V. (7 page)

"What do you let her take for," he had said, "always take." It was in his studio, she remembered, back during one of those Slab-and-Rachel idylls that usually preceded a Slab-and-Esther Affair. Con Edison had just shut off the electricity so all they had to look at each other by was one gas burner on the stove, which bloomed in a blue and yellow minaret, making the faces masks, their eyes expressionless sheets of light.

"Baby," she said, "Slab, it is only that the kid is broke, and if I can afford it why not."

"No," Slab said, a tic dancing high on his cheekbone - or it might only have been the gaslight - "no. Don't you think I see what this is, she needs you for all the money she keeps soaking you for, and you need her in order to feel like a mother. Every dime she gets out of your pocketbook adds one more strand to this cable that ties you two together like an umbilical cord, making it that much harder to cut, making her survival that much more in danger if the cord ever is cut. How much has she ever paid you back."

"She will," Rachel said.

"Sure. Now, $800 more. To change this." He waved his arm at a small portrait, leaning against the wall by the garbage can. He reached over, picked it up, tilted it toward the blue flame so they both could see. "Girl at a party." The picture, perhaps, was meant to be looked at only under hydrocarbon light. It was Esther, leaning against a wall, looking straight out of the picture, at someone approaching her. And there, that look in the eyes - half victim, half in control.

"Look at it, the nose," he said. "Why does she want to get that changed. With the nose she is a human being."

"Is it only an artist's concern," Rachel said. "You object on pictorial, or social grounds. But what else."

"Rachel," he yelled, "she takes home 50 a week, 25 comes out for analysis, 12 for rent, leaving 13. What for, for high heels she breaks on subway gratings, for lipstick, earrings; clothes. Food, occasionally. So now, 800 for a nose job. What will it be next. Mercedes Benz 300 SL? Picasso original, abortion, wha."

"She has been right on time," Rachel said, frosty, "in case you are worrying."

"Baby," suddenly ail wistful and boyish, "you are a good woman, member of a vanishing race. It is right you should help the less fortunate. But you reach a point."

The argument had gone back and forth with neither of them actually getting mad and at three in the morning the inevitable terminal point - bed - to caress away the headaches both had developed. Nothing settled, nothing ever settled. That had been back in September. The gauze beak was gone, the nose now a proud sickle, pointing, you felt, at the big Westchester in the sky where all God's elect, soon or late, ended up.

She turned out of the park and walked away from the Hudson on 112th Street. Screwer and screwee. On this foundation, perhaps, the island stood, from the bottom of the lowest sewer bed right up through the streets to the tip of the TV antenna on top of the Empire State Building.

She entered her lobby, smiled at the ancient doorman; into the elevator, up seven flights to 7G, home, ho, ho. First thing she saw through the open door was a sign on the kitchen wall, with the word PARTY, illuminated by pencil caricatures of the Whole Sick Crew. She tossed the pocketbook on the kitchen table, closed the door. Paola's handiwork, Paola Maijstral the third roommate. Who had also left a note on the table. "Winsome, Charisma, Fu, and I. V-Note, McClintic Sphere. Paola Maijstral." Nothing but proper nouns. The girl lived proper nouns. Persons, places. No things. Had anyone told her about things? It seemed Rachel had had to do with nothing else. The main one now being Esther's nose.

In the shower Rachel sang a torch song, in a red-hot-mama voice which the tile chamber magnified. She knew it amused people because it came from such a little girl:

Say a man is no good

For anything but jazzing around.

He'll go live in a cathouse,

He'll jazz it all over town.

And all kinds of meanness

To put a good woman down.

Now I am a good woman

Because I'm telling you I am

And I sure been put down

But honey, I don't give a damn.

You going to have a hard time

Finding you a kind hearted man.

Because a kind hearted man

Is the kind who will . . .

Presently the light in Paola's room began to leak out the window, up the air shaft and into the sky, accompanied by clinking bottles, running water, flushing toilet in the bathroom. And then the almost imperceptible sounds of Rachel fixing her long hair.

When she left, turning off all the lights, the hands on an illuminated clock near Paola Maijstral's bed stood near six o'clock. No ticking: the clock was electric. Its minute hand could not be seen to move. But soon the hand passed twelve and began its course down the other side of the face; as if it had passed through the surface of a mirror, and had now to repeat in mirror-time what it had done on the side of real-time.

II

The party, as if it were inanimate after all, unwound like a clock's mainspring toward the edges of the chocolate room, seeking some easing of its own tension, some equilibrium. Near its center Rachel Owlglass was curled on the pine floor, legs shining pale through black stockings.

You felt she'd done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.

Young Stencil the world adventurer, seated on the sink, waggled his shoulderblades like wings. Her back was to him; through the entrance to the kitchen he could see the shadow of her spine's indentation snaking down a deeper black along the black of her sweater, see the tiny movements of her head and hair as she listened.

She didn't like him, Stencil had decided.

"It's the way he looks at Paola," she'd told Esther. Esther of course had told Stencil.

But it wasn't sexual, it lay deeper. Paola was Maltese.

Born in 1901, the year Victoria died, Stencil was in time to be the century's child. Raised motherless. The father, Sidney Stencil, had served the Foreign Office of his country taciturn and competent. No facts on the mother's disappearance. Died in childbirth, ran off with someone, committed suicide: some way of vanishing painful enough to keep Sidney from ever referring to it in all the correspondence to his son which is available. The father died under unknown circumstances in 1919 while investigating the June Disturbances in Malta.

On an evening in 1946, separated by stone balusters from the Mediterranean, the son had sat with one Margravine di Chaive Lowenstein on the terrace of her villa on the western coast of Mallorca; the sun was setting into thick clouds, turning all the visible sea to a sheet of pearl-gray. Perhaps they may have felt like the last two gods - the last inhabitants - of a watery earth; or perhaps - but it would be unfair to infer. Whatever the reason, the scene played as follows:

MARG: Then you must leave?

STEN: Stencil must be in Lucerne before the week is out.

MARG: I dislike premilitary activity.

STEN: It isn't espionage.

MARG: What then?

(Stencil laughs, watching the twilight.)

MARG: You are so close.

STEN: To whom? Margravine, not even to himself. This place, this island: all his life he's done nothing but hop from island to island. Is that a reason? Does there have to be a season? Shall he tell you: he works for no Whitehall, none conceivable unless, ha ha, the network of white halls in is own brain: these featureless corridors he keeps swept and correct for occasional visiting agents. Envoys from the zones of human crucified, the fabled districts of human love. But in whose employ? Not his own: it would be lunacy, the lunacy of any self-appointed prophet. . .

(There is a long pause, as the light reaching them through e clouds weakens or thins out to wash over them enervated and ugly.)

STEN: Stencil reached his majority three years after old Stencil died. Part of the estate that came to him then was a number of manuscript books bound in half-calf and warped by the humid air of many European cities. His journals, his unofficial log of an agent's career. Under "Florence, April, 1899" is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: "There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report."

MARG: A woman.

STEN: Another woman.

MARG: It is she you are pursuing? Seeking?

STEN: You'll ask next if he believes her to be his mother. The question is ridiculous.

Since 1945, Herbert Stencil had been on a conscious campaign to do without sleep. Before 1945 he had been slothful, accepting sleep as one of life's major blessings. He'd spent the time between wars footloose, the source of his income then, as now, uncertain. Sidney hadn't left much in the way of pounds and shillings, but had generated good will in nearly every city in the western world among those of his own generation. This being a generation which still believed in The Family, it meant a good lookout for young Herbert. He didn't freeload all the time: he'd worked as croupier in southern France, plantation foreman in East Africa, bordello manager in Greece; and in a number of civil service positions back home. Stud poker could be depended on to fill in the low places - though an occasional mountain or two had also been leveled.

In that interregnum between kingdoms-of-death Herbert just got by, studying his father's journals only by way of learning how to please the blood-conscious "contacts" of his legacy. The passage on V. was never noticed.

In 1939 he was in London, working far the Foreign Office. September came and went: it was as if a stranger, located above the frontiers of consciousness, were shaking him. He didn't particularly care to wake; but realized that if he didn't he would soon be sleeping alone. Being the sociable sort, Herbert volunteered his services. He was sent to North Africa, in some fuzzily defined spy/interpreter/liaison capacity and seesawed with the rest from Tobruk to El Agheila, back through Tobruk to El Alamein, back again to Tunisia. At the end of it he had seen more dead than he cared to again. Peace having been won he flirted with the idea of resuming that prewar sleepwalk. Sitting at a cafe in Oran frequented largely by American ex-GI's who'd decided not to return to the States just yet, he was leafing through the Florence journal idly, when the sentences on V. suddenly acquired a light of their own.

"V. for victory," the Margravine had suggested playfully.

"No." Stencil shook his head. "It may be that Stencil has been lonely and needs something for company."

Whatever the reason, he began to discover that sleep was taking up time which could be spent active. His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to - if not vitality, then at least activity. Work, the chase - for it was V. he hunted - far from being a means to glorify God and one's own godliness (as the Puritans believe) was for Stencil grim, joyless; a conscious acceptance of the unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was there to track down.

Finding her: what then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had become directed entirely inward, toward this acquired sense of animateness. Having found this he could hardly release it, it was too dear. To sustain it he had to hunt V.; but if he should find her, where else would there be to go but back into half-consciousness? He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the search. Approach and avoid.

Here in New York the impasse had become acute. He'd come to the party at the invitation of Esther Harvitz, whose plastic surgeon Schoenmaker owned a vital piece of the V. jigsaw, but protested ignorance.

Stencil would wait. He'd taken over a low-rent apartment in the 30's (East Side), temporarily vacated by an Egyptologist named Bongo-Shaftsbury, son of an Egyptologist Sidney had known. They had been opponents once, before the first war, as had been Sidney and many of the present "contacts"; which was curious, certainly, but lucky for Herbert because it doubled his chances of subsistence. He had been using the apartment for a pied-a-terre this last month; snatching sleep between interminable visits among his other "contacts"; a population coming more and more to comprise sons and friends of the originals. At each step the sense of "blood" weakened. Stencil could see a day when he would only be tolerated. It would then be he and V. all alone, in a world that somehow had lost sight of them both.

Until such tune there were Schoenmaker to wait for; and Chiclitz the munitions king and Eigenvalue the physician (epithets characteristically stemming from Sidney's day though Sidney had known neither of the men personally) to fill up the time. It was dithering, it was a stagnant period and Stencil knew it. A month was too long to stay in any city unless there were something tangible to investigate. He'd taken to roving the city, aimlessly, waiting for a coincidence. None came. He'd snatched at Esther's invitation, hoping to come across some clue, trace, hint. But the Whole Sick Crew had nothing to offer.

The owner of this apartment seemed to express a prevailing humor common to them all. As if he were Stencil's prewar self he presented to Stencil a horrifying spectacle.

Fergus Mixolydian the Irish Armenian Jew and universal man laid claim to being the laziest living being in Nueva York. His creative ventures, all incomplete, ranged from a western in blank verse to a wall he'd had removed from a stall in the Penn Station men's room and entered in an exhibition as what the old Dadaists called a "ready-made." Critical comment was not kind. Fergus got so lazy that his only activity (short of those necessary to sustain life) was once a week to fiddle around at the kitchen sink with dry cells, retorts, alembics, salt solutions. What he was doing, he was generating hydrogen; this went to fill a sturdy green balloon with a great Z printed on it. He would tie the balloon by a string to the post of the bed whenever he plane to sleep, this being the only way for visitors to tell which side of consciousness Fergus was on.