Collected Stories Read online

  After a while the quarrel on the bed was patched up.

  You stay over there, said Irene.

  She meant me. And then with a surprising touch of modesty she flung the Japanese wrapper over the foot of the large brass bed so that it erected a little screen between us. I have no wish to titillate anyone’s fancy but for the sake of the record I will have to pronounce the noises that Irene made in the next few minutes the most impressive that I have heard in a woman’s bedroom. Gaspings, moans, smothered darlings, and at the climax a hoarse, rapid breathing which was so intense that it really alarmed me a little.

  All that time I was eating out of the stew and I was so distracted by the noise that I forgot to notice how much of the stuff I was eating. When I looked down at last, the noise on the bed having now subsided a little, the pot of stew was almost entirely exhausted.

  Irene got up. Her face was shining with sweat.

  Youll have to go now, she said.

  What for? said Carl.

  You know what for, said Irene. I got to get busy now!

  How can you paint in this light? I asked her, hoping she wouldn’t notice the stew was all gone.

  Paint! she snorted. I’m not going to paint!

  What are you going to do then?

  The answer was in one syllable, a word that you see not infrequently scrawled in white soap on windows in less desirable districts or printed in lavatories.

  My God, I thought, is she really?

  When we had left Carl told me the little he knew about her. She was from Brooklyn and had gotten her start in painting as a student in a night class at the WPA. During the day she worked in a garment shop. There was a strike and some bloody warfare with police and scabs in which she had been badly beaten and locked up in jail. She was very bitter about the treatment she had received from the Union. It seems they had let her down pretty badly, come to some sort of cowardly compromise with the garment shop employer and allowed him to discharge Irene and one or two others who had worked most actively in the strike.

  By this time she had been painting for several years and had accumulated enough canvases to cover the walls of a room. She packed all her paintings and shipped them down to New Orleans where she heard an artist could subsist on practically nothing. She had hitch-hiked down there (last winter it was) and set up the studio and lived the life of an artist with that particular modification, if it is really a modification, which her desperate need of money had imposed.

  As for her paintings, I thought they were really surprisingly good. They were very raw and terrific. Pictures of pregnant women in soiled cotton dresses and bums sleeping in doorways. Screaming strike-workers, hideous scabs and bosses. There was one that was quite indecent but powerful as hell: a policeman nude except for his cap and his badge, beating a woman striker with a club while his sex organ stood in complete erection. This sounds like very bad painting but surprisingly it wasn’t. Each of the pictures packed a tremendous wallop, they hit you right smack between the eyes with the force and precision that only comes from the fury of a first-rate talent. Irene was a furious girl, she was possessed of a demon, but more than anything else I think, Irene was an artist…

  Well-

  A few days later Carl landed in the House of Detention for a five-week term. Mardi Gras came around, the time he had been waiting for, and there he was locked up. Irene felt terribly sorry for him. I didn’t know that she liked him but apparently she did because now she visited the “house” every day or so with a tin of Union Leader and a pad of cigarette papers. They would sit on opposite sides of the bars and she would roll the cigarettes on the little machine she brought with her and lick them carefully and hand them through the grating and Carl would say thanks, morosely, and we would talk about painting and music and writing until an officer said the visiting period was over.

  On the last day of Mardi Gras Irene and I went out together in costumes which she had devised in her studio. Hers was a grass skirt and a very scanty brassière. She was very drunk that day, as nearly everyone was, and we got separated in the terrible mob at the head of Royal Street. I heard her shrieking once or twice and then she disappeared as completely as though she’d gone down for the third and last time in the boiling human sea that swept around us.

  I spent the rest of the day looking for her: found her at last, about ten o’clock in the evening, in a small bar on Dauphine. She was unconscious, in fact prostrate on the floor, but she had a death grip on her purse which was fairly bulging with money. The man at the bar said she had been working there (they had rooms in back) but had passed out cold just about half an hour ago. My God, he said as he looked at her, Jesus Christ! And he shook his head over and over and laughed way down deep in his throat…

  I called a cab and took her home in it. She began to come to and she was very grateful. She wanted to give me half of the money she’d made. Stay here for the night, she said. I’m going to be sick later on.

  I stayed. It is something great to remember because she talked continuously that night, lying in the dark on the big brass bed while the crowds went by on the walk in fantastic costumes, you heard them hawking and spitting and laughing and retching outside, you heard the electric victrola in the corner barroom playing “It Makes No Difference Now” and you heard the wagon go by, not once but time and again, and sometimes skyrockets lit the sky, you could hear them exploding softly, or nigger-devils spit excitedly across the narrow streets, the tamale vendors cried out and the pedestrians were fewer, they walked slower now, some of them dropped on the walk, fell in their fancy costumes and rolled out into the gutter, you heard them snoring, you knew the police would collect them about daybreak and jam them like baggage into the stuffy little cells adjoining night-court, you felt very sorry for them and wondered how much they had in their wallets and if it would be worth trying…

  She talked all night. Lay there too exhausted to move except when she had to vomit, but kept on talking and talking. The whole of her former life passed before me in brilliant parade. I saw the mean-souled bosses and the gallant strike-workers, I saw the brutal policemen, I saw the shrewd, self-interested union organizers and the relief workers who kept their hearts in their notebooks. I saw stray, beautiful glimpses of fire and passion and tenderness. I felt the deep, hungry love as though the whole intolerable ache of humanity had somehow found its way into this twenty-six year old girl’s heart.

  I wanted, she said—(and this is something that I will always remember)—I wanted, she said, to stretch out the long, sweet arms of my art and embrace the whole world!

  She said this at the end of everything else and it was, I think, what she had been trying to say all the time and hadn’t till then found the perfect utterance for. Now she was silent. I turned over and saw that now at last Irene had fallen asleep. And her face as she slept was white and lovely and tender, the face of a sleeping child.

  This was Irene.

  Two or three weeks after Mardi Gras there was held what was known as the Annual Spring Display of paintings by New Orleans artists. It was sponsored, of course, by a select private group of the more successful painters, the ones who if they lived in the Quarter lived there only because it had atmosphere and whose studios were sparsely furnished with very beautiful things, great oval gilt-framed mirrors and inch-thick Oriental carpets and the kind of vases that the tragic protagonist knocks over when sneaking home late at night in two-reel comedies.

  That is how I imagine them to be without, I must admit, having entered more than a couple.

  Irene had submitted ten of her best canvases and for some time before the display she went around white and excited in a new black crepe dress with a silver and rhinestone buckle. She shaved her heavy legs, now, and wore some neat black slippers and even affected an ivory cigarette holder. She had a quick, nervous smile for everyone in the Quarter. I would wake up some mornings and hear her voice on the street and think she was calling me but when I stepped out on the balcony I could see she was merely holdin
g a casual conversation with the woman who sold perfume at Hove King’s or a tangerine vendor or one of the prostitutes at the corner bar. The union organizers who had disappointed and betrayed her, the gallant workers in the garment shops, the mean-souled bosses and the sadistic policemen, all of these had receded from the surface of her mind. Art stood out above everything else, it bathed the landscape in a radiant, heavenly glow. Her eyes were lit with it, it trembled on her lips when she spoke, magnified her voice to a trumpet and filled the bigness of her body with a new kind of universal passion. She wanted to stretch out the long, sweet arms of her art—(I keep remembering that speech!)—and embrace the whole world…

  Well-

  I didn’t see her for several days and then she suddenly burst into the restaurant one Sunday while I was clearing the tables after the midday meal.

  Something has happened, she panted.

  What?

  I can’t tell you! How long will you be?

  About ten minutes.

  Okay. I’ll wait till you’re through.

  But Irene couldn’t sit still. She paced tigerishly up and down the Bohemian dining room with its charcoal nudes on the walls.

  I want a job, she said.

  Doing what?

  Painting this kind of stuff! she said. I want to decorate somebody’s bathroom with scatalogical sketches, I want to draw obscene images on the ceilings of bedrooms!

  Why?

  Because I’m finished, she said. I’m all washed-up and I’m tired of being a whore!

  It was sunny that day, terrifically bright on the streets, and Irene’s face was like a wound that should have been wrapped up. The bandages were torn away, the gentle humor, the tolerance and the good will so that nothing was visible but the raw, bleeding hurt, the fury and the terrific frustrated bitterness.

  Rejected! she said. Every one of them completely rejected!

  As we approached the artists’ salon I could see that something special was going on that afternoon. The curbs were lined with the kind of motors that the Negro woman had told Irene she would ride down Canal Street in with a man in a full-dress suit.

  We’d better not go in there now, I advised.

  I got to, said Irene, before they burn my pictures!

  Burn them?

  Yes, she said, they’re planning to destroy my work!

  It was the society crowd making a gracious bow to respectable art. Elegant people were standing around with little demitasse cups and frosted cakes and the air was pregnant with polite exclamations.

  Irene was shaking terribly now and her face was chalk white. I could see that she was determined to make some kind of a scene and I began to make mental notes of ways to get out quickly.

  What she did was to go in the back room where they had piled the rejected canvases like spare pieces of lumber after a house has been built. Their backs were outward, their faces were turned to the wall as though they stood there in shame. Irene, breathing heavily, stooping awkwardly, snatched among them until she had found her own. Then she lifted the largest and stalked with it into the bustling brightness of the little spring salon. As I looked at the persons and objects that she was moving amongst I had a warning sense of something desperately irreconcilable in the air. These delicate vases, these little china cups, these blossoms, these nicely chiseled bits of terra cotta, and also these people with their fastidious clothes and their reserved little voices, they were all too fragile and Irene was something too fierce. There could be no peace between them. I saw her moving straight forward, black and terrible as a thundercloud in all the pale spring brightness, I saw the people before her dividing politely, murmuring and giving way. I heard their nice exclamations, their Ohs and their Ahs. And I thought to myself. If one were conducting a tour of battlefields in action, one might say. Here on the left is a gorgeous specimen of a twentieth-century man with the top of his skull blown off, and that one, the stout dowager with the violets at her bosom, would point delicately with her littlest gloved finger and say. How very nicely it’s done!

  This was bitterness, not truth, but expressed my feelings.

  Irene had moved over to the middle-aged man in frock coat and pince-nez standing beneath the leathery green fronds of a large potted palm. At first she seemed to be speaking without very much agitation. He was gently, politely warding off her objections. I could see him making fatherly little faces and touching her shoulder with the tip of one finger, just enough to establish contact without the risk of any contamination, while the saliva dribbled ever so slightly from the corner of his mouth.

  Then Irene started raising her voice. There was a stir all around her. Coffee cups were set down with tiny click-clicks, a very faint spsss-spsss-spsss began to be heard under or above the ordinary chatter, eyebrows climbed higher, spruce little men craned their necks, rooster-wise, debutantes shimmered and giggled with little breathless spasms, large women waggled their bottoms the way that they do when a disturbance is pending.

  Is this the floor show? someone asked.

  The girl with the orchids giggled.

  At this point Irene’s voice rose abruptly to shouting proportions. Something like pandemonium was then beginning to be let loose at the Annual Spring Display, though it was still on a fairly small scale compared to later developments. You know how it is when a crowd of our best people discover all at once that something on the order of the Bubonic Plague has suddenly reared its hideous face amongst them. The social pattern, which is everything, is suddenly disrupted. There is no longer any logical motion so that they swarm without reason. The head is cut off the chicken, as it were, and she is flying about the yard spouting blood in complete abandon while her frenzied companions cackle in useless sympathy and dismay. Why doesn’t she put her head on? What can be done to stop it? The answer is nothing, nothing! On a stage you could ring down the curtain, in a bar you could summon the bouncers, but here amongst our nicest people there is no preparation for anything outrageous to happen. Suppose the police were called? The papers would be full of it tomorrow, a disorderly scene at the Annual Spring Display, it would completely crowd out the references to who served coffee and who was the chairman of what. It would constitute a regular scandal. But could this person be allowed to continue? No, she could not!

  Who is she, anyhow? Does anyone know?

  What? I can’t hear you!

  Oh!

  Who?

  Some Quarter Rat who paints disgusting pictures that couldn’t be shown!

  Of the actual altercation I could see very little. When I heard the loud impact, the sound of ripping canvas, I said to myself, Christ, she’s busted that picture over somebody’s head!

  Hysteria broke loose at this point. Women who had been exclaiming in little pussycat voices abruptly learned how to scream the way that swimming is learned by suddenly falling in water. Something loud crashed, a window I think it was. I was alarmed, unable to see but full of the wildest conjectures.

  Irene! I shouted. Could she have been thrown out?

  There was a brief contortion among the tight group of people who now surrounded Irene. The white-haired official was frenziedly spewed from amongst them. He shot straight forward across the floor to the phone on the opposite wall and shouted into its mouth such words as Disturbance, Riot, Police!

  But it was too late, this action too tardily taken. Irene was beyond restraint. As the wall of backs divided I had caught a glimpse of her face. My God, what a sight! Her face was no longer colorless, it was livid. Her dress had been torn loose in the struggle and one of her large white breasts was exposed. She was pinioned for that short moment by two stout gentlemen but they could not possibly hold her. She stamped on the toes of one and jabbed her knee into the other’s groin so they both fell away with desperate looks of anguish.

  Then she was out. Nothing on earth could stop her, not even the Maginot line. Like a human tornado she swept around the four walls, plucking the nice pictures down and tossing them onto the floor, hurling them at her
pursuers or at the tea table. The glittering percolator went over, the cut-glass bowl full of pale green sherbet followed right after it. Millions of voices seemed to be shouting together, but over them all, all of the other voices, was always Irene’s. Such words as she screamed the nicer ladies had never heard whispered before. Dykes she called them, bitches and son of bitches and—

  Well—

  As quickly as it had started, just that quickly the whole thing came to a finish. Irene was worn out, she collapsed. She sank down weakly onto the floor among the scattered canvases and frosted cookies and slithering balls of green sherbet. She started crying into a surprisingly small and dainty white handkerchief that she had miraculously produced from the torn bosom of her black crepe dress with the silver and rhinestone buckle. Her thick black hair had come loose and was hanging around her shoulders, she was such a big girl, so remarkably big and strong-looking, and now she was crumpled into a heap on the floor and sobbing like a tired child with nothing but havoc around her and people standing back, now, everyone waiting quietly, exhaustedly for the wagon which had been sent for to finally come and remove her. What had been done had been done, the disturbance was practically over…

  It was exactly one day after this that I lost my job at the Bohemian eating place which resulted in such a crisis in my personal affairs that nothing else seemed to matter. A fellow named Parrott had a jalopy that he was hoping to get to Hollywood in. Between us we had sixteen dollars: with that and a ten-inch section of rubber tube we managed to reach the West Coast about three weeks later. I was going to write pictures for Parrott to star in, but both of us were shortly employed as pin boys at a bowling alley in Laguna Beach.

  One Saturday night late that spring I dropped in Mona’s for a glass of beer. There was a disturbance in progress. A gentleman had been knocked unconscious in the parking lot and divested of his wallet containing about eighty-six bucks. There was something nostalgic in the atmosphere of this crime so that I couldn’t help smiling just a little in spite of the gentleman’s hysterical condition. It all blew over in a few minutes, the gentleman said that it was so dark he couldn’t possibly identify his assailant and he and the officer very quickly disappeared. They had hardly gone when the floor show started. I was seated at a remote table and could hear a great deal better than I could see. Somebody was playing “The Blue Danube” on a very corny fiddle. I didn’t need two guesses. I moved up close to the mike and when his turn was finished I brought Carl over to my table and we had a drink together.