, carrying a .30-caliber machine gun in his AWOL bag. He wasn't too sure how he had come by the weapon exactly: Da Conho preferred to think it had been smuggled out of Parris Island piece by piece, which was how the Haganah would do it. After a deal of arguing with the bartender, who also wanted the gun, Da Conho finally triumphed, swapping for it three artichokes and an eggplant. To the mezuzah nailed up over the vegetable reefer and the Zionist banner hanging in back of the salad table Da Conho added this prize. During the weeks that followed, when the head chef was looking the other way, Da Conho would assemble his machine gun, camouflage it with iceberg lettuce, watercress and Belgian endive, and mock-strafe the guests assembled in the dining room. "Yibble, yibble, yibble," he would go, squinting malevolent along the sights, "got you dead center, Abdul Sayid. Yibble, yibble, Muslim pig." Da Conho's machine gun was the only one in the world that went yibble, yibble. He would sit up past four in the morning cleaning it, dreaming of lunar-looking deserts, the sizzle of Chang music, Yemenite girls whose delicate heads were covered with white kerchiefs, whose loins ached with love. He wondered how American Jews could sit vainglorious in that dining room meal after meal while only halfway round the world the desert shifted relentless over corpses of their own. How could he tell soulless stomachs? Harangue with oil and vinegar, supplicate with heart of palm. The only nice he had was the machine gun's. Could they hear that, can stomachs listen: no. And you never hear the one that gets you. Aimed perhaps at any alimentary canal in a Hart Schaffner & Marx suit which vented lewd gurgles at the waitresses who passed, that gun was an object only, pointing where any suitable unbalance force might direct it: but which belt buckle was Da Conho taking a lead on: Abdul Sayid, the alimentary canal, himself? Why ask. He knew no more than that he was a Zionist, suffered, was confused, was daft to stand rooted sock-top deep in the loam of any kibbutz, a hemisphere away.

Profane had wondered then what it was with Da Conho and that machine gun. Love for an object, this was new to him. When he found out not long after this that the same thing was with Rachel and her MG, he had his first intelligence that something had been going on under the rose, maybe for longer and with more people than he would care to think about.

He met her through the MG, like everyone else met her. It nearly ran him over. He was wandering out the back door the kitchen one noon carrying a garbage can overflowing with lettuce leaves Da Conho considered substandard when somewhere off to his right he heard the MG's sinister sound. Profane kept walking, secure in a faith that burdened pedestrians have the right-of-way. Next thing he knew he way clipped in the rear end by the car's right fender. Fortunately, it was only moving at 5 mph - not fast enough to break anything, only to send Profane, garbage can and lettuce leaves flying ass over teakettle in a great green shower.

He and Rachel, both covered with lettuce leaves, looked at each other, wary. "How romantic," she said. "For all know you may be the man of my dreams. Take that lettuce leaf off your face so I can see." Like doffing a cap - remembering his place - he removed the leaf.

"No," she said, "you're not him."

"Maybe," said Profane, "we can try it next time with a fig leaf."

"Ha, ha," she said and roared off. He found a rake and started collecting the garbage into one pile. He reflected that here was another inanimate object that had nearly killed him. He was not sure whether he meant Rachel or the car. He put the pile of lettuce leaves in the garbage can and dumped the can back of the parking lot in a small ravine which served the Trocadero for a refuse pile. As he was turning to the kitchen Rachel came by again. The MG's adenoidal exhaust sounded like it probably could be heard all the way to Liberty. "Come for a ride, hey Fatso," she called out. Profane reckoned he could. It was a couple hours before he had to go in to set up for supper.

Five minutes out on Route 17 he decided if he ever if back to the Trocadero unmaimed and alive to forget about Rachel and only be interested thenceforth in quiet, pedestrian girls. She drove like one of the damned on holiday. He had no doubt she knew the car's and her own abilities; but how did she know, for instance, when she passed on a blind curve of that two-lane road, that the milk truck approaching would be just far enough away for her to whip back into line with a whole sixteenth of an inch to spare?

He was too afraid for his life to be, as he normally was, girl-shy. He reached over, opened her pocketbook, found a cigarette, lit it. She didn't notice. She drove single-minded and unaware there was anyone next to her. She only spoke once, to tell him there was a case of cold beer in the back. He dragged on her cigarette and wondered if he had a compulsion to suicide. It seemed sometimes that he put himself deliberately in the way of hostile objects, as if he were looking to get schlimazzeled out of existence. Why was he here anyway? Because Rachel had a nice ass? He glanced sidewise at it on the leather, upholstery, bouncing, synched with the car; watched the not-so-simple nor quite harmonic motion of her left breast inside the black sweater she had on. She pulled in finally at an abandoned rock quarry. Irregular chunks of stone were scattered around. He didn't know what kind, but it was all inanimate. They made it up a dirt road to a flat place forty feet above the floor of the quarry.

It was an uncomfortable afternoon. Sun beat down out of a cloudless, unprotective heaven. Profane, fat, sweated. Rachel played Do You Know the few kids she'd known who went to his high school and Profane lost. She talked about all the dates she was getting this summer, all it seemed with upperclassmen attending Ivy League colleges. Profane would agree from time to time how wonderful it was.

She talked about Bennington, her alma mater. She talked about herself.

Rachel came from the Five Towns on the south shore of Long Island, an area comprising Malverne, Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Hewlett and Woodmere and sometimes Long Beach and Atlantic Beach, though no one has ever thought of calling it the Seven Towns. Though the inhabitants are not Sephardim, the area seems afflicted with a kind of geographical incest. Daughters are constrained to pace demure and darkeyed like so many Rapunzels within the magic frontiers of a country where the elfin architecture of Chinese restaurants, seafood palaces and split-level synagogues is often enchanting as the sea; until they have ripened enough to be sent off to the mountains and colleges of the Northeast. Not to hunt husbands (for a certain parity has always obtained the Five Towns whereby a nice boy can be predestined for husband as early as age sixteen or seventeen); but to be anted the illusion at least of having "played the field" - so necessary to a girl's emotional development.

Only the brave escape. Come Sunday nights, with golfing done, the Negro maids, having rectified the disorder of last night's party, off to visit with relatives in Lawrence, and Ed Sullivan still hours away, the blood of this kingdom exit from their enormous homes, enter their automobiles and proceed to the business districts. There to divert themselves among seemingly endless vistas of butterfly shrimp and egg foo yung; Orientals bow, and smile, and flutter through summer's twilight, and in their voices are the birds of summer. And with night's fall comes a brief promenade in the street: the torso of the father solid and sure in its J. Press suit; the eyes of the daughters secret behind sunglasses rimmed in rhinestones. And as the jaguar has given its name to the mother's car, so has it given its skin-pattern to the slacks which compass her sleek hips. Who could escape? Who could want to?

Rachel wanted. Profane, having repaired roads around the Five Towns, could understand why.

By the time the sun was going down they'd nearly finished the case between them. Profane was balefully drunk. He got out of the car, wandered off behind a tree and pointed west, with some intention of pissing on the sun to put it out for good and all, this being somehow important for him. (Inanimate objects could do what they wanted. Not what they wanted because things do not want; only men. But things do what they do, and this is why Profane was pissing at the sun.)

It went down; as if he'd extinguished it after all and continued on immortal, god of a darkened world.

Rachel was watching him, curious. He zipped up and staggered back to the beer box. Two cans left. He opened them and handed one to her. "I put the sun out," he said, "we drink to it." He spilled most of it down his shirt.

Two more folded cans fell to the bottom of the quarry, the empty case followed.

She hadn't moved from the car.

"Benny," one fingernail touched his face.

"Wha."

"Will you be my friend?"

"You look like you have enough."

She looked down the quarry. "Why don't we make believe none of the other is real," she said: "no Bennington, no Schlozhauer's, and no Five Towns. Only this quarry: the dead rocks that were here before us and will be after us."

"Why."

"Isn't that the world?"

"They teach you that in freshman geology or something?"

She looked hurt. "It's just something I know."

"Benny," she cried - a little cry - "be my friend, is all."

He shrugged.

"Write."

"Now don't expect -"

"How the road is. Your boy's road that I'll never see, with its Diesels and dust, roadhouses, crossroads saloons. That's all. What it's like west of Ithaca and south of Princeton. Places I won't know."

He scratched his stomach. "Sure."

Profane kept running into her in what was left of the summer at least once a day. They talked in the car always, he trying to find the key to her own ignition behind the hooded eyes, she sitting back of the right-hand steering wheel and talking, talking, nothing but MG-words, inanimate-words he couldn't really talk back at.

Soon enough what he was afraid would happen happened - he finagled himself into love for Rachel and was only surprised that it had taken so long. He lay in the bunkhouse nights smoking in the dark and apostrophizing the glowing end of his cigarette butt. Around two in the morning the occupant of the upper bunk would come in off the night shift - one Duke Wedge, a pimpled bravo from the Chelsea district, who always wanted to talk about how much he was getting, which was, in fact, plenty. It lulled Profane to sleep. One night he did indeed come upon Rachel and Wedge, the scoundrel, parked in the MG in front of her cabin. He slunk back to bed, not feeling particularly betrayed because he knew Wedge wouldn't get anywhere. He even stayed awake and let Wedge regale him when he came in with a step-by-step account of how he had almost made it but not quite. As usual Profane fell asleep in the middle.

He never got beyond or behind the chatter about her world - one of objects coveted or valued, an atmosphere Profane couldn't breathe. The last time he saw her was Labor Day night. She was to leave the next day. Somebody stole Da Conho's machine gun that evening, just before supper. Da Conho dashed around in tears looking for it. The head chef told Profane to make salads. Somehow Profane managed to get frozen strawberries in the French dressing and chopped liver in the Waldorf salad, plus accidentally dropping two dozen or so radishes in the French fryer (though these drew raves from the customers when he served them anyway, too lazy to go after more) From time to time the Brazilian would come charging through the kitchen crying.

He never found his beloved machine gun. Lorn and drained-nervous, he was fired next day. The season was over anyway - for all Profane knew Da Conho may have even taken ship one day for Israel, to tinker with the guts of some tractor, trying to forget, like many exhausted workers abroad, some love back in the States.