William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (60 page)

ah ah,
patience my pretty, I know you say symptomatic not of that society, but of
our
society, the machine culture, yet so archetypical is this South with its cancerous religiosity, its exhausting need to put manners before morals, to negate all
ethos
—— Call it a
husk
of a culture. It’s a wonder, my pretty, you weren’t put out at the age of six, like certain tribal children in the d’Entrecasteaux, to dig grubs for yourself alone.” “Yes. Yes.” That’s what I replied. But I remembered grass, and gulls. “All right, lady,” the driver said, pulling up in front of the Mews, “old Stan Kosicki brings you to your destination safe and sound.” The meter gave a last click; he stopped it, pulling up the flag: 0.50. I felt in my purse but I counted only thirty cents. Terror. This would mess me up with Harry, and I remembered him, before it really got bad: “I hate to bring it up, darling, but you’ll have to be more careful with the dough, I hate to say it, darling, but it all becomes part of the syndrome, along with the dirt beneath the bed, do you understand?” “I only have thirty cents,” I told the driver, and my heart was pounding not because of him but of my Harry: what would he say when he had to pay? But then I said, “But just wait a minute, and I’ll go get some.” “Sure, lady, old Stan Kosicki is patience incarnated.” He stuck up his hand, lit a cigarette and leaned back. Or was it, I thought, sitting on the edge of the seat and retrieving my bag, or was it—— It was Strassman who talked about the syndrome: you are dangerously abstracted, he said and he wiped his nose, you do need my help you know. “Oh pooh, you’re crazy,” I said aloud, and the driver turned and chuckled: “That’s right, lady. It’s a crazy world. Sometimes I wonder if even old Stan Kosicki ain’t crazy.” “Not you,” I said. I got out of the cab. “Just a minute,” I said. Then I walked across the asphalt drive to Albert Berger’s, the first door painted white, with a bronze phallic knocker from Spanish Morocco. A skinny Hindu answered right away, before I had time to think. Of Harry coming or anything. His name was Cyril Something: he had an accent both Balliol and Indian and a perpetual leer, he had a martini in his hand. “ ’Allo, Peyton,” he said. “Hello Cyril,” I said. “Is Harry here?” “You mean Meestah Harry Meelah?” “Yes,” I said, “Harry Meelah. Is he here?” He stood wobbling for a minute, looking at me and thinking, with a wrinkled brow and blue, pouting lips. “Naw,” he said, “I’m rawther afred not.” I couldn’t think: I stood watching him, then I turned sideways toward the avenue and saw a flight of sparrows come from a tree, sprung out of the foliage like a swarm of wasps, chattering shrilly, disappear over a housetop. A bus passed south, six people on the top deck absorbing the sunshine: I couldn’t think. Then I thought: oh Harry. I held the bag to my breast, bent my head down, heard the patient steady click and whir of wheels. You, swiftly fading. Where had he gone? “Why, Peyton, why do you weep?” Cyril said slyly. “I’m drowning,” I said. “Drowning?” “No,” I said, “I mean I’m not drowning. I mean I’m crying because I’m so happy. Because the war is over and we have saved the world from democracy.” “Queer girl. Won’t you plis come in? Albert will be delayted, you know.” “Yes.” I wiped the tears on my bag, and the powder came off, too. I stepped inside, my reflection in the hallway mirror: a perfect mess. Cyril opened the other door; he wobbled slightly. He put a hand on my waist, propelled me forward gently: “We haven’t seen you for
such
a time.” “I know——” I began, but then I thought, why am I here? With Harry not. And I turned around, clutching my clock: “No really, Cyril, I mustn’t come in.” “And why not, mayt I ask?” He had wide-spaced teeth, his fleshy lips surrounded them like blue rubber cushions. I said, “Because he’s not here.” “Who?” Puzzled again, the mystified East. “Harry,” I said, “Harry!” “Ah,” he leered, “Meestah Harry Meelah. Well, stay a bit, p’raps someone will provide you weeth info’mation.” “Perhaps,” I said. He turned me around again, pushed me into the room: an air-conditioned seacave with strangled sick sunshine and darkness infringing upward, where cigarette smoke curled in milky wreaths and Albert Berger, like Poseidon and his trident approaching me through the gloom with a cocktail shaker, sidestepped the rocks huddled on the floor. “Ah, Peyton,” he said, “my pretty one, you’ve come back to us.” “Yes,” I said, “where’s Harry?” “Oh, my dear, you’ll have to ask Lennie. He’s in the study with La Baronesse du Louialles.” “Oh,” I said. He hovered over me with a caved-in chest, eyes watering allergically behind his glasses, skin white as a turnip. “And Harry isn’t here?” I said. “Oh, dear no, he left almost as soon as he came. Something about work, poor drudge. Come sit down by me, pretty one.” His voice was high and hollow, sexless, ageless, almost extinct, like the empty clacking of a metal bird. “Come with me, my pretty,” he said, and he took my hand with fingers chilled by the cocktail shaker and by something else cold and internal, too, as if his heart pumped not blood but frigid, dark, subterranean water. Thus I passed with him through the room, my clock clutched tightly, thinking of home. I saw their faces in the darkness: Daphne Gould, who had once taken on a pony; and Mario Fischer, the millionaire’s son; Dirk Schuman and Louis Pesky and Schuyler van Leer, the anthropology students; Pierre Liebowitz, a rich florist who dyed his hair; two soft-voiced Negro boys I didn’t know; Pamela Oates and Lily Davis, who were in love; Edmonia Lovett, who once almost suffocated to death in her orgone box; four stray soldiers—all these gave me a swift darting glance, and turned away. Then Albert and I were sitting on the window seat; I had a martini in my hand and he spoke: I half-listened, watched the beautiful day begin to expire outside with a final gush of yellow light; across the alley the slate roofs of the houses were in sunshine, the walls in shadow: soon the roofs, too, the gables, birds’ nests and crawling ivy, would be in shadow, and in darkness. A cloud above drifted slowly eastward, fluffy, touched with pink, shaped like Africa: lands I will never see, the far coasts, flamingo evenings, the yellow, rotted jungle dawn. I said, “It’s been a lovely day.” And Albert Berger said, “Pretty romantic one. Have you thought of forests and wonderlands and fairy books like you used to? Have you been thinking of all the impossible things?” I said, “I’ve been thinking of morns by men unseen. I’ve been thinking of a far fantastic dawn …” and I had a cramp, bent over, heard in the dizzy, spark-speckled darkness one single voice hoarse and arrogant, somewhere on the floor: “Malinowski! How can you say that? Old Bronislaw?” I pressed the bag and clock to my belly, trying to push back that pulsating pain: worse this time than ever before: I bit my tongue. It went away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should be at home.” I sat erect, not looking at Albert Berger but outside, at the sunshine. “Poor pretty,” he said, “even the loveliest must wear the duodecimal disgrace, bear the catamenial anguish. I should write a book of sonnets about the poor lost lovelies; perhaps Cleopatra used a wad of crushed roses, you know, and I suspect that Helen——” But I couldn’t listen; I watched the sunshine, thinking of Harry: first Helen, then blessed Beatrice, sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss: once I squatted beneath the rosebush by the kitchen. It was summer, too, and I heard Ella singing in the pantry and the constant buzz of bees; then I saw water trickle on the ground beneath me, a rivulet flooding toward the garden, and Helen snatched me up among the smell of roses:
you mustn’t mustn’t can’t you be proper. God punishes improper children.
I could smell roses and I heard the bees buzzing in the heat; then Bunny came and we sat out on the seawall and he read me James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby … “So it must be difficult, pretty one,” said Albert Berger. “What’s not proper?” I said. “What?” he said; his skin seemed to get paler and paler in the sunlight. “What’s not proper?” I said. “My dear girl,” he said, “such a feckless wandering mind you must have. I didn’t say proper, I said difficult.” “Oh,” I said. “I said it must be difficult for you?” “What’s difficult?” I asked. “To live in this distressing world—alone now as you are—with no real intellectual supports to put your mind at ease. Have you heard about the bomb?” “Yes,” I said. He leaned back on the seat and made a weak sexless laugh. “Coo!” he said. “Man’s triumph. I’ve been predicting it for months and months. To Louis and Schuyler. Now they’re appalled, such lovely boys but soft-minded, unwilling, safe in their bosom of
social
anthropology—
social,
mind you: the science is getting so cluttered with offshoots that it begins to look like Medusa’s hair—unwilling to accept the historical determinism, tragic as it is to the spirits of neo-humanists, the historical determinism—may I not even say propriety, to use your word?—they are unable to accept the pure
fact
in all its beauty. Man’s triumph! Jaweh! So up in bloody pulp go the children of Nippon … and yet … and yet——” His eyes watered, he sipped daintily at his martini. “And yet,” he went on in a sudden sad tone, “even Louis and Schuyler, they don’t
have
to agree. My view of the universe is harsh and brutal. In each act of creation, be it the orgasm of the simplest street cleaner or the explosion of atoms, man commits himself to the last part of the evolutionary cycle; by that I mean death, frosty, cruel and final. Thus I do not ask you any more, my pretty, to believe with me that the evil in man is both beautiful and preordained. Socially, I’m catholic and I have the most tolerant of minds. You just stay as pretty as you are, safe in your land where a whimpering Jesus gently leads Winnie-the-Pooh down a lane of arching plum blossoms. You will always—why, pretty one, you have tears in your big brown eyes.” “Yes,” I said, “remember how short my time is.” He put his hand on mine, like some polyp from an arctic sea. “Oh dear,” he said, “I’m very sorry. Really, Peyton, I’m very sorry. Is there anything I can do?” I looked into my bag for something to blow my nose on, saw the clock, covered it up quickly. Albert Berger handed me a handkerchief, I blew my nose: a young man leaned back against the rug, rolled his eyes up at one of the soldiers: “But you see,” I heard him say, “I’m
happy
in my inversion. I have found but a perfect relationship with Angelo, but a perfect one.” “Yes,” I said to Albert Berger, “you can tell me where Harry is. That’s how you can help me.” “Pretty one. You’re such a lost child. You
do
want your Harry back, don’t you?” I said, “Yes. Yes. Oh, yes.” He snickered. “Such a brave new girl. You
do
expect a lot. May I make a suggestion—of course it wasn’t Harry but little Laura who told me, who finally impels me to suggest this to you—might I suggest that you rid your house of dairymen much as you might cockroaches; then I have no doubt that your Harry could take a different stand. As it is, Harry is such a lovely boy, I’ve had
such
hopes——”
No
, I thought. Across the room Edmonia Lovett heaved to her feet, dumpy in winter sack tweeds, preening her henna hair. “Why does he go out with her,” she shrilled, “when he can go out with an analyzed dame like me who can reach a climax?” I watched her lurch to the phonograph, put on a record, the Wang-Wang Blues; yet I watched her through water for a moment, my drowning, the submarine cave, the dwarf shapes floor-sprawled, all immersed in transparent aqueous light. The voices came up as from the bottom of the sea: Albert Berger, he said I must exorcise my dairymen, yet he didn’t know, nor could he hear, as I did somewhere among the draperies behind me, the fidget and stir of flightless wings. Albert Berger, I must say, can’t you ever know what it is when you lie down in a strange bed and with a strange man and in a strange country; there is no menace in their tread, which is so cruel: across the darkening sand they come stiff-legged craning their necks, stately and regal, ruffling their lovely plumes. So even clutching his hot hostile flesh, you can’t find peace in the dawn but hinge your eyelids down tightly, feel his Christopher against your breast and then even then they pursue you across the plain, incurious and bored like feathered kings: Albert Berger, O my God! I would cry out, don’t I know my own torture and my own abuse? How many times have I lain down to sin out of vengeance, to say
so he doesn’t love me, then here is one that will,
to sleep then and dream about the birds, and then to wake with one eye open to the sweltering, joyless dawn and think
my life hath known no father, any road to any end may run,
to think of home. I would not pray to a polyp or a jellyfish, nor to Jesus Christ, but only to that part of me that was pure and lost now, when he and I used to walk along the beach, toward Hampton, and pick up shells. Once he took me in his arms and gave me beer to drink and I heard her voice from behind the mimosas,
shame, shame, shame.
“For shame, pretty one,” Albert Berger said, straight through his martini. “Why do you cause that lovely boy such trouble? Did Strassman say merely that you were dangerously abstracted or that you were psychogenically incapable of sexual fidelity——” “You just hush,” I said. He raised one finger whimsically aloft, pale Ichabod Crane ready for a pronouncement, but Lennie came up then, shirt sleeves rolled up over his pink sunburned arms. “Hello, honey,” he said nicely. “What’s the matter? You look all done in.” “Lennie, tell me please where Harry is, please do,” and I took his fingers, my handbag falling to the floor with a sudden frightening, jangling bell: all the eyes goggled up through the water from the floor bottom through wreaths of smoke like trailing seaweed, alert and popeyed as startled fish. Still the alarm clattered on, muffled some by the bag, but loud. I groped for it, hearing through the room a slow-rising chorus of laughter. Then I found the button and turned off the bell. Lennie sat down laughing beside me. “What have you got in there, honey?” he said. “A time bomb?” “No,” I said, “a clock. For Harry and me. It’s a present.” “Oh,” he said. The smile faded; he looked at me kindly, but with suspicion. “Are you going to give it to him today, Peyton?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Tell me where he is, Lennie. Please do.” Through the room the laughter dwindled, then died out: the bespectacled faces regarding me with interest. Someone whispered. Someone said, “My God,” looking at me—they who have no God, less than mine, a prayer automaton, less than mine, who dwells in some land I shall never see again. Albert Berger moved away through the water. “Listen, Peyton,” Lennie said. “Why don’t you go over to Cornelia Street and stay with Laura for a while? You look positively awful. What have you been doing? You look like you’ve been on a two weeks’ drunk.” He paused. “I told Harry I wouldn’t tell. It’s that simple. You go stay with Laura——” “No,” I said, pulling at his sleeve. “No, Lennie, please tell me where he is. Please do.” “I can’t.” “Please do.” “I can’t. You look like you need something to eat. Go tell Laura I said break out the bacon and eggs——” “But Laura doesn’t like me anymore,” I said, “so I can’t.” “She