fourteen

  Here meditation began to get really tough. Why? Because of Humboldt’s invectives and denunciations which now came back to me, together with fierce distractions and pelting anxieties, as dense as flak. Why was I lying here? I had to get ready to fly to Milan. I was supposed to go with Renata to Italy. Christmas in Milan! And I had to attend a hearing in Judge Urbanovich’s chambers, conferring first with Forrest Tomchek, the lawyer who represented me in the action brought by Denise for every penny I owned. I needed also to discuss with Murra the CPA the government’s tax case against me. Also Pierre Thaxter was due from California to talk to me about The Ark—really, to show why he had been right to default on that loan for which I had put up collateral—and to bare his soul and in so doing bare my soul, too, for who was I to have a covered soul? There was even a question about the Mercedes, whether to sell it or pay for repairs. I was almost ready to abandon it for junk. As for Ronald Cantabile, claiming to represent the new spirit, I knew that I could expect to hear from him any minute.

  Still, I was able to hold out against this nagging rush of distractions. I fought off the impulse to rise as if it were a wicked temptation. I stayed where I was on the sofa sinking into the down for which geese had been ravished, and held on to Humboldt. The will-strengthening exercises I had been doing were no waste of time. As a rule I took plants as my theme: either a particular rosebush summoned from the past, or plant anatomy. I obtained a large botany book by a woman named Esau and sank myself into morphology, into protoplasts and ergastic substances, so that my exercises might have real content. I didn’t want to be one of your idle hit-or-miss visionaries.

  Sewell an anti-Semite? Nonsense. It suited Humboldt to hoke that up. As for blood-brotherhood and covenants, they were somewhat more genuine. Blood-brotherhood dramatized a real desire. But not genuine enough. And now I tried to remember our endless consultations and briefings before I called on Rick-etts. I said, at last, to Humboldt, “Enough. I know how to do this. Not another word.” Demmie Vonghel coached me too. She thought Humboldt very funny. On the morning of the interview she made sure that I was correctly dressed and took me to Penn Station in a cab.

  This morning in Chicago I found that I could recall Ricketts without the slightest difficulty. He was youthful but white-haired. His crew cut sat low on his forehead. He was thick, strong, and red-necked, a handsome furniture-mover sort of man. Years after the war, he still clung to GI slang, this burly winsome person. A bit heavy for frolic, in his charcoal-gray flannels, he tried to take a light manner with me. “I hear you guys are going great in Sewell’s program, that’s the scuttlebutt.”

  “Ah, you should have heard Humboldt speak on Sailing to Byzantium.”

  “People have said that. I couldn’t make it. Administration. Tough titty for me. Now what about you, Charlie?”

  “Enjoying every minute here.”

  “Terrific. Keeping up your own work, I hope? Humboldt tells me you’re going to have a Broadway production next year.”

  “He’s a little ahead of himself.”

  “Ah, he’s a great guy. Wonderful thing for us all. Wonderful for me, my first year as chairman.”

  “Is it, now?”

  “Why yes, it’s my shakedown cruise, too. Glad to have both of you. You look very cheerful, by the way.”

  “I feel cheerful, generally. People find fault with it. A drunken lady last week asked me what the hell my problem was. She said I was a compulsive-heimischer type.”

  “Really? I don’t think I ever heard that expression.”

  “It was new to me too. Then she told me I was existentially out of step. And the last thing she said was, ‘You’re apparently having a hell of a good time, but life will crush you like an empty beer can.’ “

  Under the crew-cut crown Rickett’s eyes were shame-troubled. Perhaps he too was oppressed by my good spirits. In reality I was only trying to make the interview easier. But I began to realize that Ricketts was suffering. He sensed that I had come to do mischief. For why was I here, what sort of call was this? That I was Humboldt’s emissary was obvious. I brought a message, and a message from Humboldt meant nothing but trouble.

  Sorry for Ricketts, I made my pitch as quickly as possible. Humboldt and I were pals, great privilege for me to be able to spend so much time with him down here. Oh, Humboldt! Wise warm gifted Humboldt! Poet, critic, scholar, teacher, editor, original. . . .

  Eager to help me through this, Ricketts said, “He’s just a man of genius.”

  “Thanks. That’s what it amounts to. Well, this is what I want to say to you. Humboldt wouldn’t say it himself. It’s my idea entirely, I’m only passing through, but it would be a mistake not to keep Humboldt here. You shouldn’t let him get away.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  “There are things that only poets can tell you about poetry.”

  “Yes, Dryden, Coleridge, Poe. But why should Humboldt tie himself down to an academic position?”

  “That’s not the way Humboldt sees things. I think he needs an intellectual community. You can imagine how overpowering the great social structure of the country would be to inspired men of his type. Where to turn, is the question. Now the trend in the universities is to appoint poets, and you’ll do it, too, sooner or later. Here’s your chance to get the best.”

  Making my meditation as detailed as possible, no fact too small to be remembered, I could see how Humboldt had looked when he coached me on the way to handle Ricketts. Humboldt’s face, with a persuasive pumpkin smile, came so close to mine that I felt the warmth or fever of his cheeks. Humboldt said, “You have a talent for this kind of errand. I know it.” Did he mean I was a born meddler? He said, “A man like Ricketts didn’t make it big in the Protestant establishment. Not fit for the important roles—corporation president, board chairman, big banks, Republican National Committee, Joint Chiefs, Budget Bureau, Federal Reserve. To be a prof, of his kind means to be the weak kid brother. Or maybe even sister. They get taken care of. He’s probably a member of the Century Club. Okay to teach The Ancient Mariner to young Firestones or Fords. Humanist, scholar, scoutmaster, nice but a numbskull.”

  Maybe Humboldt was right. I could see that Ricketts was unable to cope with me. His sincere brown eyes seemed to ache. He waited for me to get on with this, to finish the interview. I didn’t like backing him into a corner, but behind me I had Humboldt. Because Humboldt didn’t sleep on the night Ike was elected, because he was drugged with pills and booze or toxic with metabolic wastes, because his psyche didn’t refresh itself by dreaming, because he renounced his gifts, because he lacked spiritual strength, or was too frail to stand up to the unpoetic power of the USA, I had to come here and torment Ricketts. I felt pity for Ricketts. And I couldn’t see that Princeton was such a big deal as Humboldt made out. Between noisy Newark and squalid Trenton it was a sanctuary, a zoo, a spa, with its own choochoo and elms and lovely green cages. It resembled another place I was later to visit as a tourist—a Serbian watering place called Vrnatchka Banja. But maybe what Princeton was not counted for more. It was not the factory or department store, not the great corporation office or bureaucratic civil service, it was not the routine job-world. If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution—a higher institution.

  “A chair in poetry for Humboldt,” I said.

  “A chair in poetry! A chair! Oh!—What a grand idea!” said Ricketts. “We’d love it. I speak for everyone. We’d all vote for it. The only thing is the dough! If only we had enough dough! Charlie, we’re real poor. Besides, this outfit, like any outfit, has its table of organization.”

  “Table of organization? Translate, please.”

  “A chair like that would have to be created. It’s a big deal.”

  “How would a chair be set up?”

  “Special endowment, as a rule. Fifteen or twenty grand a year, for about twenty years. Half a million bucks, with the retirement fund. We just ain’t got it, Charlie. Christ, how we’d love to get Humboldt. It breaks my heart, you know that.” Ricketts was now wonderfully cheerful. Minutely observant, my memory brought back, without my especially asking for it, the white frieze of his vigorous short hair, his brownish oxheart cherry eyes, the freshness of his face, his happy full cheeks.

  I figured that was that, when we shook hands. Ricketts, having gotten rid of us, was rapturously friendly. “If only we had the money!” he kept saying.

  And though Humboldt was waiting for me in a fever, I claimed a moment for myself in the fresh air. I stood under a brown-stone arch, on foot-hollowed stone, while panhandling squirrels came at me from all directions across the smooth quadrangles, the lovely walks. It was chilly and misty, the blond dim November sun binding the twigs in circles of light. Demmie Vonghel’s face had such a blond pallor. In her cloth coat with the marten collar, with her sublime sexual knees that touched, and the pointed feet of a princess, and her dilated nostrils presented almost as emotionally as her eyes, and breathing with a certain hunger, she had kissed me with her warm face, and pressed me with her tight-gloved hand, saying, “You’ll do great, Charlie. Just great.” We had parted at Penn Station that morning. Her cab had waited.

  I didn’t think that Humboldt would agree.

  But I was astonishingly wrong. When I showed up in the doorway he sent away his students. He had them all in a state of exaltation about literature. They were always hanging around, waiting in the corridor with their manuscripts. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “something has come up. Appointments are canceled—moved up one hour. Eleven is now twelve. Two-thirty is three-thirty.” I came in. He locked the door of the hot book-crammed smoky office. “Well?” he said.

  “He hasn’t got the money.”

  “He didn’t say no?”

  “You’re famous, he loves you, admires you, desires you, but he can’t create a chair without the dough.”

  “And that’s what he said?”

  “Exactly what he said.”

  “Then I think I’ve got him! Charlie, I’ve got him! We’ve clone it!”

  “How have you got him? How have we done it?”

  “Because—ho, ho! He hid behind the budget. He didn’t say, ‘no dice.’ Or ‘under no circumstances.’ Or ‘get the hell out of here.’ “ Humboldt was laughing that nearly silent, panting laugh of his, through tiny teeth, while a scarf of smoke flowed about him. He looked Mother-Goosey when he did this. The cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such fun. Humboldt said, “Monopoly capitalism has treated creative men like rats. Well, that phase of history is ending. ...” I didn’t quite see how that was relevant, even if true. “We’re going places.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “I’ll tell you later. But you did great.” Humboldt had started to pack, to stuff his briefcase, as he did at all decisive moments. Unbuckling, he threw back the slack flap and began to pull out certain books and manuscripts and pill bottles. He made odd foot movements, as though his cats were clawing at his trouser cuffs. He restuffed the scraped leather case with other books and papers. He lifted his broad-brimmed hat from the coat tree. Like a silent-movie hero taking his invention to the big city, he was off for New York. “Put a note up for the kids. I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said.

  I walked him to the train but he told me nothing more. He sprang into the antique Dinkey car. He wagged his fingers at me through the dirty window. And he left.

  I might have gone back to New York with him, because I had come down only for the interview with Ricketts. But he was Manic and it was best to let him be.

  fifteen

  So I, Citrine, comfortable, in the midst of life, extended on a sofa, in cashmere socks (considering how the feet of those interred shredded away like leaf tobacco—Humboldt’s feet), reconstructed the way in which my stout inspired pal declined and fell. His talent had gone bad. And now I had to think what to do about talent in this day, in this age. How to prevent the leprosy of souls. Somehow it appeared to be up to me.

  I meditated like anything. I followed Humboldt in my mind. He was smoking on the train. I saw him passing quick and manic through the colossal hall of Penn Station with its dusty dome of single-colored glass. And then I saw him get into a cab—the subway was good enough, as a rule. But today each move was unusual, without precedent. This was because he couldn’t count on reason. Reason was coming and going in shorter cycles, and one of these days it might go for good. And then what would he do? Should he lose it once and for all, he and Kathleen would need lots of money. Also, as he had said to me, you could be gaga in a tenured chair at Princeton, and would anybody notice? Ah, poor Humboldt! He might have been—no, he was so fine!

  He was soaring now. His present idea was to go straight to the top. When he got there, this blemished spirit, the top saw the point. Humboldt met with interest and consideration.

  Wilmoore Longstaff, the famous Longstaff, archduke of the higher learning in America, was the man Humboldt went to see. Longstaff had been appointed the first head of the new Belisha Foundation. The Belisha was richer than Carnegie and Rockefeller, and Longstaff had hundreds of millions to spend on science and scholarship, on the arts, and on social improvement. Humboldt already had a sinecure with the Foundation. His good friend Hildebrand had gotten it for him. Hildebrand the playboy publisher of avant-garde poets, himself a poet, was Humboldt’s patron. He had discovered Humboldt at CCNY, he admired his work, adored his conversation, protected him, kept him on the payroll at Hildebrand & Co. as an editor. This caused Humboldt to lower his voice when he slandered him. “He steals from the blind, Charlie. When the Blind Association mails in pencils, Hildebrand keeps those charity pencils. He never donates a penny.”

  I remembered saying, “Stingy-rich is just ordinary camp.”

  “Yes, but he overdoes it. Try eating dinner at his house. He starves you. And why did Longstaff hire Hildebrand for thirty thousand to plan a program for writers? He hired him because of me. If you’re a Foundation you don’t deal with poets, you go to the man who owns a stable of poets. So I do all the work and get only eight thousand.”

  “Eight for a part-time job isn’t bad, is it?”

  “Charlie, it’s cheap of you to pull this fair-mindedness on me. I say I’m an underdog and then you slip it in that I’m so privileged, meaning that you’re an under-underdog. Hildebrand gets full value from me. He never reads a manuscript. He’s always on a cruise or skiing in Sun Valley. Without my advice he’d publish toilet paper. I save him from being a millionaire Philistine. He got to Gertrude Stein because of me. Also to Eliot. Because of me he has something to offer Longstaff. But I’m forbidden absolutely to talk to Longstaff.”

  “No.”

  “Yes! I tell you,” said Humboldt. “Longstaff has a private elevator. No one gets to his penthouse from the lower ranks. I see him from a distance as he comes and goes but my instructions are to stay away from him.”

  Years afterward, I, Citrine, sat next to Wilmoore Longstaff on that Coast Guard helicopter. He was quite old then, finished, fallen from glory. I had seen him when the going was good, and he had looked like a movie star, like a five-star general, like Machiavelli’s Prince, like Aristotle’s great-souled man. Longstaff had fought technocracy and plutocracy with the classics. He forced some of the most powerful people in the country to discuss Plato and Hobbes. He made airline presidents, chairmen, governors of the Stock Exchange perform Antigone in board rooms. Truth, however, is truth and Longstaff was in many respects first rate. He was a distinguished educator, he was even noble. His life would perhaps have been easier if his looks had been less striking.

  At any rate, Humboldt did the bold thing, just as we had all seen it done in the old go-getter movies. Unauthorized, he entered Longstaffs private elevator and pushed the button. Materializing huge and delicate in the penthouse, he gave his name to the receptionist. No, he had no appointment (I saw the sun on his cheeks, on his soiled clothes—it was shining as it shines through the purer air in skyscrapers), but he was Von Humboldt Fleisher. The name was enough. Longstaff had him shown in. He was very glad to see Humboldt. This he told me during the flight, and I believed him. We sat in the helicopter belted up in orange puffy life jackets, and we were armed with those long knives. Why the knives? Perhaps to fight sharks if one fell into the harbor. “I had read his ballads,” Longstaff told me. “I considered him to have great talent.” I knew of course that for Longstaff Paradise Lost was the last real poem in English. Long-staff was a greatness-freak. What he meant was that Humboldt was undoubtedly a poet and a charming man. That he was. In Longstaff’s office Humboldt must have been swooning with wickedness and ingenuity, swollen with manic energy, with spots before his eyes and maculations of the heart. He was going to persuade Longstaff, do in Sewell, outfox Ricketts, screw Hildebrand, and bugger fate. At the moment he looked like the Roto Rooter man come to snake out the drains. Yet he was bound for a chair at Princeton. Ike had conquered, Stevenson had gone down, but Humboldt was vaulting into penthouses and beyond.

  Longstaff too was riding high. He bullied his trustees with Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas, he had the whammy on them. And probably Longstaff had old scores to settle with Princeton, a pillbox of the educational establishment at which he aimed his radical flame thrower. I knew from Ickes’ Diaries that Longstaff had made up to FDR. He wanted Wallace’s place on the ticket, and Truman’s, later. He dreamed of being Vice President and President. But Roosevelt had strung him along, had kept him waiting on tiptoes but never kissed him. That was Roosevelt all over. In this I sympathized with Longstaff (an ambitious man, a despot, a czar in my secret heart).

  So as the helicopter tilted back and forth over New York I studied this handsome aged Dr. Longstaff trying to understand how Humboldt must have looked to him. In Humboldt he perhaps had seen Caliban America, heaving and yapping, writing odes on greasy paper from the fish shop. For Longstaff had no feeling for literature. But he had been delighted when Humboldt explained that he wanted the Belisha Foundation to endow a chair for him at Princeton. “Exactly right!” said Longstaff. “Just the thing!” He buzzed his secretary and dictated a letter. Then and there Wilmoore Longstaff committed the Foundation to an extended grant. Soon Humboldt, palpitating, held a signed copy of the letter in his hand, and he and Longstaff drank martinis, gazing at Manhattan from the sixtieth floor, and talked about Dante’s bird imagery.

  As soon as he left Longstaff, Humboldt rushed downtown by cab to visit a certain Ginnie in the Village, a Bennington girl to whom Demmie Vonghel and I had introduced him. He pounded on her door and said, “It’s Von Humboldt Fleisher. I have to see you.” Stepping into the vestibule, he propositioned her immediately. Ginnie said, “He chased me around the apartment, and it was a scream. But I was worried about the puppies underfoot.” Her dachshund had just had a litter. Ginnie locked herself in the bathroom. Humboldt shouted, “You don’t know what you’re missing. I’m a poet. I have a big cock.” And Ginnie told Demmie, “I was laughing so hard I couldn’t have done it anyway.”

  When I asked Humboldt about this incident he said, “I felt I had to celebrate, and I understood these Bennington girls went for poets. Too bad about this Ginnie.. She’s very pretty but she’s honey from the icebox, if you know what I mean. Cold sweets won’t spread.”

  “Did you go elsewhere?”

  “I gave up on erotic relief. I went around and visited lots of people.”

  “And showed them Longstaff’s letter.”

  “Of course.”

  In any case, the scheme worked. Princeton couldn’t refuse the Belisha gift. Ricketts was outgeneraled. Humboldt was appointed. The Times and the Herald Tribune both carried the story. For two or three months things were smoother than velvet and cashmere. Humboldt’s new colleagues gave cocktail and dinner parties for him. Nor did Humboldt in his happiness forget that we were blood-brothers. Almost daily he would say, “Charlie, today I had a terrific idea for you. For the title role in your play . . . Victor McLaglen is a fascist of course. Can’t have him. But . . . I’m going to get in touch with Orson Welles for you. . . .”

  But then, in February, Longstaff’s trustees rebelled. They had had enough, I guess, and rallied for the honor of American monopoly-capital. Longstaff’s proposed budget was rejected, and he was forced to resign. He was not sent away quite empty-handed. He got some money, about twenty million, to start a little foundation of his own. But in effect they gave him the ax. The appropriation for Humboldt’s chair was a tiny item in that rejected budget. When Longstaff fell, Humboldt fell with him. “Charlie,” Humboldt said when he was at last able to talk about it, “it was just like my father’s experience when he was wiped out in the Florida boom. One year more and we would have made it. I’ve even asked myself, I’ve wondered, whether Long-staff knew when he sent the letter that he was on his way out ... ?”

  “I can’t believe that,” I said. “Longstaff is certainly mischievous, but he isn’t mean.”

  The Princeton people behaved well and offered to do the gentlemanly thing. Ricketts said, “You’re one of us now, Hum, you know? Don’t worry, we’ll find the dough for your chair somehow.” But Humboldt sent in his resignation. Then in March, on a back road in New Jersey, he tried to run Kathleen down in the Buick. She jumped into a ditch to save herself.

  sixteen

  At this moment I must say, almost in the form of deposition, without argument, that I do not believe my birth began my first existence. Nor Humboldt’s. Nor anyone’s. On esthetic grounds, if on no others, I cannot accept the view of death taken by most of us, and taken by me during most of my life—on esthetic grounds therefore I am obliged to deny that so extraordinary a thing as a human soul can be wiped out forever. No, the dead are about us, shut out by our metaphysical denial of them. As we lie nightly in our hemispheres asleep by the billions, our dead approach us. Our ideas should be their nourishment. We are their grainfields. But we are barren and we starve them. Don’t kid yourself, though, we are watched by the dead, watched on this earth, which is our school of freedom. In the next realm, where things are clearer, clarity eats into freedom. We are free on earth because of cloudiness, because of error, because of marvelous limitation, and as much because of beauty as of blindness and evil. These always go with the blessing of freedom. But this is all I have to say about the matter now, because I’m in a hurry, under pressure—all this unfinished business!

  As I was meditating on Humboldt, the hall-buzzer went off. I have a dark little hall where I press the button and get muffled shouts on the intercom from below. It was Roland Stiles, the doorman. My ways, the arrangements of my life, diverted Stiles a lot. He was a skinny witty old Negro. He was, so to speak, in the semifinals of life. In his opinion, so was I. But I didn’t seem to see it that way, for some strange white man’s reason, and I continued to carry on as if it weren’t yet time to think of death. “Plug in your telephone, Mr. Citrine. Do you read me? Your number-one lady friend is trying to reach you.” Yesterday my car was bashed. Today my beautiful mistress couldn’t get in touch. To him I was as good as a circus. At night Stiles’s missus liked stories about me better than television. He told me so himself.

  I dialed Renata and said, “What is it?”

  “What is it! For Christ’s sake! I’ve called ten times. You have to see Judge Urbanovich at half past one. Your lawyer’s been trying to get you, too. And he finally phoned Szathmar, and Szathmar phoned me.”

  “Half past one! They changed the time on me! For months they ignore me, then they give me two hours’ notice, curse them.” My spirit began to jump up and down. “Oh hell, I hate them, those crap artists.”

  “Maybe you can wind the whole thing up now. Today.”

  “How? I’ve surrendered five times. Each time I surrender Denise and her guy up their demands.”

  “In just a few days thank God I’m getting you out of here. You’ve been dragging your feet, because you don’t want to go, but believe me, Charlie, you’ll bless me for it when we’re in Europe again.”

  “Forrest Tomchek doesn’t even have time to discuss the case with me. Some lawyer Szathmar recommended.”

  “Now Charlie, how will you get downtown without your car? I’m surprised that Denise hasn’t tried to hitch a ride to court with you.”

  “I’ll get a cab.”

  “I have to take Fannie Sunderland to the Mart, anyway, for her tenth look at upholstery material for one fucking sofa.” Renata laughed, but she was unusually patient with her clients. “I must take care of this before we pull out for Europe. We’ll pick you up at one o’clock sharp. Be ready, Charlie.”

  Long ago I read a book called Ils Ne M’auront Pas (They Aren’t Going to Get Me) and at certain moments I whisper, “Ils ne m’auront pas.” I did that now, determined to finish my exercise in contemplation or Spirit-recollection (the purpose of which was to penetrate into the depths of the soul and to recognize the connection between the self and the divine powers). I lay down again on the sofa. To lie down was no small gesture of freedom. I am only being factual about this. It was a quarter of eleven, and if I left myself five minutes for a container of plain yoghurt and five minutes to shave I could continue for two hours to think about Humboldt. This was the right moment for it.

  Well, Humboldt tried to run down Kathleen in his car. They were driving home from a party in Princeton, and he was punching her, steering with the left hand. At a blinking light, near a package store, she opened the door and made a run for it in her stocking feet—she had lost her shoes in Princeton. He chased her in the Buick. She jumped into a ditch and he ran into a tree. The state troopers had to come and release him because the doors were jammed by the collision.

  Anyhow, the trustees had risen up against Longstaff, and the Poetry chair had disintegrated. Kathleen later told me that Humboldt had kept this from her all that day. He put down the phone and with his shuffling feet and sumo-wrestler’s belly came into the kitchen and poured himself a large jam-jar full of gin. Standing beside the dirty sink in his sneakers he drank this as if it had been milk.

  “What was that call?” said Kathleen.

  “Ricketts called.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Nothing. Just routine,” said Humboldt.

  “He turned a funny color under the eyes when he drank all that gin,” Kathleen told me. “A kind of light greeny purple. You sometimes see that shade of purple in artichoke hearts.”

  A little later on the same morning he seems to have had another talk with Ricketts. This was when Ricketts told him that Princeton would not renege. Money would be found. But this put Ricketts in the morally superior position. A poet could not allow a bureaucrat to surpass him. Humboldt locked himself in his office with the gin bottle and all day long wrote drafts of a letter of resignation.

  But that evening, on the road as they were driving in to attend a party at the Littlewoods’ he went to work on Kathleen. Why did she let her father sell her to Rockefeller? Yes the old guy was supposed to be just a pleasant character, a bohemian antique from Paris, one of the gang from the Closerie des Lilas, but he was an international criminal, a Dr. Moriarty, a Lucifer, a pimp and didn’t he try to have sexual relations with his own daughter? Well, how was it with Rockefeller? Did Rockefeller’s penis thrill her more? Did the billions enter in? Did Rockefeller have to take a woman away from a poet in order to get it up? So they drove in the Buick skidding on the gravel and booming through clouds of dust. He began to shout that her great calm-and-lovely act didn’t take him in at all. He knew all about these things. From a bookish viewpoint he actually did know a lot. He knew the jealousy of King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. Mario Praz he knew. And Proust—caged rats tortured to death, Charlus flogged by some killer-concierge, some slaughterhouse brute with a scourge of nails. “I know all that lust garbage,” he said. “And I know the game has to be played with a calm face like yours. I know all about this female masochistic business. I understand your thrills, and you’re just using me!”

  So they got to the Littlewoods’ and Demmie and I were there. Kathleen was white. Her face looked heavily powdered. Humboldt walked in silent. He wasn’t talking. This was in fact his last night as the Belisha Professor of Poetry at Princeton. Tomorrow the news would be out. Maybe it was out already. Ricketts behaved honorably but he might not have been able to resist telling everyone. But Littlewood seemed not to know anything. He was trying hard to make his party a success. His cheeks were red and jolly. He looked like Mr. Tomato with a top hat in the juice ad. He had wavy hair and a fine worldly manner. When he took a lady’s hand you wondered just what he was going to do with it. Littlewood was an upper-class bad boy, a minister’s randy son. He knew London and Rome. He especially knew Shepheard’s famous bar in Cairo, and had acquired his British Army slang there. He had friendly endearing spaces between his teeth. He loved to grin, and at every party he did imitations of Rudy Vallee. To cheer up Humboldt and Kathleen I got him to sing “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.” It did not go over well.

  I was present in the kitchen when Kathleen made a serious mistake. Holding her drink and an unlit cigarette she reached into a man’s pocket for a match. He was not a stranger, we knew him well, his name was Eubanks, and he was a Negro composer. His wife was standing near him. Kathleen was beginning to recover her spirits and was slightly drunk herself. But just as she was getting the matches out of Eubanks’s pocket Humboldt came in. I saw him coming. First he stopped breathing. Then he clutched Kathleen with sensational violence. He twisted her arm behind her back and ran her out of the kitchen into the yard. A thing of this sort was not unusual at a Littlewood party, and others decided not to notice, but Demmie and I hurried to the window. Humboldt punched Kathleen in the belly, doubling her up. Then he pulled her by the hair into the Buick. As there was a car behind him he couldn’t back out. He wheeled over the lawn and off the sidewalk, hacking off the muffler on the curb. I saw it there next morning like the case of a super-insect, flaky with rust, and a pipe coming out of it. Also I found Kathleen’s shoes stuck by the heels in the snow. There was fog, ice, dirty cold, the bushes glassy, the elm twigs livid, the March snow brocaded with soot.

  And now I recalled that the rest of the night had been a headache because Demmie and I were overnight guests, and when the party broke up Littlewood took me aside and proposed man to man that we do a swap. “An Eskimo wife deal. What say we have a romp,” he said. “A wingding.”

  “Thanks, no, it isn’t cold enough for this Eskimo stuff.”

  “You’re refusing on your own? Aren’t you even going to ask Demmie?”

  “She’d haul off and hit me. Perhaps you’d like to try her. You wouldn’t believe how hard she can punch. She looks like a fashionable broad, and elegant, but she’s really a big honest hick.”

  I had my own reasons for giving him a soft answer. We were overnight guests here. I didn’t want to go at 2 a.m. to sit in the Pennsylvania waiting room. Entitled to my eight hours of oblivion and determined to have them, I got into bed in the smoky study through which the party had swirled. But now Demmie had put on her nightgown and was a changed person. An hour ago in a black chiffon dress and the hair brushed gold and long on her head and fastened with an ornament she was a young lady of breeding. Humboldt, when he was in a balanced state, loved to cite the important American social categories, and Demmie belonged to them all. “She’s pure Main Line. Quaker schools, Bryn Mawr. Real class,” Humboldt said. She had chatted with Little-wood, whose subject was Plautus, about Latin translation and New Testament Greek. I didn’t love the farmer’s daughter in Demmie less than the society girl. She now sat on the bed. Her toes were deformed by cheap shoes. Her large collarbones formed hollows. When they were children, she and her sister, similarly built, filled up these collarbone hollows with water and ran races.

  Anything to stave off sleep. Demmie took pills but she deeply feared to sleep. She said she had a hangnail and sat on the bed filing away, the long flexible file going zigzag. Suddenly lively, she faced me cross-legged with round knees and a show of thigh. In this position she released the salt female odor, the bacterial background of deep love. She said, “Kathleen shouldn’t have reached for Eubanks’s matches. I hope Humboldt didn’t hurt her, but she shouldn’t have done it.”

  “But Eubanks is an old friend.”

  “Humboldt’s old friend? He’s known him a long time—there’s a difference. It means something if a woman goes into a man’s pocket. And we saw her do it. ... I don’t completely blame Humboldt.”

  Demmie was often like this. Just as I was ready to close my eyes for the night, having had enough of my conscious and operating self, Demmie wanted to talk. At this hour she preferred exciting topics—sickness, murder, suicide, eternal punishment, and hellfire. She got into a state. Her hair bristled and her eyes deepened with panic and her deformed toes twisted in all directions. She then closed her long hands upon her smallish breasts. With baby tremors of the lip she sank at times into a preverbal baby stammer. It was now three o’clock in the morning and I thought I heard the depraved Littlewoods carrying on above us in the master bedroom, perhaps to give us an idea of what we were missing. This was probably imaginary.

  I rose, anyway, and took away Demmie’s nail file. I tucked her in. Her mouth was naively open as she gave up the file. I got her to lie down but she was disturbed. I could see that. As she laid her head on the pillow, in profile, one large lovely eye stared out childishly. “Off you go,” I said. She shut the staring eye. Her sleep was instantaneous and seemed deep.

  But in a few minutes I heard what I expected to hear—her night voice. It was low hoarse and deep almost mannish. She moaned. She spoke broken words. She did this almost every night. The voice expressed her terror of this strange place, the earth, and of this strange state, being. Laboring and groaning she tried to get out of it. This was the primordial Demmie beneath the farmer’s daughter beneath the teacher beneath the elegant Main Line horsewoman, Latinist, accomplished cocktail-sipper in black chiffon, with the upturned nose, this fashionable conversationalist. Thoughtful, I listened to this. I let her go on awhile, trying to comprehend. I pitied her and loved her. But then I put an end to it. I kissed her. She knew who it was. She pressed her toes to my shins and held me with powerful female arms. She cried “I love you” in the same deep voice, but her eyes were still shut blind. I think she never actually woke up.

  seventeen

  In May, when the Princeton term was ended, Humboldt and I met, as blood-brothers, for the last time.

  As deep as the huge cap of December blue behind me entering the window with thermal distortions from the sun, I lay on my Chicago sofa and saw again everything that had happened. One’s heart hurt from this sort of thing. One thought, How sad, about all this human nonsense which keeps us from the large truth. But perhaps I can get through it once and for all by doing what I am doing now.

  Very good, Broadway was the word then. I had a producer, a director, and an agent. I was part of the theater world, in Hum-boldt’s eyes. There were actresses who said “dahling” and kissed you when you met. There was a Hirschfeld caricature of me in the Times. Humboldt took much credit for this. By bringing me to Princeton he had put me in the majors. Through him I met useful people in the Ivy League. Besides, he felt I had modeled Von Trenck, my Prussian hero, on him. “But look out, Charlie,” he said. “Don’t be taken in by the Broadway glamour and the commercial stuff.”

  Humboldt and Kathleen descended on me in the repaired Buick. I was in a cottage on the Connecticut shore, down the road from Lampton, the director, making revisions under his guidance—writing the play he wanted, for that was what it amounted to. Demmie was with me every weekend, but the Fleishers arrived on a Wednesday, when I was alone. Humboldt had just given a reading at Yale and they were going home. We sat in the small stone kitchen drinking coffee and gin, having a reunion. Humboldt was being “good,” serious, high-minded. He had been reading De Anima and was full of ideas about the origins of thought. I noticed, however, that he didn’t let Kathleen out of his sight. She had to tell him where she was going. “I’m just getting my cardigan.” Even to go to the bathroom, she needed permission. Also he seemed to have punched her in the eye. She sat quietly and low in her chair, arms folded and long legs crossed, but she had a shiner. Humboldt finally spoke of it himself. “It wasn’t me this time,” he said. “You won’t believe it, Charlie, but she fell against the dashboard when I made a fast stop. Some clunk in a truck came barreling out of a side road and I had to jump the brakes.”

  Perhaps he hadn’t hit her, but he did watch her; he watched like a bailiff escorting a prisoner from one jail to another. He moved his chair all the while he was lecturing about De Anima, to make sure we didn’t exchange eye-signals. He laid it on so thick that we were bound to try to outwit him. And we did. We managed at last to have a few words at the clothesline in the garden. She had rinsed her stockings and came out into the sunshine to hang them. Humboldt was probably satisfying a natural need.

  “Did he sock you or not?”

  “No, I fell on the dashboard. But it’s hell, Charlie. Worse than ever.”

  The clothesline was old and dark gray. It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.

  “He says I’m carrying on with a critic, a young, unimportant, completely innocent fellow named Magnasco. Very nice, but my God! And I’m tired of being treated like a nymphomaniac and told how I’m doing it on fire escapes or standing up, in clothes closets, every chance I get. And at Yale he made me sit on the platform during his reading. Then he blamed me for showing my legs. At every service station he forces his way into the ladies’ room with me. I can’t go back to New Jersey with him.”

  “What will you do?” said eager, heart-melting, concerned Citrine.

  “Tomorrow when we get back to New York I’m going to get lost. I love him but I can’t take any more. I’m telling you to prepare you, because you guys love each other, and you’ll have to help him. He has some money. Hildebrand fired him. But he did get a Guggenheim, you know.”

  “I didn’t even know he applied.”

  “Oh he puts in for everything. . . . Now he’s watching us from the kitchen.”

  And there indeed was Humboldt bulging out the coppery webbing of the screen door like a fisherman’s strange catch.

  “Good luck.”

  As she went back to the house her legs were eagerly beaten by the grass of May. Through stripes of shrub shadow and country sunshine, the cat was strolling. The clothesline surrendered the pith of its soul, and Kathleen’s stockings, hung at the wide end, now suggested lust. Such was Humboldt’s effect. He came straight to me at the clothesline and ordered me to tell him what we had been talking about.

  “Oh lay off, will you Humboldt? Don’t force me into this neurotic superdrama.” I was appalled by what I foresaw. I wished they would go—pile into their Buick (more than ever the muddy Flanders Field staff car) and pull out, leaving me with my Trenck troubles, the tyranny of Lampton, and the clean Atlantic shore.

  But they stayed over. Humboldt didn’t sleep. The wooden treads of the backstairs creaked all night under his weight. The tap ran and the refrigerator door slammed. When I came into the kitchen in the morning I found that the quart of Beefeater’s gin, the house present they had brought was empty on the table. The cotton wads of his pill bottles were all over the place, like rabbit droppings.

  So Kathleen disappeared from Rocco’s Restaurant on Thompson Street and Humboldt went wild. He said she was with Mag-nasco, that Magnasco kept her hidden in his room at the Hotel Earle. Somewhere Humboldt obtained a pistol and he hammered on Magnasco’s door with the butt until he shredded the wood. Magnasco called the desk, and the desk sent for the cops, and Humboldt took off. But next day he jumped Magnasco on Sixth Avenue in front of Howard Johnson’s. A group of lesbians gotten up as longshoremen rescued the young man. They had been having ice-cream sodas, and they came out and broke up the fight, pinning Humboldt’s arms behind him. It was a blazing afternoon and the women prisoners at the detention center on Greenwich Avenue were shrieking from the open windows and unrolling toilet-paper streamers.

  Humboldt phoned me in the country and said, “Charlie, where is Kathleen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Charlie, I think you do know. I saw her talking to you.”

  “But she didn’t tell me.”

  He hung up. Then Magnasco called. He said, “Mr. Citrine? Your friend is going to hurt me. I’ll have to swear out a warrant.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “You know how it is, people go further than they mean to, and then where are you? I mean, where am I? I’m calling because he threatens me in your name. He says you’ll get me if he doesn’t—his blood-brother.”

  “I won’t lay a hand on you,” I said. “Why don’t you leave town for a while?”

  “Leave?” said Magnasco. “I only just got here. Down from Yale.”

  I understood. He was on the make, had long prepared for his career.

  “The Trib is trying me out as a book reviewer.”

  “I know how it is. I have a show opening on Broadway. My first.”

  When I met Magnasco, he proved to be overweight, round-faced, young in calendar years only, steady, unflappable, born to make progress in cultural New York. “I won’t be driven out,” he said. “I’ll put him on a peace bond.”

  “Well, do you need my permission?” I said.

  “It won’t exactly make me popular in New York to do this to a poet.”

  I then said to Demmie, “Magnasco is afraid of getting in bad with the New York culture crowd by calling the cops.”

  Night-moaning, hell-fearing, pill-addicted Demmie was also a most practical person, a supervisor and programmer of genius. When she was in her busy mood, domineering and protecting me, I used to think what a dolls’ generalissimo she must have been in childhood. “And where you’re concerned,” she would say, “I’m a tiger-mother and a regular Fury. Isn’t it about a month since you saw Humboldt? He’s staying away. That means he’s beginning to blame you. Poor Humboldt, he’s flipped out, hasn’t he! We have to help him. If he keeps attacking this Magnasco character they’re going to lock him up. If the police put him in Bellevue, what you have to do is get ready to bail him out. He’ll have to be sobered up, calmed down, and cooled off. The best place for that is Payne Whitney. Listen, Charlie, Ginnie’s cousin Albert is the admitting physician at Payne Whitney. Bellevue is hell. We should raise some money and transfer him to Payne Whitney. Maybe we could get him a sort of scholarship.”

  She went into this with Ginnie’s cousin Albert, and, in my name, she telephoned people and collected money for Humboldt, taking over because I was busy with Von Trenck. We had come back from Connecticut and were going into rehearsal at the Belasco. Efficient Demmie soon raised about three thousand dollars. Hildebrand alone contributed two thousand but he was still sore at Humboldt. He stipulated that the money was for psychiatric treatment and for bare necessities only. A Fifth Avenue lawyer, Simkin, held this fund in escrow. Hildebrand knew, by now we all knew, that Humboldt had hired a private detective, a man named Scaccia, and that this Scaccia had already gotten most of Humboldt’s Guggenheim grant. Kathleen herself had done an uncharacteristic thing. Leaving New York at once she headed for Nevada to file for divorce. But Scaccia kept telling Humboldt that she was still in New York and doing lascivious things. Humboldt elaborated a new Proustian sensational scandal involving, this time, a vice ring of Wall Street brokers. If he could catch her in adultery, he would get the “property,” the shack in New Jersey, worth about eight thousand dollars, with a mortgage of five, as Orlando Huggins told me—Orlando was one of those radical bohemians who knew money. In avant-garde New York everybody knew money.

  The summer went quickly. In August rehearsals began. The nights were hot, tense, and tiring. Each morning I rose already worn out and Demmie gave me several cups of coffee and at the breakfast table also a good deal of counsel about the theater and Humboldt and the conduct of life. The little white terrier, Cato, begged for crusts and snapped his teeth while dancing backward on his hind legs. I thought that I too would prefer sleeping all day on his cushion by the window, near Demmie’s begonias, than sit in the antique filth of the Belasco and listen to dreary actors. I began to hate the theater, the feelings wickedly distended by histrionics, all the old gestures, clutchings, tears, and supplications. Besides, Von Trench was no longer my play. It belonged to goggled Harold Lampton for whom I obligingly wrote new dialogue in the dressing rooms. His actors were a bunch of sticks. All the talent in New York seemed to be in the melodrama enacted by feverish, delirious Humboldt. Pals and admirers were his audience at the White Horse on Hudson Street. There he lectured and hollered. He also consulted lawyers and was seeing a psychiatrist or two.

  Demmie, I felt, could understand Humboldt better than I because she too swallowed mysterious pills. (There were other affinities as well.) An obese child, she had weighed two hundred and eighty pounds at the age of fourteen. She showed me pictures I could hardly believe. She was given hormone injections and pills and she grew slender. Judging by the exophthalmic bulge, it must have been thyroxine that they put her on. She thought her pretty breasts disfigured by the rapid weight loss. The insignificant wrinkles in them were a grief to her. She sometimes cried, “They hurt my titties with their goddamn medicine.” Brown-paper packets were still arriving from the Mount Coptic Drugstore. “But I am attractive, though.” Indeed she was. Her Dutch hair positively gave light. She wore it sometimes combed to the side, sometimes with bangs, depending on what she had done to herself at the hairline with her nails. She often scratched herself. Her face was either childishly circular or like a frontierwoman’s, gaunt. She was sometimes a van der Weyden beauty, sometimes Mortimer Snerd, sometimes a Ziegfeld girl. The slight silken scrape of her knock-knees when she walked quickly was, I repeat, highly prized by me. I thought that if I were a locust such a sound would send me soaring over mountain ranges. When Demmie’s face with the fine upturned nose was covered with pancake make-up her big eyes, all the more mobile and clear because she had laid on so much dust, revealed two things: one was that she had a true heart and the other that she was a dynamic sufferer. More than once I rushed into Barrow Street to flag down a cab and take Demmie to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. She sun-bathed on the roof and was burned so badly that she became delirious. Then, slicing veal, she cut her thumb to the bone. She went to throw garbage down the incinerator and a gush of flame from the open chute singed her. As a good girl, she did her Latin lesson-plans for an entire term, she laid away scarves and gloves in labeled boxes, she scrubbed the house. As a bad girl she drank whisky, she had hysterics, or took up with thieves and desperadoes. She stroked me like a fairy princess or punched me in the ribs like a cowhand. In hot weather she stripped herself naked to wax the floors on her knees. Then there appeared big tendons, lanky arms, laboring feet. And when it was seen from behind the organ I adored in a different context as small, fine, intricate, rich in delightful difficulties of access, stood out like a primitive limb. But after the waxing, a seizure of sweating labor, she sat with lovely legs in a blue frock having a martini. Fundamentalist Father Vonghel owned Mount Coptic. He was a violent man. There was a scar on Demmie’s head where he had banged the child’s head on a radiator, there was another on her face where he had jammed a wastepaper basket over it—the tinsmith had to cut her free. With all this she knew the gospels by heart, she had been a field-hockey star, she could break Western horses, and she wrote charming bread-and-butter notes on Tiffany paper. Still, when she took a spoonful of her favorite vanilla custard, she was again the fat child. She savored the dessert at the tip of her tongue, open-mouthed, and the great blue mid-summer ocean-haze eyes in a trance, so that she started when I said, “Swallow your pudding.” Evenings we played backgammon, we translated Lucretius, she expounded Plato to me. “People take credit for their virtues. But he sees—what else can you be but virtuous? There is nothing else.”

  Just before Labor Day Humboldt threatened Magnasco again, and Magnasco went to the police and persuaded a plainclothesman to come back to the hotel with him. They waited in the lobby. Then Humboldt roared in and went for Magnasco. The dick got between them, and Humboldt said, “Officer, he has my wife in his room.” The reasonable thing was to make a search. They went upstairs, all three. Humboldt looked in all the closets, he searched under the pillows for her nightgown, he ran his hand under the lining papers of the drawers. There were no underthings. Nothing.

  The plainclothesman said, “So, where is she? Was it you who banged hell out of this door with the butt of your gun?”

  Humboldt said, “I have no gun. You want to frisk me?” He lifted his arms. Then he said, “Come to my room and look, if you like. See for yourself.”

  But when they got to Greenwich Street, Humboldt put the key in the lock and said, “You can’t come in.” He shouted, “Have you got a search warrant?” Then he whirled in and slammed and bolted his door.

  This was when Magnasco filed the complaint or took a peace bond—I don’t know which—and on a smoggy and stifling night the police came for Humboldt. He fought like an ox. He struggled also in the police station. An anointed head rolled on the filthy floor. Was there a strait jacket? Magnasco swore there wasn’t. But there were handcuffs, and Humboldt wept. On the way to Bellevue he had diarrhea, and they locked him away for the night in a state of filth.

  Magnasco let it transpire that he and I together had decided to do this, to prevent Humboldt from committing a crime. Everyone then said that the man responsible was Charles Citrine, Humboldt’s blood-brother and protégé. I suddenly had many detractors and enemies, unknown to me.

  And I’ll tell you how I saw it from the plush decay and heated darkness of the Belasco Theatre. I saw Humboldt whipping; his team of mules and standing up in his crazy wagon like an Oklahoma land-grabber. He rushed into the territory of excess to stake himself a claim. This claim was a swollen and quaking heart-mirage.

  I didn’t mean, The poet is off his nut. . . . Call the cops and damn the clichés. No, I suffered when the police laid hands on him, it threw me into despair. What then did I mean? Something perhaps like this: suppose the poet had been wrestled to the ground by the police, strapped into a strait jacket or handcuffed, and rushed off dingdong in a paddy wagon like a mad dog, arriving foul, and locked up raging! Was this art versus America? To me Bellevue was like the Bowery: it gave negative testimony. Brutal Wall Street stood for power, and the Bowery, so near it, was the accusing symbol of weakness. And so with Bellevue, where the poor and busted went. And so even with Payne Whitney where the monied derelicts lay. And poets like drunkards and misfits or psychopaths, like the wretched, poor or rich, sank into weakness—was that it? Having no machines, no transforming knowledge comparable to the knowledge of Boeing or Sperry Rand or IBM or RCA? For could a poem pick you up in Chicago and land you in New York two hours later? Or could it compute a space shot? It had no such powers. And interest was where power was. In ancient times poetry was a force, the poet had real strength in the material world. Of course, the material world was different then. But what interest could a Humboldt raise? He threw himself into weakness and became a hero of wretchedness. He consented to the monopoly of power and interest held by money, politics, law, rationality, technology because he couldn’t find the next thing, the new thing, the necessary thing for poets to do. Instead he did a former thing. He got himself a pistol, like Verlaine, and chased Magnasco.

  From Bellevue he phoned me at the Belasco Theatre. I heard his voice shaking, raging but rapid. He yelled, “Charlie, you know where I am, don’t you? All right, Charlie, this isn’t literature. This is life.”

  In the theater I was in the world of illusion while he, Hum-boldt, had broken out—was that it?

  But no, instead of being a poet he was merely the figure of a poet. He was enacting “The Agony of the American Artist.” And it was not Humboldt, it was the USA that was making its point: “Fellow Americans, listen. If you abandon materialism and the normal pursuits of life you wind up at Bellevue like this poor kook.”

  He now held court and made mad-scenes at Bellevue. He openly blamed me. Scandal-lovers were tisking when my name was mentioned.

  Then Scaccia the private eye came to the Belasco with a note from Humboldt. He wanted the money I had raised and wanted it right now. So Mr. Scaccia and I faced each other in the gloomy musty cement exit alley outside the stage door. Mr. Scaccia wore open sandals and white silk socks, very soiled. At the corners of his mouth was a grimy deposit.

  “The fund is held in escrow by a lawyer, Mr. Simkin, on Fifth Avenue. It’s for medical expenses only,” I said.

  “You mean psychiatric. You think Mr. Fleisher is off his nut?”

  “I don’t make diagnoses. Just tell Humboldt to talk to Simkin.”

  “We’re speaking of a man of genius. Who says a genius needs treatment?”

  “You’ve read his poems?” I said.

  “Fucking right. I won’t take a put-down from you. You’re supposed to be his friend? The man loves you. He loves you still. Do you love him?”

  “And where do you come in?”

  “I’m retained by him. And for a client I go all out.”

  If I didn’t give the private eye the money he would go to Bellevue and tell Humboldt that I thought he was insane. My impulse was to kill Scaccia in this back alley. Natural justice was on my side. I could grab this blackmailer by the throat and strangle him. O, that would be delicious! And who could blame me! A gust of murderous feeling made me look modestly at the ground. “Mr. Fleisher will have to explain to Simkin what he wants the money for,” I said. “It wasn’t raised for you.”

  After this there came a series of calls from Humboldt. “The cops put me in a strait jacket. Did you have anything to do with that? My blood-brother? They manhandled me, too, you fucking Thomas Hobbes!”

  I understand the reference. He meant that I cared only for power.

  “I’m trying to help,” I said. He hung up. Immediately the phone rang again.

  “Where’s Kathleen?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She talked to you out by the clothesline. You know where she is all right. Listen to me, handsome, you’re sitting on this money. It’s mine. You want to put me away with the little guys in the white coats?”

  “You need calming down, that’s all.”

  He called later in the day when the afternoon was gray and hot. I was having a tinny-tasting sandwich of crumbling wet tuna fish at the Greek’s across the street when they summoned me to the telephone. I took the call in the star’s dressing room.

  “I’ve talked to a lawyer,” shouted Humboldt. “I’m prepared to sue you for that money. You’re a crook. You’re a traitor, a liar, a phony, and a Judas. You had me locked up while that whore Kathleen was going to orgies. I’m charging you with embezzlement.”

  “Humboldt, I only helped to raise that money. I haven’t got it. It’s not in my hands.”

  “Tell me where Kathleen is and I’ll call off my suit.”

  “She didn’t tell me where she was going.”

  “You’ve broken your oath to me, Citrine. And now you want to put me away. You envy me. You always envied me. I’ll put you in jail if I can. I want you to know what it’s like when the police come for you, and what a strait jacket is like.” Then, bam! he hung up, and I sat sweating in the star’s grimy dressing room, the rotten tuna salad coming up on me, and a green ptomaine sensation, a cramp, a very sore spot in my side. Actors were trying on costumes that day and passed the door in their knickers, dresses, and cocked hats. I desired help but I felt like an arctic survivor in a small boat, an Amundsen hailing ships on the horizon which turned out to be icebergs. Trenck and Lieutenant Schell passed with their rapiers and wigs. They couldn’t tell me that I was not an obvious phony, a crook, and a Judas. I couldn’t tell them what I thought was really wrong with me: namely that I suffered from an illusion, perhaps a marvelous illusion, or perhaps only a lazy one, that by a kind of inspired lévitation I could rise and dart straight to the truth. Straight to the truth. For I was too haughty to bother with Marxism, Freud-ianism, Modernism, the avant-garde, or any of these things that Humboldt, as a culture-Jew, took so much stock in.

  “I’m going to the hospital to see him,” I told Demmie.

  “You are not. That’s the worst thing you can do.”

  “But look at the state he’s in. I’ve got to go there, Demmie.”

  “I won’t allow it. He’ll attack you. I couldn’t bear for you to fight, Charlie. He’ll hit you, and he’s twice your size and crazy and strong. Besides, I won’t have you disturbed when you’re doing the play. Listen,” she deepened her voice, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll go there myself. And I forbid you.”

  She never actually got to see him. Dozens of people were in the act by now. The drama at Bellevue drew crowds from Greenwich Village and Morningside Heights. I compared them to the residents of Washington who drove out in carriages to watch the Battle of Bull Run and then got in the way of the Union troops. Since I was no longer his blood-brother, bearded stammering Orlando Huggins became Humboldt’s chief friend. Huggins obtained Humboldt’s release. Then Humboldt went to Mount Sinai Hospital and signed himself in. Acting on my instructions, lawyer Simkin paid a week in advance for his private care. However, Humboldt checked out again on the very next day and collected from the hospital an unused balance of about eight hundred dollars. Out of this he paid Scaccia’s latest bill. Then he started legal actions against Kathleen, against Magnasco, against the Police Department, and against Bellevue. He continued to threaten me but didn’t actually file suit. He was waiting to see whether Von Trenck would make money.

  I was still at the primer level in my understanding of money. I didn’t know that there were many people, persistent ingenious passionate people, to whom it was perfectly obvious that they should have all your money. Humboldt had the conviction that there was wealth in the world—not his—to which he had a sovereign claim and that he was bound to get it. He had told me once that he was fated to win a big lawsuit, a million-dollar suit. “With a million bucks,” he said, “I’ll be free to think of nothing but poetry.”

  “How will this happen?”

  “Somebody will wrong me.”

  “Wrong you a million dollars’ worth?”

  “If I’m obsessed by money, as a poet shouldn’t be, there’s a reason for it,” was what Humboldt had told me. “The reason is that we’re Americans after all. What kind of American would I be if I were innocent about money, I ask you? Things have to be combined as Wallace Stevens combined them. Who says ‘Money is the root of evils’? Isn’t it the Pardoner? Well the Pardoner is the most evil man in Chaucer. No, I go along with Horace Walpole. Walpole said it was natural for free men to think about money. Why? Because money is freedom, that’s why.”

  In the enchanting days we had had such marvelous talks, only touched a little by manic depression and paranoia. But now the light became dark and the dark turned darker.

  Still reclining, holding tight on my padded sofa, I saw those gaudy weeks in review.

  Humboldt riotously picketed Von Trench but the play was a hit. To be closer to the Belasco and my celebrity, I took a suite at the St. Regis. The art nouveau elevators had gilded gates. Demmie taught Virgil. Kathleen played blackjack in Nevada. Humboldt had returned to his command post at the White Horse Tavern. There he held literary, artistic, erotic, and philosophic exercises till far into the night. He coined a new epigram which was reported to me uptown: “I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn’t turn into a price tag.” This gave me hope. He could still get off a good wisecrack. It sounded as if normalcy might be returning.

  But no. Each day Humboldt gave himself a perfunctory shave, drank coffee, took pills, studied his notes, and went to midtown to see his lawyers. He had lots of lawyers—he collected lawyers and psychoanalysts. Treatment was. not the object of his visits with the analysts. He wanted to talk, to express himself. The theoretical climate of their offices stimulated him. As to lawyers, he had them all preparing papers and discussing strategies. Lawyers didn’t often meet writers. How was any lawyer to know what was going on? A famous poet calls for an appointment. Referred by so-and-so. The entire office is excited, the typists put on make-up. Then the poet arrives, stout and ill but still handsome pale hurt-looking terrifically agitated, timid in a way, and with strikingly small gestures or tremors for such a large man. Even seated he has leg tremors, his body is vibrating. At first the voice is from another world. Trying to smile, the man can only wince. Odd small stained teeth control a trembling lip. Although thickset, really a big bruiser, he is also a delicate plant, an Ariel, and so on. Can’t make a fist. Never heard of aggression. And he unfolds a tale—you’d think it was Hamlet’s father: fraud, deceit, betrayal of pledges; finally, as he slept in his garden, someone crept up with a vial and tried to pour stuff into his ear. At first he refuses to name his false friends and would-be murderers. They are only X and Y. Then he refers to “This Person,” “I went along with this X-Person,” he says. In his innocence he entered into agreements, exchanged promises with X, this Claudius Person. He said yes to everything. He signed a paper without reading it, about joint tenancy of the New Jersey house. He was also disappointed in a blood-brother who turned fink. Shakespeare was right, There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face: he was a gentleman on whom I built an absolute trust. But now recovering from shock he’s building a case against the said gentleman. Building cases is one of the master preoccupations of human beings. He has Citrine dead to rights—Citrine grabbed his money. But restitution is all he asks. And he fights, or seems to fight, the rising fury. This Citrine is a deceptively handsome fellow. But Jakob Boehme was wrong, the outer is not the inner visible. Humboldt says he is struggling for decency. His father had no friends, he has no friends—so much for the human material. Fidelity is for phonographs. But let’s be restrained. Not all turn into poisoned rats biting one another. “I don’t want to hurt the son of a bitch. All I want is justice.” Justice! He wanted the fellow’s guts in a shopping bag.

  Yes, he spent much time with lawyers and doctors. Lawyers and doctors would best appreciate the drama of wrongs and the drama of sickness. He didn’t want to be a poet now. Symbolism, his school, was used up. No, at this time he was a performing artist who was being real. Back to direct experience. Into the wide world. No more art-substitute for real life. Lawsuits and psychoanalysis were real.

  As for the lawyers and the shrinkers, they were delighted with him not because he represented the real world but because he was a poet. He didn’t pay—he threw the bills out. But these people, curious about genius (which they had learned from Freud and from movies like Moulin Rouge or The Moon and Sixpence to esteem), were hungry for culture. They listened with joy as he told his tale of unhappiness and persecution. He spilled dirt, spread scandal, and uttered powerful metaphors. What a combination! Fame gossip delusion filth and poetic invention.

  Even then shrewd Humboldt knew what he was worth in professional New York. Endless conveyor belts of sickness or litigation poured clients and patients into these midtown offices like dreary Long Island potatoes. These dull spuds crushed psychoanalysts’ hearts with boring character problems. Then suddenly Humboldt arrived. Oh, Humboldt! He was no potato. He was a papaya a citron a passion fruit. He was beautiful deep eloquent fragrant original—even when he looked bruised in the face, hacked under the eyes, half-destroyed. And what a repertory he had, what changes of style and tempo. He was meek at first— shy. Then he became childlike, trusting, then he confided. He knew, he said, what husbands and wives said when they quarreled, bickerings so important to them and so tiresome to everyone else. People said ho-hum and looked at the ceiling when you started this. Americans! with their stupid ideas about love, and their domestic tragedies. How could you bear to listen to them after the worst of wars and the most sweeping of revolutions, the destruction, the death camps, the earth soaked in blood and fumes of cremation still in the air of Europe. What did the personal troubles of Americans amount to? Did they really suffer? The world looked into American faces and said, “Don’t tell me these cheerful well-to-do people are suffering!” Still, democratic abundance had its own peculiar difficulties. America was God’s experiment. Many of the old pains of mankind were removed, which made the new pains all the more peculiar and mysterious. America didn’t like special values. It detested people who represented these special values. And yet, without these special values—you see what I mean, said Humboldt. Mankind’s old greatness was created in scarcity. But what may we expect from plenitude? In Wagner the giant Fafnir—or is it a dragon?— sleeps on a magical ring. Is America sleeping, then, and dreaming of equal justice and of love? Anyway, I’m not here to discuss adolescent American love-myths—this was how Humboldt talked. Still, he said, I’d like you to listen to this. Then he began to narrate in his original style. He described and intricately embroidered. He worked in Milton on divorce and John Stuart Mill on women. After this came disclosure, confession. Then he accused, fulminated, stammered, blazed, cried out. He crossed the universe like light. He struck off X-ray films of the true facts. Weakness, lies, treason, shameful perversion, crazy lust, the viciousness of certain billionaires (names were named). The truth! And all of this melodrama of impurity, all these erect and crimson nipples, bared teeth, howls, ejaculations! The lawyers had heard this thousands of times but they wanted to hear it again, from a man of genius. Had he become their pornographer?

  Ah Humboldt had been great—handsome, high-spirited, buoyant, ingenious, electrical, noble. To be with him made you feel the sweetness of life. We used to discuss the loftiest things— what Diotima said to Socrates about love, what Spinoza meant by the amor dei intellectualis. To talk to him was sustaining, nourishing. But I used to think, when he mentioned people who had been his friends, that it could be only a question of time before I too was dropped. He had no old friends, only ex-friends. He could become terrible, going into reverse without warning. When this happened, it was like being caught in a tunnel by the Express. You could only cling to the walls, or lie between the rails, praying.

  To meditate, and work your way behind the appearances, you have to be calm. I didn’t feel calm after this summary of Humboldt, but thought of something he himself liked to mention when he was in a good humor and we were finishing dinner, a scramble of dishes and bottles between us. The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, “Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist?” The keen old prof replied, “And who is asking?”

  I directed this against myself. After entering so deeply into Humboldt’s character and career it was only right that I should take a deeper look also at myself, not judge a dead man who could alter nothing but keep step with him, mortal by mortal, if you know what I mean. I mean that I loved him. Very well, then, Von Trenck was a triumph (I shrank from the shame of it) and I was a celebrity. Humboldt now was only a crazy sansculotte picketing drunkenly with a mercurochrome sign while malicious pals cheered. At the White Horse on Hudson Street, Humboldt won hands down. But the name in the papers, the name that Humboldt stifling with envy saw in Leonard Lyons’ column, was Citrine. It was my turn to be famous and to make money, to get heavy mail, to be recognized by influential people, to be dined at Sardi’s and propositioned in padded booths by women who sprayed themselves with musk, to buy Sea Island cotton underpants and leather luggage, to live through the intolerable excitement of vindication. (I was right all along!) I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation.

  Demmie Vonghel who had coached me all along steered me now, acting as my trainer, my manager, my cook, my lover, and my strawboss. She had her work cut out for her and was terribly busy. She wouldn’t let me see Humboldt at Bellevue. We quarreled over it. She needed a little help with all this and felt it would be a good idea for me to consult a psychiatrist also. She said, “To look as collected as you look when I know you’re falling apart and dying of excitement just isn’t good.” She sent me to a man named Ellenbogen, a celebrity himself, appearing on many talk shows, the author of liberating books on sex. Ellenbogen’s dry lean long face had big grinning sinews, redskin cheekbones, teeth like the screaming horse in Picasso’s Guernica. He hit a patient hard in order to free him. The rationality of pleasure was his ideological hammer. He was tough, New York tough, but he smiled, and how it all added up he told you with New York emphasis. Our span is short and we must make up for the shortness of the human day in frequent, intense sexual gratification. He was never sore, never offended, he repudiated rage and aggression, the bondage of conscience, et cetera. All such things were bad for copulation. Bronze figurines of amatory couples were his bookends. The air in his office was close. Dark paneling, the comfort of deep leather. During sessions he lay fully extended, shoeless feet on a hassock, his long hand under his waistband. Was he fondling his own parts? Utterly relaxed he released a lot of gas which dissolved and impregnated the confined air. His plants anyway thrived on it.

  He lectured me as follows: “You are a guilty anxious man. Depressive. An ant longing to be a grasshopper. Can’t bear success. Melancholia, I’d say, interrupted by fits of humor. Women must be chasing you. Wish I had your opportunities. Actresses. Well, give the women a chance to give you pleasure, that’s really what they want. To them the act itself is far less important than the occasion of tenderness.” Perhaps to increase my self-confidence he told me of his own wonderful experiences. A woman in the Deep South had seen him on television and came straight north to be laid by him, and when she got what she came for said with a sigh of luxury, “When I saw you on the box I knew you’d be good. And you are good.” Ellenbogen was no friend of Demmie Vonghel when he heard of her ways. He sucked sharply and said, “Bad, a bad case. Poor kid. Pushing to get married, I bet. Development immature. A pretty baby. And weighed three hundred pounds when she was thirteen. One of those greedy parties. Domineering. She’ll swallow you.”

  Demmie was unaware that she had sent me to the enemy. She said daily, “We must get married, Charlie,” and she planned a big church wedding. Fundamentalist Demmie became an Episcopalian in New York. She talked to me about a wedding dress and veil, calla lilies, ushers, photographs, engraved announcements, morning coats. As best man and maid of honor she wanted the Littlewoods. I never had told her of the wingding Eskimo-style private party Littlewood had proposed to me in Princeton saying, “We can have a good show, Charlie.” Demmie, if I had told her, would have been vexed with Littlewood rather than shocked. By now she had fitted herself into New York. The miraculous survival of goodness was the theme of her life. Dangerous navigation, monsters attracted by her boundless female magnetism—spells charms prayers divine protection secured by inner strength and purity of heart—this was how she saw things. Hell breathed from doorways over her feet as she passed, but she did pass safely. Boxes of pills still came in the mail from the home-town pharmacy. The delivery kid from Seventh Avenue came more and more and more often with bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label. She drank the best. After all, she was an heiress. Mount Coptic belonged to her Daddy. She was a Fundamentalist princess who liked to drink. After a few highballs Demmie was grander, statelier, her eyes great circles of blue, her love stronger. She growled in Louis Armstrong style, “You are mah man.” Then she said in earnest, “I love you with my heart. No other man better try and touch me.” When she made a fist it was surprisingly big.

  Attempts to touch were often made. Her dentist as he worked on her fillings took her hand and placed it on what she assumed to be the armrest of the chair. It was no such thing. It was his excited member. Her physician concluded an examination by kissing her violently wherever he could reach. “I can’t say that I blame the man for being carried away, Demmie. You have a bottom like a white valentine greeting.”

  “I punched him right in the neck,” she said.

  On a warm day when the air conditioning had broken down, her psychiatrist said to her, “Why don’t you take off your dress, Miss Vonghel.” A millionaire host on Long Island spoke through the ventilator of his bathroom into hers. “I need you. Give me your bod. . . .” He said in a choking perishing voice, “Give me! I am dying. Save, save . . . save me!” And this was a burly strong jolly man who piloted his own airplane.

  Sexual ideas had distorted the minds of people who were under oath, who were virtually priests. Were you inclined to believe that mania and crime and catastrophe were the destiny of mankind in this vile century? Demmie by her innocence, by beauty and virtue, drew masses of evidence from the environment to support this. A strange demonism revealed itself to her. But she was not intimidated. She told me that she was sexually fearless. “And they’ve tried to pull everything on me,” she said. I believed her.

  Dr. Ellenbogen said that she was a bad marriage-risk. He was not amused by the anecdotes I related about Mother and Daddy Vonghel. The Vonghels had made a bus tour of the Holy Land, obese Mother Vonghel bringing her own peanut-butter jars and Daddy his cans of Elberta cling peaches. Mother squeezed into the tomb of Lazarus but could not get out again. Arabs had to be sent for to free her. But I was delighted, despite Ellenbogen’s warnings, with the oddities of Demmie and her family. When she lay suffering, her deep eye sockets filled with tears and she gripped the middle finger of her left hand convulsively with the other fingers. She was strongly drawn to sickbeds, hospitals, terminal cancers, and funerals. But her goodness was genuine and deep. She bought me postage stamps and commuter tickets, she cooked briskets of beef and pots of paella for me, lined my dresser drawers with tissue paper, put away my scarf in moth-flakes. She couldn’t do elementary arithmetic but she could repair complicated machines. Guided by instinct she went into the colored wires and tubes of the radio and made it play. It seldom stopped broadcasting hillbilly music and religious services from everywhere. She received from home The Upper Room, A Devotional Guide for Family and Individual Use, with its Thought of the Month: “Christ’s Renewing Power.” Or “Read and consider: Habakkuk 2:2-4.” I read this publication myself. The Song of Solomon 8:7: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” I loved her clumsy knuckles, her long head growing gold hair. We sat on Barrow Street playing gin rummy. She gripped and shuffled the deck, growling, “I’m going to clean you out, sucker.” She snapped down the cards and shouted, “Gin! Count ‘em up!” Her knees were apart.

  “It’s the open view of Shangri-La that takes my mind off these cards, Demmie,” I said.

  We also played double solitaire hearts and Chinese checkers. She led me to antique-jewelry shops. She loved old brooches and rings all the more because dead ladies once had worn them, but what she mostly wanted of course was an engagement ring. She made no secret of that. “Buy me this ring, Charlie. Then I can show my family that it’s on the up-and-up.”

  “They won’t like me no matter how big an opal you get,” I said.

  “No, that’s true. They’ll hit the roof. There’s all kinds of sin in you. They wouldn’t be impressed by Broadway. You write things that aren’t so. Only the Bible is true. But Daddy is flying down to South America to spend Christmas at his Mission. The one he’s such a big giver to, down in Colombia, near Venezuela. I’m going with him and tell him that we’re getting married.”

  “Ah, don’t go, Demmie,” I said.

  “Down in that jungle with savages all around you’ll seem a lot more normal to him,” she said.

  “Tell him what I’m making. The money should help do it all,” I said. “But I don’t want you to go. Is your mother coming too?”

  “Not here. I couldn’t take that. No, she’s staying back in Mount Coptic, giving a Christmas party for the kids in the hospital. They’ll be sorry.”

  These meditations were supposed to make you tranquil. To look behind the appearances you had to cultivate an absolute calm. And I didn’t feel very calm now. The heavy shadow of a jet from Midway airport crossed the room, reminding me of the death of Demmie Vonghel. Just before Christmas in the year of my success she and Daddy Vonghel died in a plane crash in South America. Demmie was carrying my Broadway scrapbook. Perhaps she had just begun to show it to him when the crash occurred. No one ever knew quite where this was—somewhere in the vicinity of the Orinoco River. I spent several months in the jungle looking for her.

  It was at this time that Humboldt put through the blood-brother check I had given him. Six thousand seven hundred and sixty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents was a smashing sum. But it wasn’t the money that mattered much. What I felt was that Humboldt should have respected my grief. I thought, What a time he chose to make his move! How could he do that! To hell with the money. But he reads the papers. He knows she’s gone!

  eighteen

  I now lay there grieving. Again! This wasn’t what I was looking for when I lay down. And I was actually grateful when a brassy hammering at the door made me get up. It was Cantabile on the knocker, forcing his way into my sanctuary. I was annoyed with old Roland Stiles. I paid Stiles to keep intruders and pests away while I was meditating but he wasn’t at his post in the receiving room today. Just before Christmas tenants wanted help with trees and such. He was much in demand, I suppose.

  Cantabile had brought a young woman with him.

  “Your wife, I presume?”

  “Don’t presume. She’s not my wife. This is Polly Palomino. She’s a friend. Of the family, she’s a friend. She was Lucy’s roommate at the Woman’s College in Greensboro. Before Radcliffe.”

  White-skinned, wearing no brassiere, Polly entered the light and began strolling about my parlor. The red of her hair was entirely natural. Stockingless (in December, in Chicago), minimally dressed, she walked on platform shoes of maximum thickness. Men of my generation never have gotten used to the strength, size, and beauty of women’s legs, formerly covered up.

  Cantabile and Polly examined my flat. He touched the furniture, she stooped to feel the carpet, turning over a corner to read the label. Yes, it was a genuine Kirman. She studied the pictures. Cantabile then sat down on the silky plush bolstered sofa, saying, “This is whorehouse luxury.”

  “Don’t make yourself too comfortable. I have to go to court.”

  Cantabile said to Polly, “Charlie’s ex-wife goes on suing and suing him.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything. You’ve given her a lot already, Charlie?”

  “A lot.”

  “He’s shy. He’s ashamed to say how much,” Cantabile told Polly.

  I said to Polly, “Apparently I told Rinaldo the whole story of my life at a poker game.”

  “Polly knows it. I told her about yesterday. You did most of the talking after the poker game.” He turned toward Polly. “Charlie was too smashed to drive his 280-SL so I took him home and Emil brought the T-bird. You told me plenty, Charlie. Where do you get these fancy goose-quill toothpicks? They’re scattered all over. You seem very neurotic about having crumbs between your teeth.”

  “They’re sent from London.”

  “Like your cashmere socks, and your face soap from Floris?”

  Yes, I must have been eager to talk. I had given Cantabile plenty of information and he had made extensive inquiries besides, obviously intending to develop a relationship with me. “Why do you let your Ex bug you like this? And you have a lousy big-shot lawyer. Forrest Tomchek. You see I asked around. Tomchek is top-drawer in the divorce-establishment. He divorces corporation biggies. But you’re nothing to him. It was your pal Szathmar who put you on to this prick, isn’t that right? Now, who is your wife’s lawyer?”

  “A fellow named Maxie Pinsker.”

  “Yiy! Pinsker, that man-eating kike! She’s picked the worst there is. He’ll chop up your liver with egg and onion. Yuch, Charlie! this side of your life is disgusting. You refuse to be alert about your interests. You let people dump on you. It starts with your pals. I know something about your friend Szathmar. Nobody asks you to dinner, they invite him and he puts on his louse-up Charlie routine. He feeds confidential information about you to gossip columnists. Always kissing Schneiderman’s ass, which is so low to the ground you have to stand in a foxhole to reach it. He’ll get a kickback from Tomchek. Tomchek will sell you to that cannibal Pinsker. Pinsker will throw you to the judge. The judge will give your wife . . . what’s her name?”

  “Denise,” I said, habitually helpful.

  “He’ll give Denise your skin and she’ll hang it in the den. —Well, Polly, does Charles look like Charles is supposed to look?”

  Of course Cantabile couldn’t bear his elation. Last night he naturally had to tell someone what he had done. As Humboldt after his triumph with Longstaff ran straight to the Village to get on top of Ginnie so Cantabile had roared off in his Thunder-bird to spend the night with Polly, to celebrate his triumph and my abasement. It made me think what a tremendous force the desire to be interesting has in the democratic USA. This is why Americans can’t keep secrets. In WW II we were the despair of the British because we couldn’t shut our mouths. Luckily the Germans couldn’t believe we were so gabby. They figured we were deliberately leaking false information. And it’s all done to prove that we’re not so tedious as we seem but are running over with charm and inside information. So I said to myself, Okay, be elated, you mink-mustached bastard. Brag about what you did to me and the 280-SL. I’ll catch up with you. At the same time I was glad that Renata was taking me away, forcing me to go abroad again. Renata had the right idea. For Cantabile obviously was making plans for our future. I wasn’t at all sure that I could defend myself from his singular attack.

  Polly was considering how to answer Cantabile’s question and he himself, pale and handsome, was studying me almost with affection. Still buttoned in the raglan coat and wearing the pinch hat, his beautiful boots on my Chinese lacquer coffee table, he was dark-bristled and wore a look of fatigue and satisfaction. He was not fresh now, he was smelly, but he was flying high.

  “I think Mr. Citrine is still a good-looking man,” Polly said.

  “Thank you, dear girl.”

  “He must have been. Slim but solid, with big Oriental eyes and probably a thick dick. Now he’s a faded beauty,” said Cantabile. “I know it’s killing him. He’s losing the clean jawline. Notice the dewlaps and the neck wrinkles. His nostrils are getting big and hungry-like, and they have white hair. It’s a sign with beagles and horses too, turning white around the muzzle. Oh, he’s unusual all right. A rare animal. Like the last of the orange flamingos. He should be protected as a national resource. And a sexy little bastard. He’s slept with everything under the sun. Awfully vain, too. Charlie and his pal George jog and train like a couple of adolescent jocks. They stand on their heads, take vitamin E, and play racquet ball. Though they tell me you’re a dog on the courts, Charlie.”

  “It’s a bit late for the Olympics.”

  “He has a sedentary trade and needs the exercise,” said Polly. She had a slightly bent nose as well as the fresh, shining red hair. I was growing fond of her—disinterestedly, for her human qualities.

  “The main reason for all the fitness is that he has a young broad, and young broads, unless they have a terrific sense of humor, don’t like being squeezed by a potbelly.”

  I explained to Polly, “I exercise because I suffer from an arthritic neck. Or did. As I grew older my head seemed to become heavier, my neck weaker.”

  The strain was largely at the top. In the crow’s-nest from which the modern autonomous person keeps watch. But of course Cantabile was right. I was vain, and I hadn’t reached the age of renunciation. Whatever that is. It wasn’t entirely vanity, though. Lack of exercise made me feel ill. I used to hope that there would be less energy available to my neuroses as I grew older. Tolstoi thought that people got into trouble because they ate steak and drank vodka and coffee and smoked cigars. Overcharged with calories and stimulants and doing no useful labor they fell into carnality and other sins. At this point I always remembered that Hitler had been a vegetarian, so it wasn’t necessarily the meat that was to blame. Heart-energy, more likely, or a wicked soul, maybe even karma—paying for the evil of a past life in this one. According to Steiner, whom I was now reading heavily, the spirit learns from resistance—the material body resists and opposes it. In the process the body wears out. But I had not gotten good value for my deterioration. Seeing me with my young daughters, silly people sometimes asked if these were my grandchildren. Me! Was it possible! And I saw that I was getting that look of a badly stuffed trophy or mounted specimen that I always associated with age, and was horrified. Also I recognized from photographs that I wasn’t the man I had been. I should have been able to say, “Yes, maybe I do seem about to cave in but you should see my spiritual balance sheet.” But as yet I was in no position to say that, either. I look better than the dead, of course, but at times only just.

  I said, “Well, thanks for dropping in, Mrs. Palomino. You’ll have to excuse me, though. I’m being called for and I haven’t shaved or eaten lunch.”

  “How do you shave, electric or steel?”

  “Remington.”

  “The electric Abercrombie & Fitch is the only machine. I think I’ll shave, too. And what’s for lunch?”

  “I’m having yoghurt. But I can’t offer you any.”

  “We’ve just eaten. Plain yoghurt? Do you put anything in it? What about a hard-boiled egg? Polly will boil you an egg. Polly, go in the kitchen and boil Charlie an egg. How did you say you were getting downtown?”

  “I’m being called for.”

  “Don’t be upset about the Mercedes. I’ll get you three 280-SLs. You’re too big a man to hold a mere car against me. Things are going to be different. Look, why don’t we meet after court and have a drink? You’ll need it. Besides, you should talk more. You listen too much. It’s not good for you.”

  He relaxed even more conspicuously, supporting both arms on the round back of the sofa as if to show that he was not a man I could shoo out. He wished also to transmit a sense of luxurious intimacy with pretty and fully gratified Polly. I had my doubts about that. “This kind of life is very bad for you,” he said. “I’ve seen guys come out of solitary confinement and I know the signs. Why do you live South, surrounded by the slums? Is it because you have egghead friends on the Midway? You spoke about this Professor Richard What’s-His-Face.”

  “Durnwald.”

  “That’s the man. But you also told how some pork-chop chased you down the middle of the street. You should rent near-North in a high-security building with an underground garage. Or are you here because of these professors’ wives? The Hyde Park ladies are easy to knock over.” Then he said, “Do you own a gun at least?”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Christ, here’s another example of what I mean. All you people are soft about the realities. This is a Fort Dearborn situation, don’t you know that? And only the redskins have the guns and tomahawks. Did you read about the cabbie’s face last week, blown off with a shotgun? It’ll take a year for plastic surgery to rebuild. Don’t you want revenge when you hear about that? Or have you really become so flattened out? If you have, then I don’t see how your sex life can be any good either! Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be thrilled to waste the buffalo that chased you—just turning around and shooting him through the fucking head. If I give you a gun, will you carry it? No? You liberal Jesuses are disgusting. You’ll go downtown today and it’ll be more of the same with this Forrest Tomchek and this Cannibal Pinsker. They’ll eat your ass. But you tell yourself they’re gross, while you have class. You want a gun?” He thrust his quick hand under the raglan. “Here’s a gun.”

  I had a weakness for characters like Cantabile. It was no accident that the Baron Von Trenck of my Broadway hit, the source of the movie-sale money—the blood-scent that attracted the sharks of Chicago who were now waiting for me downtown—had also been demonstrative exuberant impulsive destructive and wrong-headed. This type, the impulsive-wrong-headed, was now making it with the middle class. Rinaldo was ticking me off for my decadence. Damaged instincts. I wouldn’t defend myself. His ideas probably went back to Sorel (acts of exalted violence by dedicated ideologists to shock the bourgeoisie and regenerate its dying nerve). Although he didn’t know who Sorel was, these theories do get around and find people to exemplify them— highjackers, kidnapers, political terrorists who murder hostages or fire into crowds, the Arafats one reads of in the papers and sees on television. Cantabile was manifesting these tendencies in Chicago, wildly exalting some human principle—he knew not what. In my own fashion I myself knew not what. Why was it that I enjoyed no relations with anyone of my own mental level? I was attracted instead by these noisy bumptious types. They did something for me. Maybe this was in part a phenomenon of modern capitalist society with its commitment to personal freedom for all, ready to sympathize with and even to subsidize the mortal enemies of the leading class, as Schumpeter says, actively sympathetic with real or faked suffering, ready to accept peculiar character-distortions and burdens. It was true that people felt it gave them moral distinction to be patient with criminals and psychopaths. To understand! We love to understand, to have compassion! And there I was. As for the broad masses, millions of people born poor now had houses and power tools and other appliances and conveniences and they endured the social turbulence, lying low, hanging on to their worldly goods. Their hearts were angry but they put up with the disorders and formed no mobs in the streets. They took all the abuse, doggedly waiting it out. No rocking the boat. Apparently I shared in their condition. But I couldn’t see what good it would do me to fire a gun. As if I could shoot my way out of my perplexities—the chief perplexity being my characterl

  Cantabile had invested much boldness and ingenuity in me and now he seemed to feel that we must never part. Also he wanted me to draw him upward, to lead him to higher things. He had reached the stage reached by bums, con men, freeloaders, and criminals in France in the eighteenth century, the stage of the intellectual creative man and theorist. Maybe he thought he was Rameau’s nephew or even Jean Genet. I didn’t see this as the wave of the future. I wanted no part of it. In creating Von Trenck of course I had contributed my share to this. On the Late Late Show Von Trenck was still often seen fighting duels, escaping from prison, seducing women, lying and bragging, trying to set fire to his brother-in-law’s villa. Yes, I had done my bit. Possibly, too, I continually gave hints of a new interest in higher things, of a desire to advance in the spirit, so that it was only fair that Cantabile should ask me to tell him something of this, to share with him, to give him a hint at least. He was here to do me good, he told me. He was eager to help me. “I can put you into a good thing,” he said. He began to describe some of his enterprises to me. He had money in this and money in that. He was president of a charter-flight company, perhaps one of those that had stranded thousands of people in Europe last summer. He had also a little abortion-referral racket and advertised in college newspapers all over the country as a disinterested friend. “Call us if this misfortune occurs. We will advise and help free of charge.” This was quite accurate, said Cantabile. There was no charge but the doctors kicked back a percentage of the fee. It was normal business.

  Polly did not seem bothered by this. I thought her far too good for Cantabile. But then in every couple there is a contrast-gainer. I could see that he amused Polly, with her white skin, red hair, fine legs. That was why she was with him. He really amused her. For his part he pushed me to admire her. He also boasted about his wife’s education—what an achiever she was— and he showed me off to Polly. He was proud of us all. “Watch Charlie’s mouth,” he told Polly. “You’ll notice that it moves even when he isn’t talking. That’s because he’s thinking. He thinks all the time. Here, I’ll show you what I mean.” He grabbed up a book, the biggest on the table. “Take this monster —The Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics—Jesus Christ, what the hell is that! Now Charlie tell us, what were you reading here?”

  “I was checking something about Origen of Alexandria. Ori-gen’s opinion was that the Bible could not be a collection of mere stories. Did Adam and Eve really hide under a tree while God walked in the Garden in the cool of the day? Did angels really climb up and down ladders? Did Satan bring Jesus to the top of a high mountain and tempt him? Obviously these tales must have a deeper meaning. What does it mean to say ‘God walked’? Does God have feet? This was where the thinkers began to take over, and—”

  “Enough, that’s enough. Now what’s this book say, The Triumph of the Therapeutic?”

  For reasons of my own I wasn’t unwilling to be tested in this way. I actually did read a great deal. Did I know what I was reading? We would see. I shut my eyes, reciting, “It says that psychotherapists may become the new spiritual leaders of mankind. A disaster. Goethe was afraid the modern world might turn into a hospital. Every citizen unwell. The same point in Knock by Jules Romains. Is hypochondria a creation of the medical profession? According to this author, when culture fails to deal with the feeling of emptiness and the panic to which man is disposed (and he does say ‘disposed’) other agents come forward to put us together with therapy, with glue, or slogans, or spit, or as that fellow Gumbein the art critic says, poor wretches are recycled on the couch. This view is even more pessimistic than the one held by Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor who said: mankind is frail, needs bread, cannot bear freedom but requires miracle, mystery, and authority. A natural disposition to feelings of emptiness and panic is worse than that. Much worse. What it really means is that we human beings are insane. The last institution which controlled such insanity (on this view) was the Church—”

  He stopped me again. “Polly, you see what I mean. Now what’s this, Between Death and Rebirth?”

  “Steiner? A fascinating book about the soul’s journey past the gates of death. Different from Plato’s myth—”

  “Whoa, hold it,” said Cantabile, and he pointed out to Polly: “All you have to do is ask him a question and he turns on. Can you see this as an act in a night club? We could book him into Mr. Kelly’s.”

  Polly glanced past him at me with full and reddish-brown eyes and said, “He wouldn’t go for that.”

  “It depends how they sock it to him downtown today. Charlie, I had another idea on the way out here. We could tape you reading some of your essays and articles and rent the tapes to colleges and universities. You’d get a pretty nice little income out of that. Like that piece on Bobby Kennedy which I read at Leaven-worth, in Esquire. And the thing called ‘Homage to Harry Houdini.’ But not ‘Great Bores of the Modern World.’ I couldn’t read that at all.”

  “Well, don’t get ahead of yourself, Cantabile,” I said.

  I was perfectly aware that in business Chicago it was a true sign of love when people wanted to take you into money-making schemes. But I couldn’t lay hold of Cantabile in this present mood or get a navigational fix or reading of his spirit, which was streaming all over the place. He was a highly excited and, in that Goethean hospital, a sick citizen. I wasn’t perhaps in such great shape myself. It occurred to me that yesterday Cantabile had taken me up to a high place, not exactly to tempt me, but to sail away my fifty-dollar bills. Wasn’t he facing a challenge of the imagination now—I mean, how was he going to follow such an act? However, he seemed to feel that yesterday’s events had united us in a near-mystical bond. There were Greek words for this—philia, agape, and so on (I had heard a famous theologian, Tillich the Toiler, expound their various meanings, so that now I was permanently confused about them). What I mean was that the philia, at this particular moment in the career of mankind, expressed itself in American promotional ideas and commercial deals. To this, along the edges, I added my own peculiar embroidery. I elaborated people’s motives all too profusely.

  I looked at the clock. Renata wouldn’t be here for forty minutes yet. She would arrive fragrant painted fresh and even majestic in one of her large soft hats. I didn’t want Cantabile to meet her. For that matter I didn’t know that it was such a good idea for her to meet Cantabile. When she looked at a man who interested her she had a slow way of detaching her gaze from him. It didn’t mean much. It was only her upbringing. She was schooled in charm by her mama, the Señora. Though I suppose that if you are born with such handsome eyes you work out your own methods. In Renata’s method of womanly communication piety and fervor were important. The main point, however, was that Cantabile would see an old guy with a young chick and that he might try, as they say, to get leverage out of this.

  I want it to be clear, however, that I speak as a person who had lately received or experienced light. I don’t mean “The light.” I mean a kind of light-in-the-being, a thing difficult to be precise about, especially in an account like this, where so many cantankerous erroneous silly and delusive objects actions and phenomena are in the foreground. And this light, however it is to be described, was now a real element in me, like the breath of life itself. I had experienced it briefly, but it had lasted long enough to be convincing and also to cause an altogether unreasonable kind of joy. Furthermore, the hysterical, the grotesque about me, the abusive, the unjust, that madness in which I had often been a willing and active participant, the grieving, now had found a contrast. I say “now” but I knew long ago what this light was. Only I seemed to have forgotten that in the first decade of life I knew this light and even knew how to breathe it in. But this early talent or gift or inspiration, given up for the sake of maturity or realism (practicality, self-preservation, the fight for survival), was now edging back. Perhaps the vain nature of ordinary self-preservation had finally become too plain for denial. Preservation for what?

  For the moment Cantabile and Polly were not paying a great deal of attention to me. He was explaining to her how a convenient little corporation might be set up to protect my income. He spoke of “estate-planning,” with a one-sided grimace. In Spain working-class women give themselves a three-fingered prod in the cheek and twist their faces to denote the highest irony. Cantabile grimaced in the same way. It was a question of keeping assets from the enemy, Denise, and her lawyer, Cannibal Pinsker, and maybe even Judge Urbanovich himself.

  “My sources tell me the judge is in the lady’s corner. How do we know he isn’t on the take? There’s plenty of funny business at the crossroads. In Cook County is there anything else? Charlie, have you thought of making a move to the Cayman Islands? That’s the new Switzerland, you know. I wouldn’t put my dough in Swiss banks. After the Russians have gotten what they want out of us in this détente, they’ll make their move into Europe. And you know what’ll happen to the dough stashed in Switzerland—all that Vietnam dough and Iranian dough and Greek colonels’ and Arab oil dough. No, get yourself an air-conditioned condominium in the Caymans. Lay in a supply of underarm antiperspirant and live happy.”

  “And where’s the dough for this?” said Polly. “Has he got it?”

  “That I don’t know. But if he has no money why are they peeling his toes downtown? Without an anesthetic? I can put you onto a good thing, Charlie. Buy some contracts in commodity futures. I’ve cleaned up.”

  “On paper you have. If this fellow Stronson is straight,” Polly said.

  “What are you talking about—Stronson? A multimillionaire. Didn’t you see his big house in Kenilworth? The marketing degree from the Harvard Business School on his wall? Besides, he’s been trading for the Mafia and you know how those fellows resent being took. They alone would keep him in line. But he’s completely kosher. He has a seat on the Mid America Commodity Exchange. The twenty Gs I gave him five months ago he doubled for me. I’ll bring you his company’s literature. Anyway, Charlie only has to lift his hand to make a pile. Don’t forget he had a Broadway hit and a big box-office movie, once. Why not again? Look at all this paper lying around. These scripts and shit could be worth plenty. There’s probably a gold mine right here, you want to bet? For instance, I know that you and your pal Von Humboldt Fleisher once wrote a movie scenario together.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “My researcher wife.”

  I laughed at this, quite loudly. A movie scenario!

  “You remember it?” said Cantabile.

  “Yes, I remember. How did your wife hear of it? From Kathleen. . . ?”

  “Mrs. Tigler in Nevada. Lucy is in Nevada now interviewing her. Has been for about a week, staying at this Mrs. Tigler’s dude ranch. She’s running it alone.”

  “Why, where’s Tigler, did he take off?”

  “For good, he took off. The guy is dead.”

  “Dead, is he? She’s a widow. Poor Kathleen. She’s got no luck, poor woman. I’m sorry about Kathleen.”

  “She’s sentimental about you, too. Lucy told her that I knew you, and she sent you regards. You got any message for her? Lucy and I talk on the telephone every day.”

  “How did Tigler die?”

  “Shot in a hunting accident.”

  “That figures. He was a sporting man. Used to be a cowboy.”

  “And a pain in the ass?” said Cantabile.

  “Could be.”

  “You knew him personally, then. Not much regret, hey? All you say is poor Kathleen. Now what about this movie that you and Fleisher wrote?”

  “Oh yes, tell us,” said Polly. “What was all that about? Two minds like yours, collaborating—wow!”

  “It was piffle. Nothing to it. At Princeton we diverted ourselves that way. Simply horseplay.”

  “Haven’t you got a copy of it? You might be the last to know, commercially, what there was in it,” said Cantabile.

  “Commercially? The Hollywood big-money days are over. No more of those fancy prices.”

  “That side of it you can leave to me,” said Cantabile. “If we have a real property, I’ll know how to promote it—director, star, financing, the whole ball of wax. You have a track record, don’t forget, and Fleisher’s name hasn’t been completely forgotten yet. We’ll get Lucy’s thesis published, and that’ll revive it.”

  “But what was the story?” said Polly, bent-nosed, fragrant, idling her legs.

  “I have to shave. I need my lunch. I have to go to court. I’m expecting a friend from California.”

  “Who’s that?” said Cantabile.

  “His name is Pierre Thaxter, and we edit a journal together called The Ark. It’s really none of your business anyway. . . .”

  But of course it was his business, because he was a demon, an agent of distraction. His job was to make noise and to deflect and misdirect and send me foundering into bogs.

  “Well, tell us a little about the movie,” said Cantabile.

  “I’ll try. Just to see how good my memory is,” I said. “The thing started with Amundsen the polar explorer and Umberto Nobile. In Mussolini’s time Nobile was an Air Force officer, an engineer, a dirigible commander, a brave man. In the Twenties he and Amundsen headed an expedition over the North Pole, and flew from Norway to Seattle. But they were rivals and came to hate each other. On the next expedition, with Mussolini’s backing, Nobile went it alone. Only his lighter-than-air ship crashed in the Arctic and his crew were scattered over the ice floes. When Amundsen heard of this, he said, ‘My comrade Umberto Nobile’ —whom he detested, mind you—’is down at sea. I shall rescue him.’ So he chartered a French plane and filled it with equipment. The pilot warned him it was overloaded and wouldn’t fly. Like Sir Patrick Spens, I remember saying to Humboldt.”

  “What Spens?”

  “Just a poem,” Polly told Cantabile. “And Amundsen was the fellow who beat the Scott expedition to the South Pole.”

  Pleased to have an educated dolly to brief him, Cantabile took the patrician attitude that drudges and bookworms would give him what trifling historical information he needed.

  “The French pilot warned him, but Amundsen said, ‘Don’t teach me how to run a rescue expedition.’ So the plane rose from the runway but it fell into the sea. Everyone was killed.”

  “Is that the picture? But what about the guys on the ice?”

  “The men on the ice sent out radio messages and these were picked up by the Russians. An icebreaker named the Krassin was sent to find them. It cruised among the floes and rescued two men, an Italian and a Swede. There had been a third survivor— where was he? The explanations given were fishy and the Italian was suspected of cannibalism. The Russian doctor aboard the Krassin pumped his stomach and under the miscroscope he identified human tissue. Well, there was a frightful scandal. A jar containing the contents of this fellow’s stomach was put on display in Red Square with a huge sign: “This is how fascist imperialist capitalist dogs devour each other. Only the proletariat knows morality brotherhood and self-sacrifice!”

  “What the hell kind of movie would this make,” said Cantabile. “So far it’s a real dumdum idea.”

  “I told you.”

  “Yes, but now you’re sore at me, and you’re glaring. You think I’m a moron, in your department. I’m not artistic and I’m unfit to have an opinion.”

  “This is only background,” I said. “The picture, as Humboldt and I worked it out, opened in a Sicilian village. The cannibal, whom Humboldt and I called Signor Caldofreddo, is now a kindly old man and sells ice cream, the kids love him, he has an only daughter who’s a beauty and a darling. Here nobody remembers the Nobile expedition. But a Danish journalist turns up to interview the old guy. He’s writing a book about the Krassin rescue. The old man meets him in secret and says, ‘Leave me alone. I’ve been a vegetarian for fifty years. I churn ice cream. I am an old man. Don’t disgrace me now. Find a different subject. Life is full of hysterical situations. You don’t need mine. Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace.’ “

  “So the Amundsen and Nobile part of it is worked around this?” said Polly.

  “Humboldt admired Preston Sturges. He loved The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and also The Great McGinty, with Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff, and Humboldt’s idea was to work in Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and even the Pope.”

  “How the Pope?” said Cantabile.

  “The Pope gave Nobile a large cross to drop on the North Pole. And we saw the movie as a vaudeville and farce but with elements of Oedipus at Colonus in it. Violent spectacular sinners in old age acquire magical properties, and when they come to die they have the power to curse and to bless.”

  “If it’s supposed to be funny, leave the Pope out of it,” said Cantabile.

  “Backed into a corner, the old Caldofreddo flares up. He makes an attempt on the journalist’s life. He pries loose a boulder on a mountainside. But then he has a change of heart and throws himself on the rock and fights it till the man’s car passes in the road below. After this Caldofreddo blows his icecream vendor’s bugle in the village square, he summons everyone and makes a public confession to the townspeople. Weeping, he tells them that he’s a cannibal. . . .”

  “Which punctures his daughter’s romance, I suppose,” said Polly.

  “Just the reverse,” I said. “The villagers hold a public hearing. The daughter’s young man says, ‘Think of what our ancestors ate. As apes, as lower animals, as fishes. Think what animals have eaten since the beginning of time. And we owe our existence to them.’ “

  “No, it doesn’t sound like a winner to me,” said Cantabile.

  I said it was time to shave, and they both accompanied me to the bathroom.

  “No,” Cantabile said again. “I don’t think it’s any good. But have you got a copy of this thing?”

  I had started the electric shaver but Cantabile took it from me. He said to Polly, “Don’t sit down. Go fix that egg for Charlie’s lunch. Go on, now, go to the kitchen.” Then he said, “I’ll shave first. I don’t like to use the machine when it’s heated up. The temperature of the other guy upsets me.” He ran the buzzing shining machine up and down, pulling at his skin and twisting his face. “She’ll fix your lunch. Pretty, isn’t she! What do you make of her, Charlie?”

  “A stunning girl. Signs of intelligence, too. I see by the left hand that she’s married.”

  “Yes, to a drip who makes TV commercials. He’s a hard worker. Never at home. I see a lot of Polly. Every morning when Lucy leaves for her job at Mundelein, Polly arrives and gets in bed with me. I see this makes a bad impression on you. But don’t put on with me, you lit up when you saw her, and you’ve been trying to make a hit with her, showing off. That extra little try. You don’t have it when you’re among men.”

  “I admit I like to shine when there are ladies.”

  He lifted his chin to get at his neck with the razor. The bulb of his pale nose was darkly lined. “Would you like to make it with Polly?” he said.

  “I? Is that an abstract question?”

  “Nothing abstract. You do things for me, I do things for you. Yesterday I bashed your car, I ran you around town. Now we’re on a different basis. I know you’re supposed to have a pretty lady friend. But I don’t care who she is and what she knows, compared to Polly she’s a bush leaguer. Polly makes other girls look sick.”

  “In that case, I ought to thank you.”

  “That means you don’t want to. You’re refusing. Take your razor, I’m finished.” He put the warm small machine into my hand with a slap. Then he stood away from the basin and leaned against the bathroom wall with his arms crossed and one foot posed on its toe. He said, “You’d better not reject me.”

  “Why not?”

  His face, the colorless-intense type, filled with pale heat. But he said, “There’s a thing the three of us can do together. You lie on your back. She gets on top of you and at the same time goes down on me.”

  “Let’s not have any more filth. Stop it. I can’t even visualize this.”

  “Don’t put on with me. Don’t be superior.” He explained again. “I’m at the head of the bed, standing. You lie down. Polly straddles you, leaning forward to me.”

  “Stop these disgusting propositions. I want no part of your sexual circuses.”

  He gave me a bloody-murder look but I couldn’t have cared less. There were lots of people ahead of him in the bloody-murder line—Denise and Pinsker, Tomchek and the court, the Internal Revenue Service. “You’re no puritan,” said Cantabile, sullen. But sensing my mood he changed the subject. “Your friend George Swiebel was talking at the game about a beryllium mine in East Africa—what is this beryllium stuff?”

  “It’s needed for hard alloys used in space ships. George claims he has friends in Kenya....”

  “Oh, he has an inside track with some jungle-bunnies. I bet they all love him. He’s so natural healthy and humane. I bet he’s a lousy businessman. You’d be better off with Stronson and the commodity futures. There’s a real smart guy. I know you can’t believe it but I’m trying to help you. They’re going to mangle you in court. Haven’t you stashed something away? You can’t be as dumb as all that. Haven’t you got a bagman somewhere?”

  “I never thought of one.”

  “You want me to believe you have nothing in your thoughts except angels on ladders and immortal spirits but I can see from the way you live that it can’t be true. First of all you’re a dude. I know your tailor. Secondly you’re an old sex-pot. . . .”

  “Did I talk to you that night about the immortal spirit?”

  “You sure as hell did. You said that after it gets through the gates of death—this is a quote—your soul spreads out and looks back at the world. Charlie, I had a thought this morning about you—shut the door. Go on, shut it. Now, listen, we could pretend to kidnap one of your kids. You pay the ransom, and I put the dough away in the Cayman Islands for you.”

  “Let me see that gun of yours now,” I said.

  He handed it to me and I pointed it at him. I said, “I’ll certainly use this on you if you try any such thing.”

  “Put that Magnum down. It’s only an idea. Don’t get all shook up.”

  I removed the bullets and threw them in the wastepaper basket, handing back the pistol. That he made such suggestions to me was, I recognized, my own fault. The arbitrary can become the pets of the rational. Cantabile seemed to recognize that he was my pet arbitrary. In some sense he played up to this. Maybe it was better to be a pet arbitrary than a mere nut. But was I so rational?

  “The kidnap idea is too gaudy. You’re right,” he said. “Well, how about getting to the judge? After all, a county judge has to be put on the ballot for re-election. Judges are in politics, too, and you’d better know it. There are little characters in the Organization who put ‘em on and take ‘em off the ballot. For thirty or forty Gs, the right guy will call on Judge Urbanovich.”

  I puffed, and blew the tiny clippings out of the shaver.

  “You don’t go for that either?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe the other side has already gotten to him. Why be such a gentleman? It’s like a kind of paralysis. Absolutely unreal. Behind the glass in the Field Museum, that’s where you belong. I believe you got stuck in your childhood. If I said to you, ‘Liquidate and go abroad,’ what would you answer?”

  “I’d say that I wouldn’t leave the USA just because of money.”

  “That’s right. You’re no Vesco. You love your country. Well, you’re not fit to have this money. Maybe the other guys should get it from you. People like the President pretended to be fine clean Americans from The Saturday Evening Post. They were boy scouts, they delivered the newspaper at dawn. But they were fakes. The real American is a freak like you, a highbrow Jew from the West Side of Chicago. You ought to be in the White House.”

  “I’m inclined to agree.”

  “You’d love the Secret Service protection.” Cantabile opened the bathroom door to check on Polly. She was not eavesdropping. He shut it again and said, low-voiced, “We could put a contract on your wife. Does she wanna fight? Let her have it. There could be a car accident. She could die in the street. She could be pushed in front of a train, dragged into an alley and stabbed. Crazy buffaloes are doing women in left and right, so who’s to know. She’s bugging you to death—well, how would it be if she died? I know you’ll say no, and treat it as a joke—Wildass Cantabile, a joker.”

  “You’d better be joking.”

  “I’m only reminding you this is Chicago, after all/’

  “Ninety-eight-percent nightmare, so you think I should total it? I’ll just assume that you’re kidding. I’m sorry Polly wasn’t listening to this. Okay, I appreciate your great interest in my welfare. Don’t offer any more suggestions. And don’t make me a horrible Christmas present, Cantabile. You’re casting about to make a dynamic impression. Don’t make any more criminal offers, you understand? If I hear another whisper of this I’ll tell the homicide squad.”

  “Relax. I wouldn’t lift a finger. I just thought I’d point out the whole range of options. It helps to see them from end to end. It clears your head. You know she’ll be damn glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.”

  “I don’t know any such thing,” I said.

  I was lying. She had told me exactly that herself. Really, to be having a conversation like this served me right. I had brought it on myself. I had rooted and sorted my way through mankind experiencing disappointment upon disappointment. What was my disappointment? I had, or assumed that I had, needs and perceptions of a Shakespearian order. But they were only too sporadically of that high order. And so I found myself now looking into the moony eyes of a Cantabile. Ah my higher life! When I was young I believed that being an intellectual assured me of a higher life. In this Humboldt and I were exactly alike. He too would have respected and adored the learning, the rationality, the analytical power of a man like Richard Durnwald. For Durnwald the only brave, the only passionate, the only manly life was a life of thought. I had agreed, but I no longer thought in the same way. I had decided to listen to the voice of my own mind speaking from within, from my own depths, and this voice said that there was my body, in nature, and that there was also me. I was related to nature through my body, but all of me was not contained in it.

  Because of this kind of idea I now found myself under Cantabile’s gaze. He examined me. He also looked tender concerned threatening punitive and even lethal.

  I said to him, “Years ago there was a little kid in the funnies called Desperate Ambrose. Before your time. Now don’t you play Desperate Ambrose with me. Let me out of here.”