“Go on, go on,” said Cantabile.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “To the can. Where is it?”

  “Don’t you want the dough?”

  “I said the can! The can!”

  I then understood, his bowels were acting up, he had been caught short, he had to go to the toilet, and I was to go with him. He wouldn’t allow me to wait in the street. “Okay,” I said, “just take it easy and I’ll lead you.” He followed me through the locker room. The John entrance was doorless. Only the individual stalls have doors. I motioned him forward and was about to sit down on one of the locker-room benches nearby but he gave me a hard push on the shoulder and drove me forward. These toilets are the Bath at its worst. The radiators put up a stunning dry heat. The tiles are never washed, never disinfected. A hot dry urine smell rushes to your eyes like onion fumes. “Jesus!” said Cantabile. He kicked open a stall, still keeping me in front of him. He said, “You go in first.”

  “The both of us?” I said.

  “Hurry up.”

  “There’s space only for one.”

  He tugged out his gun and shook the butt at me. “You want this in your teeth?” The black fur of his mustache spread as the lip of his distorted face stretched. His brows were joined above the nose like the hilt of a large dagger. “In the corner, you!” He slammed the door and panting, took off his things. He thrust the raglan and the matching hat into my arms, although there was a hook. There was even a piece of hardware I had never before noticed. Attached to the door was a brass fitting, a groove labeled Cigar, a touch of class from the old days. He was seated now with the gun held in both palms, his hands between his knees, his eyes first closing then dilating greatly.

  In a situation like this I can always switch out and think about the human condition over-all. Of course he wanted to humiliate me. Because I was a chevalier of the Légion d’honneur? Not that he actually knew of this. But he was aware that I was as they would say in Chicago a Brain, a man of culture or intellectual attainments. Was this why I had to listen to him rumbling and slopping and smell his stink? Perhaps fantasies of savagery and monstrosity, of beating my brains out, had loosened his bowels. Humankind is full of nervous invention of this type, and I started to think (to distract myself) of all the volumes of ape behavior I had read in my time, of Kohler and Yerkes and Zuckerman, of Marais on baboons and Schaller on gorillas, and of the rich repertory of visceral-emotional sensitivities in the anthropoid branch. It was even possible that I was a more limited person than a fellow like Cantabile in spite of my concentration on intellectual achievement. For it would never have occurred to me to inflict anger on anyone by such means. This might have been a sign that his vital endowment or natural imagination was more prodigal and fertile than mine. In this way, thinking improving thoughts, I waited with good poise while he crouched there with his hardened dagger brows. He was a handsome slender man whose hair had a natural curl. It was cropped so close that you could see the roots of his curls and I observed the strong contraction of his scalp in this moment of stress. He wanted to inflict a punishment on me but the result was only to make us more intimate.

  As he stood and then wiped, and then pulled his shirttails straight, belting his pants with the large oval buckle and sticking back the gun (I hoped the safety catch was on), as I say, when he pulled his shirttails straight and buckled his stylish belt on the hip-huggers, thrusting the gun in, flushing the toilet with his pointed soft boot, too fastidious to touch the lever with his hand—he said, “Christ, if I catch the crabs here . , . !” As if that would be my fault. He was evidently a violent reckless blâmer. He said, “You don’t know how I hated to sit here. These old guys must piss on the seats.” This too he entered on the debit side against me. Then he said, “Who owns this joint?”

  Now this was a fascinating question. It had never occurred to me, you know. The Bath was so ancient, it was like the Pyramids of Egypt, the Gardens of Ashurbanipal. It was like water seeking its level, or like gravitational force. But who in fact was its proprietor? “I’ve never heard of an owner,” I said. “For all I know it’s some old party out in British Columbia.”

  “Don’t get smart. You’re too fucking smart. I only asked for information. I’ll find out.”

  To turn the faucet he used a piece of toilet paper. He washed his hands without soap, none was provided by the management. At this moment I offered him the nine fifty-dollar bills again. He refused to look at them. He said, “My hands are wet.” He wouldn’t use the roller towel. It was, I must admit, repulsively caked, filthy, with a certain originality in the way of filth. I held out my pocket handkerchief, but he ignored it. He didn’t want his anger to diminish. Spreading his fingers wide he shook them dry. Full of the nastiness of the place he said, “Is this what they call a Bath?”

  “Well,” I said, “the bathing is all downstairs.”

  They had two long rows of showers, below, which led to the heavy wooden doors of the steam room. There also was a small cistern, the cold plunge. The water was unchanged from year to year, and it was a crocodile’s habitat if I ever saw one.

  Cantabile now hurried out to the lunch counter, and I followed him. There he dried his hands with paper napkins which he pulled from the metal dispenser angrily. He crumpled these embossed flimsy papers and threw them on the floor. He said to Mickey, “Why don’t you have soap and towels in the can? Why don’t you wash the goddamn place out? There’s no disinfectant in there.”

  Mickey was very mild, and he said, “No? Joe is supposed to take care of it. I buy him Top Job, Lysol.” He spoke to Joe. “Don’t you put in mothballs any more?” Joe was black and old, and hé answered nothing. He was leaning on the shoe-shine chair with its brass pedestals, the upside-down legs and rigid feet (reminiscent of my own feet and legs during the Yoga headstand). He was there to remind us all of some remote, grand considerations and he would not answer any temporal questions.

  “You guys are gonna buy supplies from me,” said Cantabile. “Disinfectant, liquid soap, paper towels, everything. The name is Cantabile. I’ve got a supply business on Clybourne Avenue.” He took out a long pitted ostrich-skin wallet and threw several business cards on the counter.

  “I’m not the boss,” said Mickey. “All I have is the restaurant concession.” But he picked up a card with deference. His big fingers were covered with black knife-marks.

  “I better hear from you.”

  “I’ll pass it along to the Management. They’re downtown.”

  “Mickey, who owns the Bath?” I said.

  “All I know is the Management, downtown.”

  It would be curious, I thought, if the Bath should turn out to belong to the Syndicate.

  “Is George Swiebel here?” said Cantabile.

  “No.”

  “Well, I want to leave him a message.”

  “I’ll give you something to write on,” said Mickey.

  “There’s nothing to write. Tell him he’s a dumb shit. Tell him I said so.”

  Mickey had put on his specs to look for a piece of paper, and now he turned his spectacled face toward us as if to say that his only business was the coleslaw and skirt-steaks and whitefish. Cantabile did not ask for old Father Myron, who was steaming himself below.

  We went out into the street. The weather had suddenly cleared. I couldn’t decide whether gloomy weather suited the environment better than bright. The air was cold, the light was neat, and the shadows thrown by blackened buildings divided the sidewalks.

  I said, “Well, now let me give you this money. I brought new bills. This ought to wrap the whole thing up, Mr. Cantabile.”

  “What—just like that? You think it’s so easy?” said Rinaldo.

  “Well, I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have happened. I really regret it.”

  “You regret it! You regret your hacked-up car. You stopped a check on me, Citrine. Everybody blabbed. Everybody knows. You think I can allow it?”

  “Mr. Cantabile, who knows—who is everybody? Was it really so serious? I was wrong—”

  “Wrong, you fucking ape. . . !”

  “Okay, I was stupid.”

  “Your pal George tells you to stop a check, so you stop it. Do you take that asshole’s word for everything? Why didn’t he catch Emil and me in the act? He has you pull this sneaky stunt and then you and he and the undertaker and the tuxedo guy and the other dummies spread around the gossip that Ronald Cantabile is a punk. Man! You could never get away with that. Don’t you realize!”

  “Yes, now I realize.”

  “No, I don’t know what you realize. I was watching at the game, and I don’t dig you. When are you going to do something and know what you’re doing?” Those last words he spaced, he accented vehemently and uttered into my face. Then he snatched away his coat, which I was still holding for him, the rich brown raglan with its large buttons. Circe might have had buttons like those in her sewing box. They were very beautiful, really, rather Oriental-treasure buttons.

  The last garment I had seen resembling this one was worn by the late Colonel McCormick. I was then about twelve years old. His limousine had stopped in front of the Tribune Tower, and two short men came out. Each man held two pistols, and they circled on the pavement, crouching low. Then, in this four-gun setting, the Colonel stepped out from his car in just such a tobacco-colored coat as Cantabile’s and a pinch hat with gleaming harsh fuzz. The wind was stiff, the air pellucid, the hat glistened like a bed of nettles.

  “You don’t think I know what I’m doing, Mr. Cantabile?”

  “No you don’t. You couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”

  Well, he may have been right. But at least I wasn’t crucifying anyone. Apparently life had not happened to me as it had happened to other people. For some indiscernible reason it happened differently to them, and so I was not a fit judge of their concerns and desires. Aware of this I acceded to more of these desires than was practical. I gave in to George’s low-life expertise. Now I bent before Cantabile. My only resource was to try to remember useful things from my ethological reading about rats, geese, sticklebacks, and dancing flies. What good is all this reading if you can’t use it in the crunch? All I asked was a small mental profit.

  “Anyway, what about these fifty-dollar bills?” I said.

  “I’ll let you know when I’m ready to take them,” he said. “You didn’t like what happened to your car, did you?”

  I said, “It’s a beautiful machine. It was really heartless to do that.”

  Apparently the bats he had threatened me with were what he had used on the Mercedes and there were probably more assault weapons in the back seat of the Thunderbird. He made me get into this showy auto. It had leather bucket seats red as spilt blood and an immense instrument panel. He took off at top speed from a standstill, like an adolescent drag-racer, the tires wildly squealing.

  In the car I got a slightly different impression of him. Seen in profile, his nose ended in a sort of white bulb. It was intensely, abnormally white. It reminded me of gypsum and it was darkly lined. His eyes were bigger than they ought to have been, artificially dilated perhaps. His mouth was wide, with an emotional underlip in which there was the hint of an early struggle to be thought full grown. His large feet and dark eyes also hinted that he aspired to some ideal, and that his partial attainment or nonattainment of the ideal was a violent grief to him. I suspected that the ideal itself might be fitful.

  “Was it you or your cousin Emil that fought in Vietnam?”

  We were speeding eastward on Division Street. He held the wheel in both hands as though it were a pneumatic drill to chop up the macadam. “What! Emil in the Army? Not that kid. He was 4-F, practically psycho. No, the most action Emil ever saw was during the 1968 riots in front of the Hilton. He was twigged out and didn’t even know which side he was on. No, I was in Vietnam. The folks sent me to that smelly Catholic college near St. Louis that I mentioned at the game, but I dropped out and enlisted. That was some time back.”

  “Did you fight?”

  “I’ll tell you what you want to hear. I stole a tank of gasoline —the truck, trailer, and all. I sold it to some blackmarket guys. I got caught but my folks made a deal. Senator Dirksen helped. I was only eight months in jail.”

  He had a record of his own. He wished me to know that he was a true Cantabile, a throwback to the Twenties and no mere Uncle Moochy. A military prison—he had a criminal pedigree and he could produce fear on his own credentials. Also the Can-tabiles were evidently in small rackets of the lesser hoodlum sort, as witness the toilet-disinfectant business on Clybourne Avenue. Perhaps also a currency exchange or two—currency exchanges were often owned by former small-time racketeers. Or in the extermination business, another common favorite. But he was obviously in the minor leagues. Perhaps he was in no league at all. As a Chicagoan I had some sense of this. A real big shot used hired muscle. No Vito Langobardi would carry baseball bats in the back seat of his car. A Langobardi went to Switzerland for winter sports. Even his dog traveled in class. Not in decades had a Langobardi personally taken part in violence. No, this restless striving smoky-souled Cantabile was on the outside trying to get in. He was the sort of unacceptable entrepreneur that the sanitation department still fished out of the sewers after three months of decomposition. Certain persons of this type were occasionally found in the trunks of automobiles parked at O’Hare. The weight of the corpse at the back was balanced by a cinderblock laid on the motor.

  Deliberately, at the next corner, Rinaldo ran a red light. He rode the bumper of the car ahead and he made other motorists chicken out. He was elegant, flashy. The seats of the T-bird were specially upholstered in soft leather—so soft, so crimson! He wore the sort of gloves sold to horsemen at Abercrombie & Fitch. At the expressway he swept right and gunned up the slope, running into merging traffic. Cars braked behind us. His radio played rock music. And I recognized Cantabile’s scent. It was Canoe. I had once gotten a bottle of it for Christmas from a blind woman named Muriel.

  In the squalid closet at the Bath when his pants were down and I was thinking about Zuckerman’s apes at the London Zoo it had been clear that what was involved here were the plastic and histrionic talents of the human creature. In other words I was involved in a dramatization. It wouldn’t have done much for the image of the Cantabiles, however, if he had actually shot off the gun that he held between his knees. It would make him too much like the crazy uncle who disgraced the family. That, I thought, was the whole point.

  nine

  Was I afraid of Cantabile? Not really. I don’t know what he thought, but what I thought was perfectly clear to me. Absorbed in determining what a human being is, I went along with him. Cantabile may have believed that he was abusing a passive man. Not at all. I was a man active elsewhere. At the poker game, I received a visionary glimpse of this Cantabile. Of course, I was very high that night, if not downright drunk, but I saw the edge of his spirit rising from him, behind him. So when Cantabile yelled and threatened I didn’t make a stand on grounds of proper pride—”Nobody treats Charlie Citrine like this, I’m going to the police,” and so forth. No, the police had no such things to show me. Cantabile had made a very peculiar and strong impression on me.

  What a human being is—I always had my own odd sense of this. For I did not have to live in the land of the horses, like Dr. Gulliver, my sense of mankind was strange enough without travel. In fact I traveled not to seek foreign oddities but to get away from them. I was drawn also to philosophical idealists because I was perfectly sure that this could not be it. Plato in the Myth of Er confirmed my sense that this was not my first time around. We had all been here before and would presently be here again. There was another place. Maybe a man like me was imperfectly reborn. The soul is supposed to be sealed by oblivion before its return to earthly life. Was it possible that my oblivion might be slightly defective? I never was a thorough Platonist. I never could believe that you could be reincarnated a bird or a fish. No soul once human was locked into a spider. In my case (which I suspect is not so rare as all that) there may have been an incomplete forgetting of the pure soul-life, so that the mineral condition of re-embodiment seemed abnormal, so that from an early age I was taken aback to see eyes move in faces, noses breathe, skins sweat, hairs grow, and the like, finding it comical. This was sometimes offensive to people born with full oblivion of their immortality.

  This leads me to recall and reveal a day of marvelous spring and a noontime full of the most heavy silent white clouds, clouds like bulls, behemoths, and dragons. The place is Appleton, Wisconsin, and I am a grown man standing on a crate trying to see into the bedroom where I was born in the year 1918. I was probably conceived there, too, and directed by divine wisdom to appear in life as so-and-so, such-and-such (C. Citrine, Pulitzer Prize, Legion of Honor, father of Lish and Mary, husband of A, lover of B, a serious person, and a card). And why should this person be perched on a box, partly hidden by the straight twigs and glossy leaves of a flowering lilac? And without asking permission of the lady of the house? I had knocked and rung but she did not answer. And now her husband was standing at my back. He owned a gas station. I told him who I was. At first he was very hard-nosed. But I explained that this was my birthplace and I asked for old neighbors by name. Did he remember the Saunderses? Well, they were his cousins. This saved me a punch in the nose as a Peeping Tom. I could not say, “I am standing on this crate among these lilacs trying to solve the riddle of man, and not to see your stout wife in her panties.” Which was indeed what I saw. Birth is sorrow (a sorrow that may be canceled by intercession) but in the room where my birth took place I beheld with sorrow of my own a fat old woman in underpants. With great presence of mind she pretended not to see my face at the screen but slowly left the room and phoned her husband. He ran from the gas pumps and nabbed me, laying oily hands on my exquisite gray suit—I was at the peak of my elegant period. But I was able to explain that I Was in Appleton to prepare that article on Harry Houdini, also a native—as I have obsessively mentioned—and I experienced a sudden desire to look into the room where I was born.

  “So what you got was an eyeful of my Missus.”

  He didn’t take this hard. I think he understood. These matters of the spirit are widely and instantly grasped. Except of course by people who are in heavily fortified positions, mental opponents trained to resist what everyone is born knowing.

  As soon as I saw Rinaldo Cantabile at George Swiebel’s kitchen table I was aware that a natural connection existed between us.

  ten

  I was now taken to the Playboy Club. Rinaldo was a member. He walked away from his supercar, the Bechstein of automobiles, leaving it to the car jockey. The checkroom Bunny knew him. From his behavior here I began to understand that my task was to make amends publicly. The Cantabiles had been defied. Maybe Rinaldo had been ordered at a family council to go out and repair the damage to their good bad name. And this matter of his reputation would consume a day—an entire day. And there were so many pressing needs, I had so many headaches already that I might justifiably have begged fate to give me a pass. I had a pretty good case.

  “Are the people here?”

  He threw over his coat. I also dropped mine. We stepped into the opulence, the semidarkness, the thick carpets of the bar where bottles shone, and sensual female forms went back and forth in an amber light. He took me by the arm into an elevator and we rose immediately to the top. Cantabile said, “We’re going to see some people. “When I give you the high sign, then you pay me the money and apologize.”

  We were standing before a table.

  “Bill, I’d like to introduce Charlie Citrine,” said Ronald to Bill.

  “Hey, Mike, this is Ronald Cantabile,” Bill said, on cue.

  The rest was, Hey how are you, sit down, what’ll you drink.

  Bill was unknown to me, but Mike was Mike Schneiderman the gossip columnist. He was large heavy strong tanned sullen fatigued, his hair was razor styled, his cuff links were as big as his eyes, his necktie was a clumsy flap of silk brocade. He looked haughty, creased and sleepy, like certain oil-rich American Indians from Oklahoma. He drank an old-fashioned and held a cigar. His business was to sit with people in bars and restaurants. I was much too volatile for sedentary work like this, and I couldn’t understand how it was done. But then I couldn’t understand office jobs, either, or clerking or any of the confining occupations or routines. Many Americans described themselves as artists or intellectuals who should only have said that they were incapable of doing such work. I had many times discussed this with Von Humboldt Fleisher, and now and then with Gum-bein the art critic. The work of sitting with people to discover what was interesting didn’t seem to agree with Schneiderman either. At certain moments he looked blank and almost ill. He knew me, of course, I had once appeared on his television program, and he said, “Hello, Charlie.” Then he said to Bill, “Don’t you know Charlie? He’s a famous person who lives in Chicago incognito.”

  I began to appreciate what Rinaldo had done. He had gone to great trouble to set up this encounter, pulling many strings. This Bill, a connection of his, perhaps owed the Cantabiles a favor and had agreed to produce Mike Schneiderman the columnist. Obligations were being called in all over the place. The accountancy must be very intricate, and I could see that Bill was not pleased. Bill had a Cosa Nostra look. There was something corrupt about his nose. Curving deeply at the nostrils it was powerful yet vulnerable. He had a foul nose. In a different context I would have guessed him to be a violinist who had become disgusted with music and gone into the liquor business. He had just returned from Acapulco and his skin was dark, but he was not exactly shining with health and well-being. He didn’t care for Rinaldo; he appeared contemptuous of him. My sympathy at this moment was with Cantabile. He had attempted to organize what should have been a beautiful spirited encounter, worthy of the Renaissance, and only I appreciated it. Cantabile was trying to crash Mike’s column. Mike of course was used to this. The would-be happy few were always after him and I suspected that there was a good deal of trading behind the scenes, quid pro quo. You gave Mike an item of gossip and he printed your name in bold type. The Bunny took our drink order. Up to the chin she was ravishing. Above, all was commercial anxiety. My attention was divided between the soft crease of her breasts and the look of business difficulty on her face.

  We were on one of the most glamorous corners of Chicago. I dwelt on the setting. The lakeshore view was stupendous. I couldn’t see it but I knew it well and felt its effect—the shining road beside the shining gold vacancy of Lake Michigan. Man had overcome the emptiness of this land. But the emptiness had given him a few good licks in return. And here we sat amid the flatteries of wealth and power with pretty maidens and booze and tailored suits, and the men wearing jewels and using scent. Schneiderman was waiting, most skeptically, for an item he could use in his column. In the right context, I was good copy. People in Chicago are impressed with the fact that I am taken seriously elsewhere. I have now and then been asked to cocktail parties by culturally ambitious climbing people and have experienced the fate of a symbol. Certain women have said to me, “You can’t be Charles Citrine!” Many hosts are pleased by the contrast I offer. Why, I look like a man intensely but incompletely thinking. My face is no match for their shrewd urban faces. And it’s especially the ladies who can’t mask their disappointment when they see what the well-known Mr. Citrine actually looks like.

  Whisky was set before us. I drank down my double Scotch eagerly and, being a quick expander, started to laugh. No one joined me. Ugly Bill said, “What’s funny?”

  I said, “Well, I just remembered that I learned to swim just down the way at Oak Street before all these skyscrapers went up, the architectural pride of P.R. Chicago. It was the Gold Coast then, and we used to come from the slums on the streetcar. The Division car only went as far as Wells. I’d come with a greasy bag of sandwiches. My mother bought me a girl’s bathing suit at a sale. It had a little skirt with a rainbow border. I was mortified and tried to dye it with India ink. The cops used to jab us in the ribs to hurry us across the Drive. Now I’m up here, drinking whisky. . . .”

  Cantabile gave me a shove under the table with his whole foot, leaving a dusty print on my trousers. His frown spread upward into his scalp, rippling under the close-cut curls, while his nose became as white as candle wax.

  I said, “By the way, Ronald . . .” and I took out the bills. “I owe you money.”

  “What money?”

  “The money I lost to you at that poker game—it was some time back. I guess you forgot about it. Four hundred and fifty bucks.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Rinaldo Cantabile. “What game?”

  “You can’t remember? We were playing at George Swiebel’s apartment.”

  “Since when do you book guys play poker?” said Mike Schneiderman.

  “Why? We have our human side. Poker has always been played at the White House. Perfectly respectable. President Harding played. Also during the New Deal. Morgenthau, Roosevelt, and so on.”

  “You sound like a West Side Chicago boy,” said Bill.

  “Chopin School, Rice and Western,” I said.

  “Well, put away your dough, Charlie,” said Cantabile. “This is drink time. No business. Pay me later.”

  “Why not now, while I think of it and have the bills out? You know the whole thing slipped my mind, and last night I woke up with a start thinking, ‘I forgot to pay Rinaldo his dough.’ Christ, I could have blown my brains out.”

  Cantabile said violently, “Okay, okay, Charlie!” He snatched the money from me and crammed it without counting into his breast pocket. He gave me a look of high irritation, a flaming look. What for? I could not imagine why. What I did know was that Mike Schneiderman had power to put you in the paper and if you were in the paper you hadn’t lived in vain. You were not just a two-legged creature, seen for a brief hour on Clark Street, sullying eternity with nasty doings and thoughts. You were—

  “What’cha doing these days, Charlie,” said Mike Schneider-man. “Another play maybe? A movie? You know,” he said to Bill, “Charlie’s a real famous guy. They made a terrific flick out of his Broadway hit. He’s written a whole lot of stuff.”

  “I had my moment of glory on Broadway,” I said. “I could never repeat it, so why try?”

  “Now I remember. Somebody said you were going to publish some kind of highbrow magazine. When is it coming out? I’ll give you a plug.”

  But Cantabile glared and said, “We’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll be glad to phone when I have an item for you. It would be helpful,” I said with a meaning glance toward Cantabile.

  But he had already gone. I followed him and in the elevator he said, “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  “I can’t think what I did wrong.”

  “You said you wanted to blow your brains out, and you know damn well, you creep, that Mike Schneiderman’s brother-in-law blew his brains out two months ago.”

  “No!”

  “You must have read it in the paper—that whole noise about the phony bonds, the counterfeit bonds he gave for collateral.”

  “Oh, that one, you mean Goldhammer, the fellow who printed up his own certificates, the forger!”

  “You knew it, don’t pretend,” said Cantabile. “You did it on purpose, to louse me up, to wreck my plan.”

  “I didn’t, I swear I didn’t. Blowing my brains out? That’s a commonplace expression.”

  “Not in a case like this. You knew,” he said violently, “you knew. You knew his brother-in-law killed himself.”

  “I didn’t make the connection. It must have been a Freudian slip. Absolutely unintentional.”

  “You always pretend you never know what you’re doing. I suppose you didn’t know who that big-nosed fellow was.”

  “Bill?”

  “Yes! Bill! Bill is Bill Lakin, the banker who was indicted with Goldhammer. He took the forged bonds as security.”

  “Why should he be indicted for that? Goldhammer put them over on him.”

  “Because, you bird-brain, don’t you understand what you read in the news? He bought Lekatride from Goldhammer for a buck a share when it was worth six dollars. Haven’t you heard of Kerner either? All these grand juries, all these trials? But you don’t care about the things that other people knock themselves out over. You have contempt. You’re arrogant, Citrine. You despise us.”

  “Who’s us?”

  “Us! People of the world . . .” said Cantabile. He spoke wildly. It was no time for argument. I was to respect and to fear him. It would be provoking if he didn’t think I feared him. I didn’t think that he would shoot me but a beating was surely possible, perhaps even a broken leg. As we left the Playboy Club he thrust the money again into my hand.

  “Do we have to do this over?” I said. He explained nothing. He stood with his head angrily hooked forward until the Thun-derbird came around. Once more I had to get in.

  Our next stop was in the Hancock Building, somewhere on the sixtieth or seventieth story. It looked like a private apartment, and yet it seemed also to be a place of business. It was furnished in decorator style with plastic, trick art objects hanging on the walls, geometrical forms of the trompe l’oeil type that intrigue business people. They are peculiarly vulnerable to art racketeers. The gentleman who lived here was elderly, in a brown hopsack sports jacket with gold threads and a striped shirt on his undisciplined belly. White hair was slicked back upon his narrow head. The liver stains on his hands were large. Under the eyes and about the nose he did not look altogether well. As he sat on the low sofa which, judging by the way it gave under him, was stuffed with down, his alligator loafers extended far into the ivory shag carpet. The pressure of his belly brought out the shape of his phallus on his thigh. Long nose, gaping lip, and wattles went with all this velvet, the gold-threaded hopsack, brocade, satin, the alligator skin, and the trompe l’oeil objects. From the conversation I gathered that his line was jewelry and that he dealt with the underworld. Perhaps he was also a fence—how would I know? Rinaldo Cantabile and his wife had an anniversary coming and he was shopping for a bracelet. A Japanese houseboy served drinks. I am not a great drinker but today I understandably wanted whisky and I took another double shot of Black Label. From the skyscraper I could contemplate the air of Chicago on this short December afternoon. A ragged western sun spread orange light over the dark shapes of the town, over the branches of the river and the black trusses of bridges. The lake, gilt silver and amethyst, was ready for its winter cover of ice. I happened to be thinking that if Socrates was right, that you could learn nothing from trees, that only the men you met in the street could teach you something about yourself, I must be in a bad way, running off into the scenery instead of listening to my human companions. Evidently I did not have a good stomach for human companions. To get relief from uneasiness or heaviness of heart I was musing about the water. Socrates would have given me a low mark. I seemed rather to be on the Wordsworth end of things —trees, flowers, water. But architecture, engineering, electricity, technology had brought me to this sixty-fourth story. Scandinavia had put this glass in my hand, Scotland had filled it with whisky, and I sat there recalling certain marvelous facts about the sun, namely, that the light of other stars when it entered the sun’s gravitational field, had to bend. The sun wore a shawl made of this universal light. So Einstein, sitting thinking of things, had foretold. And observations made by Arthur Eddington during an eclipse proved it. Finding before seeking.

  Meantime the phone rang continually and not a single call seemed local. It was all Las Vegas, L.A., Miami, and New York. “Send your boy over to Tiffany and find out what they get for an item like that,” our host was saying. I then heard him speak of estate-jewels, and of an Indian prince who was trying to sell a whole lot of stuff in the USA and inviting bids.

  At one interval, while Cantabile was fussing over a tray of diamonds (nasty, that white stuff seemed to me), the old gentleman spoke to me. He said, “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?”

  “Yes,” I said. “From the whirlpool at the Downtown Health Club, I think.”

  “Oh yeah sure, I met you with that lawyer fellow. He’s a big talker.”

  “Szathmar?”

  “Alec Szathmar.”

  Cantabile said, fingering diamonds and not lifting his face from the dazzle of the velvet tray, “I know that son of a bitch Szathmar. He claims to be an old buddy of yours, Charlie.”

  “True,” I said, “we were all boys at school. Including George Swiebel.”

  “In the old stone age that must have been,” said Cantabile.

  Yes, I had met this old gentleman in the hot chemical bath at the club, the circular bubbling whirlpool where people sat sweating, gossiping about sports, taxes, television programs, best sellers, or chatting about Acapulco and numbered bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. I didn’t know but what this old fence had one of those infamous cabanas near the swimming pool to which young chicks were invited for the siesta. There had been some scandal and protest over this. What was done behind drawn drapes in the cabanas was no one’s business, of course, but some of the old guys, demonstrative and exhibitionistic, had been seen fondling their little dolls on the sun-terrace. One had removed his false teeth in public to give a girl soul kisses. I had read an interesting letter in the Tribune about this. A retired history teacher living high up in the club building had written a letter saying that Tiberius—the old girl was showing off—Tiberius in the grottoes of Capri had had nothing on these grotesque lechers. But what did these old characters, in the rackets or in First Ward politics, care about indignant school-mams and classical allusions. If they had gone to see Fellini’s Satyricon at the Woods Theater it was only to get more sex ideas not because they were studying Imperial Rome. I myself had seen some of these spider-bellied old codgers on the sundeck taking the breasts of teen-age hookers into their hands. It occurred to me that the Japanese houseboy was also a judo or karate expert as in 007 movies, there were so many valuables in the apartment. When Rinaldo said he’d like to see more Accutron watches, the fellow brought out a few dozen, flat as wafers. These may or may not have been stolen. My heated imagination couldn’t be relied upon for guidance here. I was excited, I admit, by these currents of criminality. I could feel the need to laugh rising, mounting, always a sign that my weakness for the sensational, my American, Chicagoan (as well as personal) craving for high stimuli, for incongruities and extremes, was aroused. I knew that fancy thieving was a big thing in Chicago. It was said that if you knew one of these high-rise superrich Fagin-types you could obtain luxury goods at half the retail price. The actual shoplifting was done by addicts. They were compensated in heroin. As for the police, they were said to be paid off. They kept the merchants from making too much noise. Anyway there was insurance. There was also the well-known “shrinkage” or annual loss reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Such information about corruption, if you had grown up in Chicago, was easy to accept. It even satisfied a certain need. It harmonized with one’s Chicago view of society. Naïveté was something you couldn’t afford.

  Item by item, I tried to assess what Cantabile wore as I sat there in soft upholstery with my scotch on the rocks, his hat coat suit boots (the boots may have been unborn calf) his equestrian gloves, and I made an effort to imagine how he had obtained these articles through criminal channels, from Field’s, from Saks Fifth Avenue, from Abercrombie & Fitch. He was not, so far as I could judge, taken absolutely seriously by the old fence.

  Rinaldo was intrigued with one of the watches and slipped it on. His old watch he tossed to the Japanese who caught it. I thought the moment had come to recite my piece and I said, “Oh, by the way, Ronald, I owe you some dough from the other night.”

  “Where from?” said Cantabile.

  “From the poker game at George Swiebel’s. I guess it slipped your mind.”

  “Oh I know that guy Swiebel with all the muscles,” said the old gentleman. “He’s terrific company. And you know he cooks a great bouillabaisse, I’ll give him that.”

  “I inveigled Ronald and his cousin Emil into this game,” I said. “It really was my fault. Anyhow, Ronald cleaned up on us. Ronald is one of the poker greats. I ended up about six hundred dollars in the hole and he had to take my IOU—I’ve got the dough on me, Ronald, and I better give it to you while we both remember.”

  “Okay.” Again Cantabile, without looking, crumpled the notes into his jacket pocket. His performance was better than mine, though I was doing my very best. But then he had the honor side of the deal, the affront. To be angry was his right and that was no small advantage.

  When we were out of the building again I said, “Wasn’t that okay?”

  “Okay—yes! Okay!” he said loud and bitter. Clearly he wasn’t ready to let me off. Not yet.

  “I figure that old pelican will pass the word around that I paid you. Wasn’t that the object?”

  I added, almost to myself, “I wonder who makes pants like the pants the old boy was wearing. The fly alone must have been three feet long.”

  But Cantabile was still stoking his anger. “Christ!” he said. I didn’t like the way he was staring at me under those straight bodkin brows.

  “Well, then, that does it,” I said. “I can get a cab.”

  Cantabile caught me by the sleeve. “You wait,” he said. I didn’t really know what to do. After all, he carried a gun. I had for a long time thought about having a gun too, Chicago being what it is. But they’d never give me a license. Cantabile, without a license, packed a pistol. There was one index of the difference between us. Only God knew what consequences such differences might bring. “Aren’t you enjoying our afternoon?” said Cantabile, and grinned.

  Attempting to laugh this off I failed. The globus hystericus interfered. My throat felt sticky.

  “Get in, Charlie.”

  Again I sat in the crimson bucket seat (the supple fragrant leather kept reminding me of blood, pulmonary blood) and fumbled for the seat belt—you never can find those cursed buckles.

  “Don’t fuck with the belt, we’re not going that far.”

  Out of this information I drew what relief I could. We were on Michigan Boulevard, heading south. We drew up beside a skyscraper under construction, a headless trunk swooping up, swarming with lights. Below the early darkness now closing with December speed over the glistening west, the sun like a bristling fox jumped beneath the horizon. Nothing but a scarlet afterglow remained. I saw it between the El pillars. As the tremendous trusses of the unfinished skyscraper turned black, the hollow interior filled with thousands of electric points resembling champagne bubbles. The completed building would never be so beautiful as this. We got out, slamming the car doors, and I followed Cantabile over some plank-bedding laid down for the trucks. He seemed to know his way around. Maybe he had clients among the hard-hats. If he was in the juice racket. Then again if he was a usurer he wouldn’t come here after dark and risk getting pushed from a beam by one of these tough guys. They must be reckless. They drink and spend recklessly enough. I like the way these steeplejacks paint the names of their girlfriends on inaccessible girders. From below you often see DONNA or SUE. I suppose they bring the ladies on Sunday to point to their love-offerings eight hundred feet up. They fall to death now and then. Anyway Cantabile had brought his own hard hats. We put them on. Everything was prearranged. He said he was related by blood to some of the supervisory personnel. He also mentioned that he did lots of business hereabouts. He said he had connections with the contractor and the architect. He told me things much faster than I could discount them. However, we rose in one of the big open elevators, up, up.

  How should I describe my feelings? Fear, thrill, appreciation, glee—yes I appreciated his ingenuity. It seemed to me, however, that we were rising too high, too far. Where were we? Which button had he pressed? By daylight I had often admired the mantis-like groups of cranes, tipped with orange paint. The tiny bulbs, which seemed so dense from below, were sparsely strung through. I don’t know how far we actually went, but it was far enough. We had as much light about us as the time of day had left to give, steely and freezing, keen, with the wind ringing in the empty squares of wound-colored rust and beating against the hanging canvases. On the east, violently rigid was the water, icy, scratched, like a plateau of solid stone, and the other way was a tremendous effusion of low-lying color, the last glow, the contribution of industrial poisons to the beauty of the Chicago evening. We got out. About ten hard-hats who had been waiting pushed into the elevator at once. I wanted to call to them “Wait!” They went down in a group, leaving us nowhere. Cantabile seemed to know where he was going, but I had no faith in him. He was capable of faking anything. “Come on,” he said. I followed, but I was going slowly. He waited for me. There were a few windbreaks up here on the fiftieth or sixtieth floor, and those, the wind was storming. My eyes ran. I held on to a pillar and he said, “Come on Granny, come on check-stopper.”

  I said, “I have leather heels. They skid.”

  “You better not chicken out.”

  “No, this is it,” I said. I put my arms around the pillar. I wouldn’t move.

  Actually we had come far enough to suit him. “Now,” he said, “I want to show you just how much your dough means to me. You see this?” He held up a fifty-dollar bill. He rested his back on a steel upright and stripping off his fancy equestrian gloves began to fold the money. It was incomprehensible at first. Then I understood. He was making a child’s paper glider of it. Hitching back his raglan sleeve, he sent the glider off with two fingers. I watched it speeding through the strung lights with the wind behind it out into the steely atmosphere, darker and darker below. On Michigan Boulevard they had already put up the Christmas ornaments, winding tiny bubbles of glass from tree to tree. They streamed down there like cells under a microscope.

  My chief worry now was how to get down. Though the papers underplay it people are always falling off. But however scared and harassed, my sensation-loving soul also was gratified. I knew that it took too much to gratify me. The gratification-threshold of my soul had risen too high. I must bring it down again. It was excessive. I must, I knew, change everything.

  He sailed off more of the fifties. Tiny paper planes. Origami (my knowledgeable mind, keeping up its indefatigable pedantry —my lexical busybody mind!), the Japanese paper-folder’s art. An international congress of paper-aircraft freaks had been held, I think, last year. It seemed last year. The hobbyists were mathematicians and engineers.

  Cantabile’s green bills went off like finches, like swallows and butterflies, all bearing the image of Ulysses S. Grant. They brought crepuscular fortune to people down in the streets.

  “The last two I’m going to keep,” said Cantabile. “To blow them on drinks and dinner for us.”

  “If I ever get down alive.”

  “You did fine. Go on, lead the way, start back.”

  “These leather heels are awfully tricky. I hit an ordinary piece of wax paper in the street the other day and went down. Maybe I should take my shoes off.”

  “Don’t be crazy. Go on your toes.”

  If you didn’t think of falling, the walkways were more than adequate. I crept along, fighting paralysis of the calves and the thighs. My face was sweating faster than the wind could dry it as I took hold of the final pillar. I thought that Cantabile had been treading much too close behind. More hard-hats waiting for the elevator probably took us for union guys or architect’s men. It was night now and the hemisphere was frozen all the way to the Gulf. Gladly I fell into the seat of the Thunderbird when we got down. He removed his hard hat and mine. He cocked the wheel and started the motor. He should really let me go now. I had given him enough satisfaction.

  But he was off again, driving fast. He sped away toward the next light. My head hung back over the top of the seat in the position you take to stop a nosebleed. I didn’t know exactly where we were. “Look, Rinaldo,” I said. “You’ve made your point. You bashed my car, you’ve run me all day long, and you’ve just given me the scare of my life. Okay, I see it wasn’t the money that upset you. Let’s stuff the rest of it down a sewer so I can go home.”

  “You’ve had it with me?”

  “It’s been a whole day of atonement.”

  “You’ve seen enough of the whatchamacallems?—I learned some new words at the poker game from you.”

  “Which words?”

  “Proles,” he said, “Lumps. Lumpenproletartat. You gave us a little talk about Karl Marx.”

  “My lord, I did carry on, didn’t I. Completely unbuttoned. What got into me!”

  “You wanted to mix with riffraff and the criminal element. You went slumming, Charlie, and you had a great time playing cards with us dumbheads and social rejects.”

  “I see. I was insulting.”

  “Kind of. But you were interesting, here and there, about the social order and how obsessed the middle class was with the Lumpenproletariat. The other fellows didn’t know what in hell you were talking about.” For the first time, Cantabile spoke more mildly to me. I sat up and saw the river flashing night-lights on the right, and the Merchandise Mart decorated for Christmas. We were going to Gene and Georgetti’s old steak house, just off the spur of the Elevated train. Parking among other sinister luxury cars we went into the drab old building where—hurrah for opulent intimacy!—a crash of jukebox music fell on us like Pacific surf. The high-executive bar was crowded with executive drinkers and lovely companions. The gorgeous mirror was peopled with bottles and resembled a group photograph of celestial graduates.

  “Giulio,” Rinaldo told the waiter. “A quiet table, and we don’t want to sit by the rest rooms.”

  “Upstairs, Mr. Cantabile?”

  “Why not?” I said. I was shaky and didn’t want to wait at the bar for seating. It would lengthen the evening, besides.

  Cantabile stared as if to say, Who asked you! But he then consented. “Okay, upstairs. And two bottles of Piper Heidsieck.”

  “Right away, Mr. Cantabile.”

  In the Capone days hoodlums fought mock battles with champagne at banquets. They jigged the bottles up and down and shot each other with corks and foaming wine, all in black tie, and like a fun-massacre.

  “Now I want to tell you something,” said Rinaldo Cantabile, “and it’s a different subject altogether. I’m married, you know.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “To a marvelous beautiful intelligent woman.”

  “You mentioned your wife in South Chicago. That night . . . Do you have children? What does she do?”

  “She’s no housewife, buddy, and you’d better know it. You think I’d marry some fat-ass broad who sits around the house in curlers and watches TV? This is a real woman, with a mind, with knowledge. She teaches at Mundelein College and she’s working on a doctoral thesis. You know where?”

  “No.”

  “At Radcliffe, Harvard.”

  “That’s very good,” I said. I emptied the champagne glass and refilled it.

  “Don’t brush it off. Ask me what her subject is. Of the thesis.”

  “All right, what is it?”

  “She’s writing a study of that poet who was your friend.”

  “You’re kidding. Von Humboldt Fleisher? How do you know he was my friend? ... I see. I was talking about him at George’s. Someone should have locked me in a closet that night.”

  “You didn’t have to be cheated, Charlie. You didn’t know what you were doing. You were talking away like a nine-year-old kid about lawsuits, lawyers, accountants, bad investments, and the magazine you were going to publish—a real loser, it sounded like. You said you were going to spend your own money on your own ideas.”

  “I never discuss these things with strangers. Chicago must be giving me arctic madness.”

  “Now, listen, I’m very proud of my wife. Her people are rich, upper class. . . .” Boasting gives people a wonderful color, I’ve noticed, and Cantabile’s cheeks glowed. He said, “You’re asking yourself what is she doing with a husband like me.”

  I muttered, “No, no,” though that certainly was a natural question. However, it was not exactly news that highly educated women were excited by scoundrels criminals and lunatics, and that these scoundrels etcetera were drawn to culture, to thought. Diderot and Dostoevski had made us familiar with this.

  “I want her to get her PhD,” said Cantabile. “You understand? I want it bad. And you were a pal of this Fleisher guy. You’re going to give Lucy the information.”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  “Look this over.” He handed me an envelope and I put on my glasses and glanced over the document enclosed. It was signed Lucy Wilkins Cantabile and it was the letter of a model graduate student, polite, detailed, highly organized, with the usual academic circumlocutions—three single-spaced pages, dense with questions, painful questions. Her husband kept me under close observation as I read. “Well, what do you think of her?”

  “Terrific,” I said. The thing filled me with despair. “What do you two want of me?”

  “Answers. Information. We want you to write out the answers. What’s your opinion of her project?”

  “I think the dead owe us a living.”

  “Don’t horse around with me, Charlie. I didn’t like that crack.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” I said. “This poor Humboldt, my friend, was a big spirit who was destroyed ... never mind that. The PhD racket is a very fine racket but I want no part of it. Besides, I never answer questionnaires. Idiots impose on you with their documents. I can’t bear that kind of thing.”

  “Are you calling my wife an idiot?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her.”

  “I’ll make allowances for you. You got hit in the guts by the Mercedes and then I ran you ragged. But don’t be unpleasant about my wife.”

  “There are things I don’t do. This is one of them. I’m not going to write answers. It would take weeks.”

  “Listen!”

  “I draw the line.”

  “Just a minute!”

  “Bump me off. Go to hell.”

  “All right, easy does it. Some things are sacred. I understand. But we can work everything out. I listened at the poker game and I know that you’re in plenty of trouble. You need somebody tough and practical to handle things for you. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I have all kinds of ideas for you. We’ll trade off.”

  “No, I don’t want to trade anything. I’ve had it. My heart is breaking and I want to go home.”

  “Let’s have a steak and finish the wine. You need red meat. You’re just tired. You’ll do it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Take the order, Giulio,” he said.

  eleven

  I wish I knew why I feel such loyalty to the deceased, Hearing of their deaths I often said to myself that I must carry on for them and do their job, finish their work. And that of course I couldn’t do. Instead I found that certain of their characteristics were beginning to stick to me. As time went on, for instance, I found myself becoming absurd in the manner of Von Humboldt Fleisher. By and by it became apparent that he had acted as my agent. I myself, a nicely composed person, had had Humboldt expressing himself wildly on my behalf, satisfying some of my longings. This explained my liking for certain individuals— Humboldt, or George Swiebel, or even someone like Cantabile. This type of psychological delegation may have its origins in representative government. However, when an expressive friend died the delegated tasks returned to me. And as I was also the expressive delegate of other people, this eventually became pure hell.

  Carry on for Humboldt? Humboldt wanted to drape the world in radiance, but he didn’t have enough material. His attempt ended at the belly. Below hung the shaggy nudity we know so well. He was a lovely man, and generous, with a heart of gold. Still his goodness was the sort of goodness people now consider out of date. The radiance he dealt in was the old radiance and it was in short supply. What we needed was a new radiance altogether.

  And now Cantabile and his PhD wife were after me to recall the dear dead days of the Village, and its intellectuals, poets, crack-ups, its suicides and love affairs. I didn’t care much for that. I had no clear view of Mrs. Cantabile as yet, but I saw Rinaldo as one of the new mental rabble of the wised-up world and anyway I didn’t feel just now like having my arm twisted. It wasn’t that I minded giving information to honest scholars, or even to young people on the make, but I just then was busy, fiercely, painfully busy—personally and impersonally busy: personally, with Renata and Denise, and Murra the accountant, and the lawyers and the judge, and a multitude of emotional vexations; impersonally, participating in the life of my country and of Western Civilization and global society (a mixture of reality and figment). As editor of an important magazine, The Ark, which would probabl never come out, I was always thinking of statements that must be made and truths of which the world must be reminded. The world, identified by a series of dates (1789-1914-1917-1939) and by key words (Revolution, Te hnology, Science, and so forth), was another cause of busyness. You owed your duty to these dates and words. The whole thing was so momentous, overmastering, tragic, that in the end what I really wanted was to lie down and go to sleep. I have always had an exceptional gift for passing out. I look at snapshots taken in some of the most evil hours of mankind and I see that I have lots of hair and am appealingly youthful. I am wearing an ill-fitting double-breasted suit of the Thirties or Forties, smoking a pipe, standing under a tree, holding hands with a plump and pretty bimbo—and I am asleep on my feet, out cold. I have snoozed through many a crisis (while millions died).

  This is all terrifically relevant. For one thing, I may as well admit that I came back to settle in Chicago with the secret motive of writing a significant work. This lethargy of mine is related to that project—I got the idea of doing something with the chronic war between sleep and consciousness that goes on in human nature. My subject, in the final Eisenhower years, was boredom. Chicago was the ideal place in which to write my master essay— “Boredom.” In raw Chicago you could examine the human spirit under industrialism. If someone were to arise with a new vision of Faith, Love, and Hope, he would want to understand to whom he was offering it—he would have to understand the kind of deep suffering we call boredom. I was going to try to do with boredom what Malthus and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill or Durkheim had done with population, wealth, or the division of labor. History and temperament had put me in a peculiar position, and I was going to turn it to advantage. I hadn’t read those great modern boredom experts, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, and Baudelaire, for nothing. Over the years I had worked a lot on this essay. The difficulty was that I kept being overcome by the material, like a miner by gas fumes. I wouldn’t stop, though. I’d say to myself that even Rip van Winkle had slept for only twenty years, I had gone him at least two decades better and I was determined to make the lost time yield illumination. So I kept doing advanced mental work in Chicago, and also joined a gymnasium, playing ball with commodity brokers and gentleman-hoodlums in an effort to strengthen the powers of consciousness. Then my respected friend Durnwald mentioned, kiddingly, that the famous but misunderstood Dr. Rudolf Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. Steiner’s books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up. He argued that between the conception of an act and its execution by the will there fell a gap of sleep. It might be brief but it was deep. For one of man’s souls was a sleep-soul. In this, human beings resembled the plants, whose whole existence is sleep. This made a very deep impression on me. The truth about sleep could only be seen from the perspective of an immortal spirit. I had never doubted that I had such a thing. But I had set this fact aside quite early. I kept it under my hat. These beliefs under your hat also press on your brain and sink you down into the vegetable realm. Even now, to a man of culture like Durnwald, I hesitated to mention the spirit. He took no stock in Steiner, of course. Durnwald was reddish, elderly but powerful, thickset and bald, a bachelor of cranky habits but a kind man. He had a peremptory blunt butting even bullying manner, but if he scolded it was because he loved me—he wouldn’t have bothered otherwise. A great scholar, one of the most learned people on earth, he was a rationalist. Not narrowly rationalistic, by any means. Nevertheless, I couldn’t talk to him about the powers of a spirit separated from a body. He wouldn’t hear of it. He had simply been joking about Steiner. I was not joking, but I didn’t want to be thought a crank.

  I had begun to think a lot about the immortal spirit. Still, night after night, I kept dreaming that I had become the best player in the club, a racquet demon, that my backhand shot skimmed the left wall of the court and fell dead in the corner, it had so much English on it. I dreamed that I was beating all the best players—all those skinny, hairy, speedy fellows who in reality avoided playing with me because I was a dud. I was badly disappointed by the shallow interests such dreams betrayed. Even my dreams were asleep. And what about money? Money is necessary for the protection of the sleeping. Spending drives you into wakefulness. As you purge the inner film from the eye and rise into higher consciousness, less money should be required.

  Under the circumstances (and it should now be clearer what I mean by circumstances: Renata, Denise, children, courts, lawyers, Wall Street, sleep, death, metaphysics, karma, the presence of the universe in us, our being present in the universe itself) I had not paused to think about Humboldt, a precious friend hid in death’s dateless night, a camerado from a former existence (almost), well-beloved but dead. I imagined at times that I might see him in the life to come, together with my mother and my father. Demmie Vonghel, too. Demmie was one of the most significant dead, remembered every day. But I didn’t expect him to come at me as in life, driving ninety miles an hour in his Buick fourholer. First I laughed. Then I shrieked. I was transfixed. He bore down on me. He struck me with blessings. Humboldt’s gift wiped out many immediate problems.

  The role played by Ronald and Lucy Cantabile in this is something else again.

  Dear friends, though I was about to leave town and had much business to attend to, I decided to suspend all practical activities for one morning. I did this to keep from cracking under strain. I had been practicing some of the meditative exercises recommended by Rudolf Steiner in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. As yet I hadn’t attained much, but then my soul was well along in years and very much stained and banged up, and I had to be patient. Characteristically, I had been trying too hard, and I remembered again that wonderful piece of advice given by a French thinker: Trouve avant de chercher— Valéry, it was. Or maybe Picasso. There are times when the most practical thing is to lie down.

  And so the morning after my day with Cantabile I took a holiday. The weather was fine and clear. I drew the openwork drapes which shut out the details of Chicago and let in the bright sun and the high blue (which in their charity shone and towered even over a city like this). Cheerful, I dug out my Humboldt papers. I piled notebooks, letters, diaries, and manuscripts on the coffee table and on the covered radiator behind the sofa. Then I lay down, sighing, pulling off my shoes. Under my head I put a needlepoint cushion embroidered by a young lady (what a woman-filled life I always led. Ah, this sexually-disturbed century!), a Miss Doris Scheldt, the daughter of the anthroposophist I consulted now and then. She had given me this handmade Christmas gift the year before. Small and lovely, intelligent, strikingly strong in profile for such a pretty young woman, she liked to wear old-fashioned dresses that made her look like Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. Her footwear, however, was provocative, quite far out. In my private vocabulary she was a little noli me tangerine. She did and did not wish to be touched. She herself knew a great deal about anthroposophy and we spent a lot of time together last year, when Renata and I had a falling-out. I sat in her bentwood rocking chair while she put her tiny patent-leather boots up on a hassock, embroidering this red-and-green, fresh-grass-and-hot-embers cushion. We chatted, etcetera. It was an agreeable relationship, but it was over. Renata and I were back together.

  This is by way of explaining that I took Von Humboldt Fleisher as the subject of my meditation that morning. Such meditation supposedly strengthened the will. Then, gradually strengthened by such exercises, the will might become an organ of perception.

  A wrinkled postcard fell to the floor, one of the last Humboldt had sent me. I read the phantom strokes, like a fuzzy graph of the northern lights:

        Mice hide when hawks are high;

        Hawks shy from airplanes;

        Planes dread the ack-ack-ack;

        Each one fears somebody.

        Only the heedless lions

        Under the Booloo tree

        Snooze in each other’s arms

        After their lunch of blood—

        I call that living good!

  Eight or nine years ago, reading this poem, I thought, Poor Humboldt, those shock-treatment doctors have lobotomized him, they’ve ruined the guy. But now I saw this as a communication, not as a poem. The imagination must not pine away—that was Humboldt’s message. It must assert again that art manifests the inner powers of nature. To the savior-faculty of the imagination sleep was sleep, and waking was true waking. This was what Humboldt now appeared to me to be saying. If that was so, Humboldt was never more sane and brave than at the end of his life. And I had run away from him on Forty-sixth Street just when he had most to tell me. I had spent that morning, as I have mentioned, grandly dressed up and revolving elliptically over the city of New York in that Coast Guard helicopter, with the two US Senators and the Mayor and officials from Washington and Albany and crack journalists, all belted up in puffy life jackets, each jacket with its sheath knife. (I’ve never gotten over those knives.) And then, after the luncheon in Central Park (I am compelled to repeat), I walked out and saw Humboldt, a dying man eating a pretzel stick at the curb, the dirt of the grave already sprinkled on his face. Then I rushed away. It was one of those ecstatically painful moments when I couldn’t hold still. I had to run. I said, “Oh, kid, good-by. I’ll see you in the next world!”

  There was nothing more to be done for him in this world, I had decided. But was that true? The wrinkled postcard now made me reconsider. It struck me that I had sinned against Humboldt. Lying down on the goose-down sofa in order to meditate, I found myself getting hot with self-criticism and shame, flushing and sweating. I pulled Doris Scheldt’s pillow from behind my head and wiped my face with it. Again I saw myself taking cover behind the parked cars on Forty-sixth Street. And Humboldt like a bush tented all over by the bagworm and withering away. I was stunned to see my old pal dying and I fled, I went back to the Plaza and phoned Senator Kennedy’s office to say that I had been called to Chicago suddenly. I’d return to Washington next week. Then I took a cab to La Guardia and caught the first plane to O’Hare. I return again and again to that day because it was so dreadful. Two drinks, the limit in flight, did nothing for me—nothing! When I landed I drank several double shots of Jack Daniel’s in the O’Hare bar, for strength. It was a very hot evening. I telephoned Denise and said, “I’m back.”

  “You’re days and days early. What’s up, Charles?”

  I said, “I’ve had a bad experience.”

  “Where’s the Senator?”

  “Still in New York. I’ll go back to Washington in a day or two.”

  “Well, come on home, then.”

  Life had commissioned an article on Robert Kennedy. I had now spent five days with the Senator, or rather near him, sitting on a sofa in the Senate Office Building, observing him. It was, from every point of view, a singular inspiration, but the Senator had allowed me to attach myself to him and even seemed to like me. I say “seemed” because it was his business to leave such an impression with a journalist who proposed to write about him. I liked him, too, perhaps against my better judgment. His way of looking at you was odd. His eyes were as blue as the void, and there was a slight lowering in the skin of the lids, an extra fold. After the helicopter trip we drove from La Guardia to the Bronx in a limousine, and I was in there with him. The heat was dismal in the Bronx but we were in a sort of crystal cabinet. His desire was to be continually briefed. He asked questions of everyone in the party. From me he wanted historical information —”What should I know about William Jennings Bryan?” or, “Tell me about H. L. Mencken”—receiving what I said with a kind of inner glitter that did not tell me what he thought or whether he could use such facts. We pulled up at a Harlem playground. There were Cadillacs, motorcycle cops, bodyguards, television crews. A vacant lot between two tenements had been fenced in, paved, furnished with slides and sandboxes. The playground director in his Afro and dashiki and beads received the two Senators. Cameras stood above us on trestles. The black director, radiant, ceremonious, held a basketball between the two Senators. A space was cleared. Twice the slender Kennedy, carelessly elegant, tossed the ball. He nodded his ruddy, foxy head high with hair and smiled when he missed. Senator Javits could not afford to miss. Compact and bald he too was smiling but squared off at the basket drawing the ball to his breast and binding himself by strength of will to the objective. He made two smart shots. The ball did not arch. It flew straight at the loop and went in. There was applause. What vexation, what labor to keep up with Bobby. But the Republican Senator managed very well.

  And this was what Denise wanted me to occupy myself with. Denise had arranged all this for me, phoning the people at Life, supervising the whole deal. “Come on home,” she said. But she was displeased. She didn’t want me in Chicago now.

  Home was a grand house in Kenwood on the South Side. Rich German Jews had built Victorian-Edwardian mansions here early in the century. When the mail-order tycoons and other nobs departed, university professors, psychiatrists, lawyers, and Black Muslims moved in. Since I had insisted on returning to become the Malthus of boredom, Denise bought the Kahnheim house. She had done this under protest, saying, “Why Chicago! We can live wherever we like, can’t we? Christ!” She had in mind a house in Georgetown, or in Rome, or in London SW3. But I was obstinate, and Denise said she hoped it wasn’t a sign that I was headed for a nervous breakdown. Her father the federal judge was a keen lawyer. I know she often consulted him downtown about property, joint-tenancy, widows’ rights in the State of Illinois. He advised us to buy Colonel Kahnheim’s mansion. Daily at breakfast Denise asked when I was going to make my will.

  Now it was night and she was waiting for me in the master bedroom. I hate air conditioning. I kept Denise from installing it. The temperature was in the nineties, and on hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul. The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter-city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the streets once were filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter the yards lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place. It returns at times, suspiring from the vacated soil, to remind us all that Chicago had once led the world in butcher-technology and that billions of animals had died here. And that night the windows were open wide and the familiar depressing multilayered stink of meat, tallow, blood-meal, pulverized bones, hides, soap, smoked slabs, and burnt hair came back. Old Chicago breathed again through leaves and screens. I heard fire trucks and the gulp and whoop of ambulances, bowel-deep and hysterical. In the surrounding black slums incendiarism shoots up in summer, an index, some say, of psychopathology. Although the love of flames is also religious. However, Denise was sitting nude on the bed rapidly and strongly brushing her hair. Over the lake, steel mills twinkled. Lamplight showed the soot already fallen on the leaves of the wall ivy. We had an early drought that year. Chicago, this night, was panting, the big urban engines going, tenements blazing in Oakwood with great shawls of flame, the sirens weirdly yelping, the fire engines, ambulances, and police cars— mad-dog, gashing-knife weather, a rape and murder night, thousands of hydrants open, spraying water from both breasts. Engineers were staggered to see the level of Lake Michigan fall as these tons of water poured. Bands of kids prowled with handguns and knives. And—dear-dear—this tender-minded mourning Mr. Charlie Citrine had seen his old buddy, a dead man eating a pretzel in New York, so he abandoned Life and the Coast Guard and helicopters and two Senators and rushed home to be comforted. For this purpose his wife had taken off everything and was brushing her exceedingly dense hair. Her enormous violet and gray eyes were impatient, her tenderness was mixed with glowering. She was asking tacitly how long I was going to sit on the chaise longue in my socks, heart-wounded and full of obsolete sensibility. A nervous and critical person, she thought I suffered from morbid aberrations about grief, that I was pre-modern or baroque about death. She often declared that I had come back to Chicago because my parents were buried here. Sometimes she said with sudden alertness, “Ah, here comes the cemetery bit!” What’s more she was often right. Soon I myself could hear the chain-dragging monotony of my low voice. Love was the remedy for these death moods. And here was Denise, impatient but dutiful, sitting stripped on the bed, and I didn’t even take off my necktie. I know this sorrow can be maddening. And it tired Denise to support me emotionally. She didn’t take much stock in these emotions of mine. “Oh, you’re on that kick again. You must quit all this operatic bullshit. Talk to a psychiatrist. Why are you hung up on the past and always lamenting some dead party or other?” Denise pointed out with a bright flash of the face, a sign that she had had an insight, that while I shed tears for my dead I was also patting down their graves with my shovel. For I did write biographies, and the deceased were my bread and butter. The deceased had earned my French decoration and got me into the White House. (The loss of our White House connections after the death of JFK was one of Denise’s bitterest vexations.) Don’t get me wrong, I know that love and scolding often go together. Durnwald did this to me, too. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. The whole thing was mixed with affection. When I came home in a state over Humboldt, she was ready to comfort me. But she had a sharp tongue, Denise did. (I sometimes called her Rebukah.) Of course my lying there so sad, so heart-injured, was provoking. Besides, she suspected that I would never finish the Life article. There she was right again.

  If I was going to feel so much about death, why didn’t I do something about it. This endless sensibility was awful. Such was Denise’s opinion. I agreed with that, too.

  “So you feel bad about your pal Humboldt!” she said. “But how come you haven’t looked him up? You had years to do it in. And why didn’t you speak to him today?”

  These were hard questions, very intelligent. She didn’t let me get away with a thing.

  “I suppose I could have said, ‘Humboldt, it’s me, Charlie. What about some real lunch? The Blue Ribbon is just around the corner.’ But I think he might have thrown a fit. A couple of years ago he tried to hit some dean’s secretary with a hammer. He accused her of covering his bed with girlie magazines. Some kind of erotic plot against him. They had to put him away again. The poor man is crazy. And it’s no use going back to Saint Julien or hugging lepers.”

  “Who said anything about lepers? You’re always thinking what nobody else has remotely in mind.”

  “Well okay, then, but he looked gruesome and I was all dressed up. And I’ll tell you a curious coincidence. In the helicopter this morning I was sitting next to Dr. Longstaff. So naturally I thought of Humboldt. It was Longstaff who promised Humboldt a huge grant from the Belisha Foundation. This was when we were still at Princeton. Haven’t I ever told you about that disaster?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The whole thing came back to me.”

  “Is Longstaffi still so handsome and distinguished? He must be an old man. And I’ll bet you pestered him about those old times.”

  “Yes, I reminded him.”

  “You would. And I suppose it was disagreeable.”

  “The past isn’t disagreeable to the fully justified.”

  “I wonder what Longstaff was doing in that Washington crowd.”

  “Raising money for his philanthropies, I expect.”

  twelve

  Thus went my meditation on the green sofa. Of all the meditative methods recommended in the literature I liked this new one best. Often I sat at the end of the day remembering everything that had happened, in minute detail, all that had been seen and done and said. I was able to go backward through the day, viewing myself from the back or side, physically no different from anyone else. If I had bought Renata a gardenia at an open-air stand, I could recall that I had paid seventy-five cents for it. I saw the brass milling of the three silver-plated quarters. I saw the lapel of Renata’s coat, the white head of the long pin. I remembered even the two turns the pin took in the cloth, and Renata’s full woman’s face and her pleased gaze at the flower, and the odor of the gardenia. If this was what transcendence took, it was a cinch, I could do it forever, back to the beginning of time. So, lying on the sofa, I now brought back to mind the obituary page of the Times.

  The Times was much stirred by Humboldt’s death and gave him a double-column spread. The photograph was large. For after all Humboldt did what poets in crass America are supposed to do. He chased ruin and death even harder than he had chased women. He blew his talent and his health and reached home, the grave, in a dusty slide. He plowed himself under. Okay. So did Edgar Allan Poe, picked out of the Baltimore gutter. And Hart Crane over the side of a ship. And Jarrell falling in front of a car. And poor John Berryman jumping from a bridge. For some reason this awfulness is peculiarly appreciated by business and technological America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either. Look at these good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies.” So this, I was meditating, is how successful bitter hard-faced and cannibalistic people exult. Such was the attitude reflected in the picture of Humboldt the Times chose to use. It was one of those mad-rotten-majesty pictures —spooky, humorless, glaring furiously with tight lips, mumpish or scrofulous cheeks, a scarred forehead, and a look of enraged, ravaged childishness. This was the Humboldt of conspiracies, putsches, accusations, tantrums, the Bellevue Hospital Humboldt, the Humboldt of litigations. For Humboldt was litigious. The word was made for him. He threatened many times to sue me.

  Yes, the obituary was awful. The clipping was somewhere amongst these papers that surrounded me, but I didn’t want to look at it. I could remember verbatim what the Times said. It said, in its tinkertoy style of knobs and sticks, that Von Humboldt Fleisher had made a brilliant start. Born on New York’s Upper West Side. At twenty-two set a new style in American poetry. Appreciated by Conrad Aiken (who once had to call the cops to get him out of the house). Approved by T. S. Eliot (about whom, when he was off his nut, he would spread the most lurid improbable sexual scandal). Mr. Fleisher was also a critic, essayist, writer of fiction, teacher, prominent literary intellectual, a salon personality. Intimates praised his conversation. He was a great talker and wit.

  Here, no longer meditative, I took over myself. The sun still shone beautifully enough, the blue was wintry, of Emersonian haughtiness, but I felt wicked. I was as filled with harsh things to say as the sky was full of freezing blue. Very good, Humboldt, you made it in American Culture as Hart Schaffner & Marx made it in cloaks and suits, as General Sarnoff made it in communications, as Bernard Baruch made it on a park bench. As, according to Dr. Johnson, dogs made it on their hind legs and ladies in the pulpit—exceeding their natural limits curiously. Orpheus, the Son of Greenhorn, turned up in Greenwich Village with his ballads. He loved literature and intellectual conversation and argument, loved the history of thought. A big gentle handsome boy he put together his own combination of symbolism and street language. Into this mixture went Yeats, Apollinaire, Lenin, Freud, Morris R. Cohen, Gertrude Stein, baseball statistics, and Hollywood gossip. He brought Coney Island into the Aegean and united Buffalo Bill with Rasputin. He was going to join together the Art Sacrament and the Industrial USA as equal powers. Born (as he insisted) on a subway platform at Columbus Circle, his mother going into labor on the IRT, he intended to be a divine artist, a man of visionary states and enchantments, Platonic possession. He got a Rationalistic, Naturalistic education at CCNY. This was not easily reconciled with the Orphic. But all his desires were contradictory. He wanted to be magically and cosmically expressive and articulate, able to say anything; he wanted also to be wise, philosophical, to find the common ground of poetry and science, to prove that the imagination was just as potent as machinery, to free and to bless humankind. But he was out also to be rich and famous. And of course there were the girls. Freud himself believed that fame was pursued for the sake of the girls. But then the girls were pursuing something themselves. Humboldt said, “They’re always looking for the real thing. They’ve been had and had by phonies, so they pray for the real thing and they rejoice when the real thing appears. That’s why they love poets. This is the truth about girls.” Humboldt was the real thing, certainly. But by and by he stopped being a beautiful young man and the prince of conversationalists. He grew a belly, he became thick in the face. A look of disappointment and doubt appeared under his eyes.

  Brown circles began to deepen there, and he had a bruised sort of pallor in the cheeks. That was what his “frantic profession” did to him. For he always had said that poetry was one of the frantic professions in which success depends on the opinion you hold of yourself. Think well of yourself, and you win. Lose self-esteem, and you’re finished. For this reason a persecution complex develops, because people who don’t speak well of you are killing you. Knowing this, or sensing it, critics and intellectuals had you. Like it or not you were dragged into a power struggle. Then Humboldt’s art dwindled while his frenzy increased. The girls were dear to him. They took him for the real thing long after he had realized that nothing real was left and that he was imposing on them. He swallowed more pills, he drank more gin. Mania and depression drove him to the loony bin. He was in and out. He became a professor of English in the boondocks. There he was a grand literary figure. Elsewhere, in one of his own words, he was zilch. But then he died and got good notices. He had always valued prominence, and the Times was tops. Having lost his talent, his mind, fallen apart, died in ruin, he rose again on the cultural Dow-Jones and enjoyed briefly the prestige of significant failure.

  thirteen

  To Humboldt the Eisenhower landslide of 1952 was a personal disaster. He met me, the morning after, with heavy depression. His big blond face was madly gloomy. He led me into his office, Sewell’s office, which was stuffed with books—I had the adjoining room. Leaning on the small desk, the Times with the election results spread over it, he held a cigarette but his hands were also clasped in despair. His ashtray, a Savarin coffee can, was already full. It wasn’t simply that his hopes were disappointed or that the cultural evolution of America was stopped cold. Humboldt was afraid. “What are we going to do?” he said.

  “We’ll have to mark time,” I said. “Maybe the next administration will let us into the White House.”

  Humboldt would allow no light conversation this morning.

  “But look,” I said. “You’re poetry editor of Arcturus, you’re on the staff of Hildebrand & Co. and a paid adviser to the Belisha Foundation, and teaching at Princeton. You have a contract to do a textbook in modern poetry. Kathleen told me that if you lived to be a hundred and fifty you’d never be able to make good on all the advances you’ve drawn from publishers.”

  “You wouldn’t be jealous, Charlie, if you knew how hard my position is. I seem to have a lot going for me, but it’s all a bubble. I’m in danger. You, without any prospects at all, are in a much stronger position. And now there’s this political disaster.” I sensed that he was afraid of his back-country neighbors. In his nightmares they burned his house, he shot it out with them, they lynched him and carried off his wife. Humboldt said, “What do we do now? What’s our next move?”

  These questions were asked only to introduce the scheme he had in mind.

  “Our move?”

  “Either we leave the US during this administration, or we dig in.”

  “We could ask Harry Truman for asylum in Missouri.”

  “Don’t joke with me, Charlie. I have an invitation from the Free University of Berlin to teach American literature.”

  “That sounds grand.”

  He quickly said, “No, no! Germany is dangerous. I wouldn’t take a chance on Germany.”

  “That leaves digging in. Where are you going to dig?”

  “I said ‘we.’ The situation is very unsafe. If you had any sense you’d feel the same. You think because you’re such a pretty-boy, and so bright and big-eyed, that nobody would hurt you.”

  Humboldt now began to attack Sewell. “Sewell really is a rat,” he said.

  “I thought you were old friends.”

  “Long acquaintance isn’t friendship. Did you like him? He received you. He condescended, he was snotty, you were treated like dirt. He didn’t even talk to you, only to me. I resented it.”

  “You didn’t say so.”

  “I didn’t want to rouse you right away and make you angry, start you under a cloud. Do you think he’s a good critic?”

  “Can the deaf tune pianos?”

  “He’s subtle, though. He’s a subtle man, in a dirty way. Don’t underrate him. And he’s a rough infighter. But to become a professor without even a BA ... it speaks for itself. His father was just a lobsterman. His mother took in washing. She did Kit-tredge’s collars in Cambridge and she wangled library privileges for her son. He went down into the Harvard stacks a weakling and he came up a regular titan. Now he’s a Wasp gentleman and lords it over us. You and I have raised his status. He comes on with two Jews like a mogul and a prince.”

  “Why do you want to make me sore at Sewell?”

  “You’re too lordly yourself to take offense. You’re an even bigger snob than Sewell. I think you may be psychologically one of those Axel types that only cares about inner inspiration, no connection with the actual world. The actual world can kiss your ass,” said Humboldt wildly. “You leave it to poor bastards like me to think about matters like money and status and success and failure and social problems and politics. You don’t give a damn for such things.”

  “If true, why is that so bad?”

  “Because you stick me with all these unpoetic responsibilities. You lean back like a king, relaxed, and let all these human problems happen. There ain’t no flies on Jesus. Charlie, you’re not place bound, time bound, goy bound, Jew bound. What are you bound? Others abide our question. Thou art free! Sewell was stinking to you. He snubbed you and you’re sore at him, too, don’t deny it. But you can’t pay attention. You’re always mooning in your private mind about some kind of cosmic destiny. Tell me, what is this great thing you’re always working on?”

  I was now still lying on my broccoli plush sofa engaged in a meditation on this haughty freezing blue December morning. The heating engines of the great Chicago building made a strong hum. I could have done without this. Though I was beholden to modern engineering, too. Humboldt in the Princeton office stood before my mind, and my concentration was intense.

  “Come to the point,” I said to him.

  His mouth seemed dry but there was nothing to drink. Pills make you thirsty. He smoked some more instead, and said, “You and I are friends. Sewell brought me here. And I brought you.”

  “I’m grateful to you. But you aren’t grateful to him.”

  “Because he’s a son of a bitch.”

  “Perhaps.” I didn’t mind hearing Sewell called that. He had snubbed me. But with his depleted hair, his dry-cereal mustache, the drinker’s face, the Prufrock subtleties, the would-be elegance of his clasped hands and crossed legs, with his involved literary mutterings he was no wicked enemy. Although I seemed to be restraining Humboldt I loved the way he loused up Sewell. Humboldt’s wayward nutty fertility when he let himself go gratified one of my shameful appetites, no doubt about it.

  “Sewell is taking advantage of us,” Humboldt said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “When he comes back we’ll be turned out.”

  “But I always knew it was a one-year job.”

  “Oh, you don’t mind being like a rented article from Hertz’s, like a trundle bed or a baby’s potty?” said Humboldt.

  Under the shepherd’s plaid of the blanket-wide jacket his back began to look humped (a familiar sign). That massing of bison power in his back meant that he was up to no good. The look of peril grew about his mouth and eyes and the two crests of hair stood higher than usual. Pale hot radiant waves appeared in his face. Pigeons, gray-and-cream-feathered, walked with crimson feet on the sandstone window sills. Humboldt didn’t like them. He saw them as Princeton pigeons, Sewell’s pigeons. They cooed for Sewell. At times Humboldt seemed to view them as his agents and spies. After all this was Sewell’s office and Humboldt sat at Sewell’s desk. The books on the walls were Sewell’s. Lately Humboldt had been throwing them into boxes. He pushed off a set of Toynbee and put up his own Rilke and Kafka. Down with Toynbee; down with Sewell, too. “You and I are expendable here, Charlie,” Humboldt said. “Why? I’ll tell you. We’re Jews, shonickers, kikes. Here in Princeton, we’re no threat to Sewell.”

  I remembered thinking hard about this, knitting my forehead. “I’m afraid I still haven’t grasped your point,” I said.

  “Try thinking of yourself as Sheeny Solomon Levi, then. It’s safe to install Sheeny Solomon and go to Damascus for a year to discuss The Spoils of Poynton. When you come back, your classy professorship is waiting for you. You and I are no threat.”

  “But I don’t want to be a threat to him. And why should Sewell worry about threats?”

  “Because he’s at war with these old guys, all the billy whiskers, the Hamilton Wright Mabie genteel crappers who never accepted him. He doesn’t know Greek or Anglo-Saxon. To them he’s a lousy upstart.”

  “So? He’s a self-made man. Now I’m for him.”

  “He’s corrupt, he’s a bastard, he’s covered you and me with contempt. I feel ridiculous when I walk down the street. In Princeton you and I are Moe and Joe, a Yid vaudeville act. We’re a joke—Abie Kabibble and Company. Unthinkable as members of the Princeton community.”

  “Who needs their community?”

  “Nobody trusts that little crook. There’s something human he just hasn’t got. The person who knew him best, his wife—when she left him she took her birds. You saw all those cages. She didn’t even want an empty cage to remind her of him.”

  “Did she go away with birds sitting on her head and arms? Come on, Humboldt, what do you want?”

  “I want you to feel as insulted as I feel, not stick me with the whole thing. Why don’t you have any indignation, Charlie— Ah! You’re not a real American. You’re grateful. You’re a foreigner. You have that Jewish immigrant kiss-the-ground-at-Ellis-Island gratitude. You’re also a child of the Depression. You never thought you’d have a job, with an office, and a desk, and private drawers all for yourself. It’s still so hilarious to you that you can’t stop laughing. You’re a Yiddisher mouse in these great Christian houses. At the same time, you’re too snooty to look at anyone.”

  “These social wars are nothing to me, Humboldt. And let’s not forget all the hard things you’ve said about Ivy League kikes. And only last week you were on the side of Tolstoi—it’s time we simply refused to be inside history and playing the comedy of history, the bad social game.”

  It was no use arguing. Tolstoi? Tolstoi was last week’s conversation. Humboldt’s big intelligent disordered face was white and hot with turbulent occult emotions and brainstorms. I felt sorry for us, for both, for all of us, such odd organisms under the sun. Large minds abutting too close on swelling souls. And banished souls at that, longing for their home-world. Everyone alive mourned the loss of his home-world.

  Sunk into the pillow of my green sofa it was all clear to me. Ah, what this existence was! What being human was!

  Pity for Humboldt’s absurdities made me cooperative. “You’ve been up all night thinking,” I said.

  Humboldt said with an unusual emphasis, “Charlie, you trust me, don’t you?”

  “Christ, Humboldt! Do I trust the Gulf Stream? What am I supposed to trust you in?”

  “You know how close I feel to you. Interknitted. Brother and brother.”

  “You don’t have to soften me up. Spill it, Humboldt, for Christ’s sake.”

  He made the desk seem small. It was manufactured for lesser figures. His upper body rose above it. He looked like a three-hundred-pound pro linebacker beside a kiddie car. His nail-bitten fingers held the ember of a cigarette. “First we’re going to get me an appointment here,” he said.

  “You want to be a Princeton prof?”

  “A chair in modern literature, that’s what I want. And you’re going to help. So that when Sewell comes back he finds me installed. With tenure. The US Gov has sent him to dazzle and oppress those poor Syrian wogs with The Spoils of Poynton. Well, when he’s wound up a year of boozing and mumbling long sentences under his breath he’ll come back and find that the old twerps who wouldn’t give him the time of day have made me full professor. How do you like it?”

  “Not much. Is that what kept you up last night?”

  “Call on your imagination, Charlie. You’re overrelaxed. Grasp the insult. Get sore. He hired you like a spittoon-shiner. You’ve got to cut the last of the old slave-morality virtues that still bind you to the middle class. I’m going to put some hardness in you, some iron.”

  “Iron? This will be your fifth job—the fifth that I know of. Suppose I were hard—I’d ask you what’s in it for me. Where do I come in?”

  “Charlie!” He intended to smile; it was not a smile. “I’ve got a blueprint.”

  “I know you have. You’re like what’s-his-name, who couldn’t drink a cup of tea without a stratagem—like Alexander Pope.”

  Humboldt seemed to take this as a compliment, and laughed between his teeth, silently. Then he said, “Here’s what you do. Go to Ricketts and say: ‘Humboldt is a very distinguished person —poet, scholar, critic, teacher, editor. He has an international reputation and he’ll have a place in the literary history of the United States’—all of which is true, by the way. ‘And here’s your chance, Professor Ricketts, I happen to know that Hum-boldt’s tired of living like a hand-to-mouth bohemian. The literary world is going fast. The avant-garde is a memory. It’s time Humboldt led a more dignified settled life. He’s married now. I know he admires Princeton, he loves it here, and if you made him an offer he’d certainly consider it. I might talk him into it. I’d hate for you to miss this opportunity, Professor Ricketts. Princeton has got Einstein and Panofsky. But you’re weak on the literary creative side. The coming trend is to have artists on the campus. Amherst has Robert Frost. Don’t fall behind. Grab Fleisher. Don’t let him get away, or you’ll end up with some third-rater.’ “

  “I won’t mention Einstein and Panofsky. I’ll start right out with Moses and the prophets. What a cast-iron plot! Ike has inspired you. This is what I call high-minded low cunning.”

  However, he didn’t laugh. His eyes were red. He’d been up all night. First he watched the election returns. Then he wandered about the house and yard gripped by despair, thinking what to do. Then he planned out this putsch. Then filled with inspiration he drove in his Buick, the busted muffler blasting in the country lanes and the great long car skedaddling dangerously on the curves. Lucky for the woodchucks they were already hibernating. I know what figures crowded his thoughts—Walpole, Count Mosca, Disraeli, Lenin. While he thought also, with un-contemporary sublimity, about eternal life. Ezekiel and Plato were not absent. The man was noble. But he was all asmolder, and craziness also made him vile and funny. Heavy-handed, thick-faced with fatigue, he took a medicine bottle from his briefcase and fed himself a few little pills out of the palm of his hand. Tranquilizers, perhaps. Or maybe amphetamines for speed. He swallowed them dry. He doctored himself. Like Demmie Vonghel. She locked herself in the bathroom and took many pills.

  “So you’ll go to Ricketts,” Humboldt told me.

  “I thought he was only a front man.”

  “That’s right. He’s a stooge. But the old guard can’t disown him. If we outsmart him, they’ll have to back him up.”

  “But why should Ricketts pay attention to what I say?”

  “Because, friend, I passed the word around that your play is going to be produced.”

  “You did?”

  “Next year, on Broadway. They look on you as a successful playwright.”

  “Now why the hell did you do that? I’m going to look like a phony.”

  “No, you won’t. We’ll make it true. You can leave that to me. I gave Ricketts your last essay in the Kenyan to read, and he thinks you’re a comer. And don’t pretend with me. I know you. You love intrigue and mischief. Right now your teeth are on edge with delight. Besides, it’s not just intrigue. . . .”

  “What? Sorcery! Fucking sortilegio!”

  “It’s not sortilegio. It’s mutual aid.”

  “Don’t give me that stuff.”

  “First me, then you,” he said.

  I distinctly remember that my voice jumped up. I shouted, “What!” Then I laughed and said, “You’ll make me a Princeton professor, too? Do you think I could stand a whole lifetime of this drinking, boredom, small talk, and ass-kissing? Now that you’ve lost Washington by a landslide, you’ve settled pretty fast for this academic music box. Thank you, I’ll find misery in my own way. I give you two years of this goyish privilege.”

  Humboldt waved his hands at me. “Don’t poison my mind. What a tongue you have, Charlie. Don’t say those things. I’ll expect them to happen. They’ll infect my future.”

  I paused and considered his peculiar proposition. Then I looked at Humboldt himself. His mind was executing some earnest queer labor. It was swelling and pulsating oddly, painfully. He tried to laugh it all off with his nearly silent panting laugh. I could hardly hear the breath of it.

  “You wouldn’t be lying to Ricketts,” he said. “Where would they get somebody like me?”

  “Okay, Humboldt. That is a hard question.”

  “Well, I am one of the leading literary men of this country.”

  “Sure you are, at your best.”

  “Something should be done for me. Especially in this Ike moment, as darkness falls on the land.”

  “But why this?”

  “Well, frankly, Charlie, I’m out of kilter, temporarily. I have to get back to a state in which I can write poetry again. But where’s my equilibrium? There are too many anxieties. They dry me out. The world keeps interfering. I have to get the enchantment back. I feel as if I’ve been living in a suburb of reality, and commuting back and forth. That’s got to stop. I have to locate myself. I’m here” (here on earth, he meant) “to do something, something good.”

  “I know, Humboldt. Here isn’t Princeton, either, and everyone is waiting for the good thing.”

  Eyes reddening still more, Humboldt said, “I know you love me, Charlie.”

  “It’s true. But let’s only say it once.”

  “You’re right. I’m a brother to you, too, though. Kathleen also knows it. It’s obvious how we feel about one another, Demmie Vonghel included. Humor me, Charlie. Never mind how ridiculous this seems. Humor me, it’s important. Call up Ricketts and say you have to talk to him.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  Humboldt put his hands on Sewell’s small yellow desk and thrust himself back in the chair so that the steel casters gave a wicked squeak. The ends of his hair were confused with cigarette smoke. His head was lowered. He was examining me as if he had just surfaced from many fathoms.

  “Have you got a checking account, Charlie? Where do you keep your money?”

  “What money?”

  “Haven’t you got a checking account?”

  “At Chase Manhattan. I’ve got about twelve bucks.”

  “My bank is the Corn Exchange,” he said. “Now, where’s your checkbook?”

  “In my trench coat.”

  “Let’s see.”

  I brought out the flapping green blanks, curling at the edges. “I see my balance is only eight,” I said.

  Then Humboldt reaching into his plaid jacket brought out his own checkbook and undipped one of his many pens. He was bandoliered with fountain pens and ball-points.

  “What are you doing, Humboldt?”

  “I’m giving you carte blanche power to draw on my account. I’m signing a blank check in your name. And you make one out to me. No date, no amount, just ‘Pay to Von Humboldt Fleisher.’ Sit down, Charlie, and fill it out.”

  “But what’s it about? I don’t like this. I have to understand what’s going on.”

  “With eight bucks in the bank, what do you care?”

  “It’s not the money. . . .”

  He was very moved, and he said, “Exactly. It isn’t. That’s the whole point. If you’re ever up against it, fill in any amount you need and cash it. The same applies to me. We’ll take an oath as friends and brothers never to abuse this. To hold it for the worst emergency. When I said mutual aid you didn’t take me seriously. Well, now you see.” Then he leaned on the desk in all his heaviness and in a tiny script he filled in my name with trembling force.

  My control wasn’t much better than his. My own arm seemed full of nerves and it jerked as I was signing. Then Humboldt, big delicate and stained, heaved himself up from his revolving chair and gave me the Corn Exchange check. “No, don’t just stick it in your pocket,” he said. “I want to see you put it away. It’s dangerous. I mean it’s valuable.”

  We now shook hands—all four hands. Humboldt said, “This makes us blood-brothers. We’ve entered into a covenant. This is a covenant.”

  A year later I had a Broadway hit and he filled in my blank check and cashed it. He said that I had betrayed him, that I, his blood-brother, had broken a sacred covenant, that I was conspiring with Kathleen, that I had set the cops on him, and that I had cheated him. They had lashed him in a strait jacket and locked him in Bellevue, and that was my doing, too. For this I had to be punished. He imposed a fine. He drew six thousand seven hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents from my account at Chase Manhattan.

  As for the check he had given me, I put it in a drawer under some shirts. In a few weeks it disappeared and was never seen again.