Moise and the World of Reason Read online

  FOR ROBERT

  The white blackbird exists, but it is so white that it cannot be seen, and the black blackbird is only its shadow.

  —JULES RENARD

  I

  THIS ROOM of Charlie’s and mine wasn’t really a room, it was a small section of an abandoned warehouse near the South Hudson docks. It was graced with a minimal sort of lavatory and a precipitous flight of stairs to West Eleventh Street and it was scantily partitioned off from the vastness in which it crouched by three walls of plywood which ascended about halfway to the ceiling. Sometimes I called it “the rectangle with hooks,” for an earlier lover of mine, the only earlier lover, had placed hooks in the plywood to hang things on, and at the risk of committing a pathetic fallacy, I will add that there was not much to hang on them anymore.

  But I am not a materialistic person as most sensualists are. I am a very sensual person. I suppose I would have to confess that I am, it is so apparent in my writing, both in the truths and the fantasies of my existence, and I think it is visible in my eyes, as visible as a thing printed in primary colors in public view. Of course as one grows older, and I am now more than twice the age at which I met my first love, there is a tendency to put on some materialism, probably through exposure to it in others. At the age of fifteen, when I met my first love, Lance, and committed my life to his, I was already a sensualist but material things were of little consequence to me, and I don’t believe that I expressed any surprise when he introduced me to his living quarters, astonishing as they were. Well, I’m a Southerner from a small town and it’s traditional among those of such origin to be politely silent about whatever oddities they observe in the life styles and mannerisms of those who entertain them. I suppose if we’re offered a slice of cake or cup of coffee and discover a bug in it, well, we may not pretend to eat or drink it but we don’t like to say, “There’s a bug in this,” we just sort of shove it slightly aside as if more interested in the individual than in the “refreshments” offered. I may have looked at Lance with a hint of something that was like a question, the first night that he introduced me to the hooked rectangle, for he sat right down on the clean, well-made bed, somewhere between single and double, accommodating two bodies with ease provided that they loved without reserve, and he grinned at me and said, “Baby, this is better than the streets but not much better, I know that.”

  My response was a delighted comment on the clothes, professional and social, that were suspended from the hooks about the rectangle. They were “elegant funk,” I guess that’s their definition, and inclined to glitter, designed for a glamorous night life, either far uptown or downtown.

  He looked at me seriously then, and said, “Baby, let’s not delude yourself about it. All this paraphernalia, these glittery costumes on the hooks, can’t possibly blind you to the fact that this ain’t a suite at the Waldorf, and I better explain to you right now that the circumstances I live in are not so much adapted to the way I live now as the way that I may have to live in the future.”

  I smiled and said, “I see,” although what he meant was far beyond my conjecture that first night.

  So much, and maybe too much, about how I came to live here. As a writer I don’t concentrate on craftsmanship: still I know, intuitively, when a piece of explication should be extended no further than the point at which it can be dropped.

  Now I have informed you that I am a writer and a reasonably young writer, at least in the number of my years on earth, but you’ve probably also surmised that I am a failed one, which is the indisputable truth. My writing desk was a wooden box with the fading words BON AMI printed on it. The light bulb was long extinct and no one had cared to replace it. There were windows on this floor of the warehouse but not in our section of it and two of them nearby had been shattered by a storm so that there was no way to keep the elements out, but when the human element of love is present, even in such a drab and restricted space, the elements outside are of relatively small consequence most of the time, and if you don’t know that to be God’s truth, then you’ve never lived with a fellow being like Charlie in your lifetime, nor with the other love to whom I’ve alluded.

  Oh, I’ve neglected to mention that that previous love of my life, a light-skinned black, skater by profession, who referred to himself as “the living nigger on ice,” had honored my twenty-first birthday with a record player with records by Ida Cox, Bessie Smith and by Billie Holiday, the third an idol whose habits he emulated too closely. To this original collection of records there had been no addition till a month ago when the proprietor of the bar nearby changed the records on his music box and presented me with my favorite, a haunting pop number called “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” This record player is right by the bed and that new record is always on it. I always turn it on just before getting into bed and Charlie makes fun of me for being moved to tears by it as I once was moved to tears by Lady Day singing “Violets for Your Furs.”

  Charlie says that my undoing as a writer is an excess of sentiment and that’s a point I’ve never argued with him, not even so much as to say, “Baby, you’re twenty and I’m thirty and you’ll abandon me some day or night more thoroughly than this old warehouse has been abandoned.” Perhaps I ought to say something like that to Charlie, but I suspect he would laugh, not to dismiss the idea but at the Bavarian burgher that still runs in my blood as a heritage from my father’s forebears.

  Time now to begin with yesterday afternoon.

  Charlie and I were reluctant to get out of bed as it was the bitterest day of the winter. Charlie had the flu in its early feverish stage which made his body deliciously warm to touch. The thought of racing naked to the bathroom was a shivering thought that nevertheless had to be entertained since it was now half past four and we had promised Moise to help her prepare for her mysterious party which was supposed to start at five-thirty. I know that Moise is a strange name to introduce so abruptly but that’s her name. It is her first, last and only name as far as anyone I know or have known seems to know. It does not rhyme with noise. It rhymes with nothing I know and since, as this Blue Jay continues, you will encounter the name again and again, let me pronounce it for you. Say mo. And then say ease, with the accent placed (ironically) on the ease. And as for the rest of the name that I’ll give to this work, you will soon come to see not only the relevance but the final necessity of it, there being, among the universal dualities, among the pluralities, always the world of reason and that which is outside it: enough about that for now.

  It’s time to return to yesterday afternoon.

  Charlie tried to tell me that the one-legged nickel-plated clock on the box by the bed had stopped during the night but I held it to his ear so he could hear it was ticking. Then he tried to detain me by further love play but I said, “Baby, save it,” and rushed into the improvised bathroom and before I’d finished peeing he joined me over the cracked seatless bowl and it was good to be in contact again with his little heating apparatus of a body. I’d got it down and it started up again now, if you know what I mean, which I know is a stupid question, and I thought it was a little far out even for a kid from the cattle-land of Texas when he did this thing which is probably too far out for me to report but seems to demand inclusion in the scene. He caught the stream of my pee in his cupped hands and then rubbed it over his face as if he were applying after-shave lotion to it, and, yes, it was a touch of intimacy that I, who was his senior by ten years and not from the cattle-land of Texas, felt obliged to put down.

  “Let’s not get into that sort of thing,” I said to him sharply. But he smiled up at me, so bright and innocent with his teeth chattering that I laughed and slapped his ass lovingly and turned on the washbowl that onl
y ran water so cold that it was a wonder that it was able to run.

  And it was so cold in the room that we didn’t stop to consider what to put on for Moise’s party. We just jerked into the clothes we’d dropped by the bed the night before.

  “Moise will be unhappy that we didn’t dress up,” said Charlie.

  “I doubt that she’ll notice. Put your sweater on and my muffler and army jacket.”

  “Yes, Mother.” For once he was eager to comply with a suggestion of mine as nothing he put on would be enough to be comfortable inside or outside of.

  “Uninhabitable quarters!” I said with a glance around me. And now already I am indulging in the fractured sentence which is the stylistic practice in my writing which has been most irritating to the editors of the few publications to which I’ve submitted my work.

  “Yes, now let’s get cracking!”

  But I had to wait a minute at the stair-top while he fooled with his shoulder-length red-gold hair, saying from behind the plywood, “I think it’s getting too long for anything but a ponytail, don’t you?”

  “Fuck your hair.”

  “Why not?” he laughed. “I guess it’s all that you haven’t.”

  And now we were running downstairs and our breath whistling between our teeth steamed like horses’ breath before we got out the door.

  “Why is Moise giving this party?”

  “Charlie, you heard her last night. She said it was to make an announcement and she said it probably didn’t concern anybody but herself but she wanted to make it publicly.”

  Well, you can’t talk and run the way we were running from a dockside warehouse to Moise’s place on Bleecker Street and discuss a mystery of this nature in more detail: anyhow, Charlie was half a block ahead of me, a terrific little quarter horse he was with a golden mane. I could hear his boots clattering and once or twice he whooped which I suppose is a Texas cattle-land practice, sometimes he jumps up whooping in his sleep and sometimes with a reason I won’t go into.

  Moise’s front door was slightly open but there was no sign of the lady in the single big room which was her habitation and was at the end of a singularly long narrow corridor (which we called her uterine passage to the world).

  We went on in there and observed that she had purchased two half-gallons of Gallo, one white and one red, a loaf of square-sliced bread, a (tiny) bottle of clam dip, a tin of smoked oysters and a tin of sardines.

  “I guess it’s going to be the destitute lady’s shore dinner.”

  “Let’s see what we can do, Charlie.”

  “Why bother, there aren’t even glasses.”

  “Look!”

  I pointed at a fifth of cheap white port which was nearly empty.

  “Yeh, I noticed and it was almost full last night so she’s already drunk, I reckon.”

  “But look!”

  I pointed at a fresh canvas on the easel and it was one of the loveliest things that La Moise had ever done in her life but it was all in gray and black with hardly perceptible little stains of blue here and there.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s her immortal piece of chiffon,” said Charlie lightly.

  Being a painter himself, and painters rarely giving each other a quarter of an inch in appreciation, he didn’t value the work of Moise as I did. (A distinguished failed writer at thirty!)

  Then we suddenly noticed that two well-dressed young-middle-aged men had come into the room in silence and were taking photos with primitive box cameras of great simplicity and beauty. The lenses of the cameras were square crystals and the black boxes were so old that they had acquired a purplish patina and glistened in the cold light.

  And then the door halfway down the corridor opened and Moise appeared, still clad in the see-through thing she had worn the evening before, hardly definable as a garment, merely a transparency with a narrow opening at one end through which her head protruded and a wider one at the other for her bare feet and slits on either side through which her arms extended at the elbows. Nor did it have, of itself, a definable color other than faint wine stains and fainter dust, with through it the opalescent shimmer of her flesh as she moved into light.

  “Moise, shouldn’t you be dressed?”

  “Yes, completely,” she murmured.

  “She’s in her Halston hostess gown,” Charlie snickered. “It’s a trend-setter, photographed by Avedon on the lovely Miss Hutton for the cover of next month’s Bazaar.”

  She made no response to this except a quick disparaging glance at Charlie, then turned away from us to whisper something to one of the cameramen.

  I decided, however, to be insistent.

  “Moise, please slip on something underneath.”

  “Such as what? Go through my wardrobe, and I’ll oblige you gladly if you discover something not contributed to the Army of Salvation.”

  Charlie turned to me with a grin that suddenly made his face scarcely recognizable to me.

  “Hush, let it be,” I whispered.

  “Please, no whispers around here,” said Moise. “Will one of you please shut and bolt the entrance to the tunnel of the unloved and will the others please unfold the chairs and tables for the guests I’m expecting.”

  Charlie retired to a corner from which he gave me a glance and closed his eyelids on tears. I stood reflecting. Loves come between each other. Although I’d continued to see Moise, since the advent of Charlie, as often as she’d open the door onto Bleecker at her visiting hours, something less definable and revealing than what she wore had descended between us. I think that after Lance’s crash through ice, she’d assumed that I would elect no second love but her. But isn’t that presuming more than assuming? And my little time of reflection ended where it began, with the one certain fact that loves come between each other: that much was plain and mystifying to me as any rule of nature.

  The two cameramen were now photographing Moise as if for some important event in her life, hopping about like slender, elegant frogs, taking their photographs from crouched positions. Her attitude was at once submissive and one that seemed accustomed to provocation. With unexpected ease and freedom, she posed herself for them. It didn’t seem at all like her, it seemed like Isadora Duncan posing for Arnold Genthe at the Parthenon somehow.

  I swear she seemed like a dancer, and I remembered Lance saying, “Moise is unable to be other than graceful, and I am, too.”

  (Was this what drew them together?)

  I had never seen Moise so beautiful as that evening. Without being conscious of it I moved close to her and closer and then I had an arm about her waist but her face did not alter except that she raised her chin a little higher.

  “Moise? Will you please listen to me?”

  “No. Will you please shut up?”

  “I’ve got to say something to you before things get out of hand.”

  “What things do you mean and out of whose hand do you mean? Do you mean out of mine or out of that blubbering fag’s?”

  “Moise, you know what we mean.”

  “Yes,” she said icily. “Nothing. That’s what you mean to everyone but each other, and thank you so much for being so much help with my goddam announcement party.”

  “Moise, will you clue me in just a little to the nature of this announcement?”

  “Eighty-seven years old at Bellevue.”

  I tried to figure what could be made out of that as a clue-in. It occurred to me that maybe she meant a great-uncle of hers for whom she had considerable attachment since he was her only relative in the world and I thought she probably meant he had passed away at Bellevue, which was plausible enough since he was a charity case in all senses except that he received no charity except a lot of Moise’s affection, but somehow this didn’t stick as a clue to the nature of her impending announcement. I felt there was danger in pursuing the inquisition but I still was impelled to continue it a bit further.

  “Do you mean your great-uncle, Moise?”

  “Christ, no. Patron, was he a
patron? How could that old derelict be a patron? A patron is not a parasite, exactly!”

  “Oh, patron, no, you mean a patron, you’ve lost a patron to Bellevue.”

  “Christ and his mother, yes, yes, yes, I had a patron till Wednesday night at Bellevue where he expired while handing me nine dollars and sixty-two cents at eighty-seven. Now do you understand or do you expect me to accompany this advance notice of the announcement with finger painting on the ass of that catamite you live with?”

  Now these are about as close to her words as I can get now, since I wasn’t equipped with a tape recorder that night nor any other.

  She was shaking intensely and I was thinking intensely.

  Moise had a patron. Well, that figures since she had no means of subsistence that I ever noticed but it doesn’t figure that she’d never have mentioned him to me till this moment. But then Moise. How plausible is Moise? I guess about as plausible as her name, as her spectral beauty and as my own definition of myself as a distinguished failed writer.

  Nothing of much action was yet happening at Moise’s, that is, nothing except Moise herself and the slender men in black mohair who were taking pictures of Moise’s few finished and many unfinished canvases with their box cameras while the cold light through the windows lasted. Each time a canvas was exposed by Moise to the cameras she would try to shield it from our eyes, particularly Charlie’s, but his tears, true or false, were now gone and he merely winked and shrugged at her maneuvers. It was unavoidable that my thoughts should drift back to the lover who had preceded Charlie in my life and the vast difference between Moise’s attitude toward him and his toward her from the vibes that existed between her and Charlie. I recalled the night after the loss of Lance, the skater, I had slept with Moise, not sexually but for companionship that night, how neither of us had slept, just lain side by side with locked fingers, and how, at daybreak, she’d turned her head toward me slightly and touched the hair at my temple and whispered, “It is not good but it’s God.” And I was reminded of a time earlier than that when Lance had spoken of Moise and related matters. He’d said, “Moise will go on for a while just like she is, but, baby, you know and I know that just going on for a while don’t make the gig for Moise or no one else. And, baby, you know there’s just a few of us and we got to look out for each other.”