Moise and the World of Reason Read online

  For emphasis of this wise and important remark, or so it seemed to me then, he clasped my body tight with his long, hard, beautiful legs, then went on to tell me, “My mama in Chicago said to me, ‘Lance, God is going to take care of you just like he does of me.’ And it was just a month later that I got word from Chicago when I was skating in Seattle that Mama had a big growth in her that couldn’t be cut out and that was the way that God took care of Mama and I reckon that’s the way he’ll look out for us if we don’t look out for each other.”

  I was then young enough to cry very easily without records, and Lance comforted me by thrusting his hot tongue into the ear into which he had whispered huskily those words of dreadful wisdom.

  Oh, I know that you know by this time why I am a failed writer and are shocked at my presumption in calling myself a distinguished one, but here an incomplete sentence is coming at you.

  They say that O’Neill the playwright referred to it all as Pipe Dreams and sometimes they put him down for it, but if it obsessed him, as apparently it did, I think it was brave of him to repeat it that much: I thought of that because thinking of myself as both failed and distinguished in my vocation is one of those illogical premises to which we must cling for a sufferable lifetime.

  Now Moise had turned to me. She was saying, “Someday you are going to wake up, little man, and remember that someone with angelic wisdom once said that ripeness is all.”

  “Now, Moise, honey, why do you say that to me?”

  “Because you are here and you understand English and just don’t bug me no more, as Lance would say, about things that concern only me and the possible exception of my last resource in this world, which is Tony Smith in South Orange, New Jersey, and his wife Janie.”

  Then there was a long stretch of tense silence and to break it I said to her, “Charlie has the flu and the fever makes him silly.”

  “It must be a constant fever. Let him have it at your place on his own time, and to expose my guests to his flu is a little too much even for the latitude of my tolerance which is wide as the Nebraska plains which I hail from!”

  “Now you’re beginning to sound more like yourself.

  “I don’t know what you mean by that remark and I am entirely capable of standing on my feet without your arm about me.”

  But she didn’t move away and I didn’t remove my arm.

  Her body, thin as a whippet’s, was now trembling violently and I did believe that if I released her she would drop to the floor.

  No one having closed and bolted the door as Moise had directed, the curious event of the “party” was now under way. Charlie had gone out and returned with paper cups for the Gallo. The first half hour was unnaturally subdued for any kind of social occasion that I had ever attended. It was now dark through the windows and the room lighted only by a thick yellow aromatic candle which had burned down to half an inch from extinction.

  I said to Moise, “Honey, that candle is not going to last much longer. Have you got another?”

  “No.”

  “Then let me run over to the Italian Kitchen on the corner and ask them to lend us one.”

  “No.”

  “But, Moise, dear, it will be totally dark in here when that candle goes out!”

  She trembled even more in the crook of my supporting arm.

  “The announcement,” she said, “is pertinent to darkness, and anyhow—”

  (That is a sentence which Moise did not complete, not an incomplete sentence of my own doing.)

  It seemed to me that her voice was as close to expiration as the guttering tallow which filled the large room with a faint, pleasantly sorrowful musk. I think of the word “patchouli” and I throw it in simply because it sounds right.

  “Now, Moise, if you are really intending to make an announcement to this strange collection of guests, I think you should do it at once, for when the room is totally dark nobody will know for sure who is speaking even if they can hear you.”

  “No. Will you please be still. I’m now going to make the announcement.”

  She did not seem able to lift her voice enough to be heard by anyone much further from her than me in the crowded room, and nevertheless she was making the announcement, and it was obviously intended for everyone present.

  “Things have become untenable in my world.”

  She repeated this statement twice like a judge calling for order in a courtroom. Probably no one heard the statement but me. Her voice was a whisper, and so I took the liberty of repeating it for her at the top of my lungs.

  “Moise says that things have become untenable in her world!”

  And that was the way the announcement had to proceed. Moise would whisper a sentence and I would shout it. As for the reaction of the guests, or audience, most of them paid no attention but continued their own talk in pairs and groups.

  Now Moise was explaining.

  “You see, my world is not your world at all. It would be an observation of insufferable banality for me to observe that each of us is the sole occupant of his own world. And so I don’t know your world and you don’t know my world. Of course it appears to me, it appears quite evident to me, that your world is relatively a world that contains some reason.”

  At this point she paused for breath and I became aware that Charlie was standing before me with a furious scowl on his face.

  “Listen, prick,” he shouted, “there isn’t a mother in here that’s interested in this shit!”

  Moise heard him and delivered a slap to the face and a kick to the shin and he moved away, shouting, “Fuck off!”

  As he turned in the flickering candlelight, I noticed his ass in profile and exclaimed with astonishment to myself this histrionic thing: “What is life but a memory of asses and cunts you’ve been into?”

  (That isn’t at all true, you know, it was just an hysterical expletive of the libido.)

  The announcement is continuing as before.

  “I think I lived in something more like your world once, I mean a world of reason, but things became more and more untenable and I began to leave the room of that world and to retire into this one. I don’t know how long ago.”

  At this point most of the guests had begun to listen to the announcement but their facial expressions were curious beyond my failing power of description. I can only say there was nothing appropriate in their expressions with the single exception of the expression on the face of an actress named Invicta. Her face was attentive and comprehending: the faces of all the others were—I don’t know how to describe it. It was rather like they were in one of those bars in the Village where they show old silent comedies of the Keystone era.

  Moise was now mentioning things of a less abstract nature, relevant to her estrangement from the world of reason. She was saying, “My zinc white is exhausted and I have no more blue. I squeezed out my last bit of blue onto my last bit of canvas this last afternoon in my world. Also my black. Gone, too. My cup of turpentine could be mistaken for a cup of gumbo. My linseed oil, gone, gone, and as for my brushes, well, I can paint with my fingers but sometimes I think of my brushes as I remember—please, are you listening to me? You look at me so strangely that I can’t tell—I think of my dear canvas as of a gentleman who provided me with whatever means I had to continue subsistence. Gone, gone, too, eighty-seven at Bellevue.”

  She paused, clutching my shoulder in a paroxysm of emotion.

  “To have possessed a patron who was a pauper has been the presence of God in my life, but now, oh, now—lived on security, died in charity, where is the poem God now? And the hope of new white, new blue, new black, or one more stretch of canvas?”

  I had now stopped repeating her whispers: there was no more breath in me, now, and nothing but, I am ashamed to admit this, but homesickness for the bed in the section of loft and Charlie’s fever to warm me.

  Much as I do love Moise, when someone you love departs altogether from the world of reason, dubitable as that world may be, you know, you are subject
to such distractions from her condition, his condition, whatever, that you

  “Moise, please stop now, they’re all turning away and the Actress Invicta has collapsed to the floor!”

  “What right has she got to give a theatrical performance during my announcement?” Moise demanded. “Get her up and out of here this instant.”

  “But, Moise, she is genuinely affected by your announcement, in fact I believe she’s the only one here who is at all interested in it besides you and me.”

  “Hush! The announcement continues!”

  And it did continue and I must say that despite the fact that I am accustomed to shocking revelations or confessions, having devoted half my life to them, I was embarrassed, yes, I was truly shocked by what she was now announcing.

  “This gentleman, eighty-seven, lost at Bellevue, it is pitiable but not shameful for me to admit this, was, in a sense, my lover as well as my patron. It is probably more accurate to say that I performed for his sake certain little services such as a bit of prostatic massage along with a bit of fellatio and out of his loneliness, the terminal affliction of the old, he would call me his love, and I, well, I was in no position to decline his material assistances, on Saturdays in summer, Wednesdays too in winter, and in spring, yes, actually that season affects the elderly too, more frequent summonses to Apartment F, third floor right, appalling stairs, had to pause for breath on the second landing. And ladies not being allowed there, it was a bachelors’ home supported by B’Nai B’Rrith, he had provided me with a tall black hat and a pair of trousers inherited from his father, a rabbi in New Rochelle, to wear when summoned. I received strange glances, caught on the run rushing through, but bus fare there and back was added to the remittance taken out of a padlocked metal box and handed me with whispers of devotion. I don’t suppose this belongs in the world of reason. I only meant to tell you that he is gone, too, and I am bereft, I am left without further means to continue beyond this announcement, unless it reaches South Orange. . . .”

  She stopped as if to inquire if it would or would not and during this pause in the announcement, which, needless to say, I was no longer repeating, a tall young man appeared directly before us and said, “Unreal, unreal.” I recognized this personable new arrival as Big Lot. And then I noticed that Charlie was crossing to him with a cup of Gallo. I caught him by the belt of my army coat which gave him a jolt that caused him to spill the Gallo on my coat and Big Lot.

  “Charlie, the party is over,”

  “Party, did you say party, and did you mean this one-joint smoke-in without a shot of vodka?”

  I looked at Big Lot who said this with one of his impish smirks that enchant some people some of the time and simply seem to be cruelly appropriate to others, the way some people laughed when Candy would not, they say, take the chemotherapy treatment because it would make her hair fall out. But I had stopped interpreting the smiles of a winter night and I only said lamely, “If it wasn’t a party, wouldn’t you be in the bushes on Central Park West?”

  “No, baby, in the trucks with some old trick of yours!”

  It was not a scintillating exchange of bitcheries nor was it meant to be, and Big Lot’s baby-brown eyes turned upon Charlie with a dreamily appraising up-down look.

  “Why don’t we go down to Phoebe’s for some chow, it’s a night for hot chili.”

  He hardly returned his look to my direction as he ordered me imperiously to give Charlie some cab fare.

  “What is a cab?”

  “A four-wheeled conveyance used for urban transport by successful writers.”

  Allusions to my calling always score painfully when made by faded friends and I never answer, but Moise had emerged from her moments of inner reflection. She said to Big Lot, “It’s a distinction to be a master of anything, which includes the cunning of betrayal.”

  Her ice-gray look removed the languidly supercilious smile of Big Lot as if his face had never worn it. Hurt and anger flashed there.

  “Oh, for Chrissake, Moise, it’s me that betrays himself to everybody, not anybody to me or by me, and whatever this fucking gig is I find it too unreal to believe it and personally not being into the theater of the ridiculous, I’m going to Phoebe’s for vodka and hot chili and no shit about betrayals.”

  “Watch out for the sudden subway,” Moise said softly as I’ve read that the Titanic first touched that submarine mountain of ice, so softly the dancers in the great ballroom didn’t feel it.

  (“The sudden subway” was Moise’s term for all such disastrous inadvertencies as Big Lot is inclined to provoke, less for himself than others, or it may be the opposite way: in either case, it’s a tightrope act to

  Yes, that sentence is finished in its fashion.)

  The image of ice recurs and whispers, too, and almost subliminally the wire announcing the death of the skater flashed into my mind, and then the night I slept with Moise for companionship’s comfort only, our hands touching until daybreak when she placed her fingertips on my temple and said, “Just say to yourself”

  Incomplete, there being nothing I could have said to myself except, “Overdosed on blackbirds, a super high, overdosed on a super high in Montreal, a spectacular leap and was dead still skating. ‘Didn’t come out of the glide. Wanted it so. Audience didn’t know I escorted him off the ice, tall smiling dead living.’”

  What on earth did she mean by “wire instructions and love”?

  A distinguished failed writer at thirty has suspended the climax as if it were a sentence that he had the audacity not to complete.

  The Actress Invicta had risen and put on her heroic black cloak as if an imperative such as “À nous le jouer” swept her away

  (Period omitted by intent since she stays on.)

  An outraged lady once said to me, “How dare you compare him to?”

  Each one has his love and comparisons exist in that fact only.

  Now back to

  Now at this instant the door down the corridor made a loud banging sound as if Moise’s announcement party were being raided by the police, it banged the wall that loud, but it wasn’t a police raid but something worse. It was the entrance of a certain distillation of venom in the form of a human (?) female called Miriam Skates. I knew it was she who had entered by that inimitable and indescribable shrillness of voice. I know it is a writer’s business to describe whatever he sees, hears, feels or imagines but the circumstances under which I’m now writing this thing have made it impossible for me to arrest its present motion by a description of the voice of Skates when she entered the lightless hall: at best I can only remark that probably nothing like it has been heard outside the spectators’ section of the old Roman Colosseum in the pre-Christian era when a fallen gladiator was about to be impaled by the victor’s trident.

  Moise had not moved but I caught hold of her as if she were running and shouted to her, “Moise, you didn’t invite her, surely you didn’t invite her?”

  “Who, who, not invited?”

  “Skates, to the announcement!”

  “Oh, has she come, is she present? The lights so dim, I—”

  “She has just entered with her little company of attendant bitches and there’s a dreadful commotion by the door.”

  “Oh, just arrived. She must have missed my announcement, I’ll have to repeat it to her.”

  “Don’t!” I cried out to Moise but she broke away from my grasp with amazing force and started moving toward Skates as Skates started moving toward her. I’m sure it was by intention that Skates arrived at the threshold of the room at the same moment as Moise, no one between them, close enough to have embraced each other had that been their impulse. There was just enough light still coming from the candle for me to see Moise extending her delicate hand toward Skates as if to offer her a polite welcome, and then this fantasy of a confrontation occurred, and before I tell you about it, let me assure you that I am aware of the regrettable sound association between the name “Skates” and the word “skater.” You must believe m
e though when I tell you that the skater and Skates were two polarities, the skater being love and Skates at the opposite pole. All right. Now this is what was now occurring at Moise’s announcement party. Skates threw both her skinny arms high into the flickering penumbra by the threshold, her face contorted with loathing, and began to make this loud hissing sound that continued and continued and continued. I will always hear it. It was worse than the hissing sound of any imaginable reptile since the age when the giant ones ruled the earth.

  And yet Moise seemed not to hear it at all.

  Eventually it stopped, as all things eventually must, and at the very instant it stopped, the candle went out altogether and it was totally black in the room, it was not just black in the room and the corridor but an intensification of black.

  But next, and then?

  I did not realize until then how dreadfully people fear dark when it is both total and sudden, even when the light that preceded it came only from a candle that was flickering toward its instant of extinction.

  The guests were now all in motion and collision. They were tumbling among and over each other in panic toward the door onto Bleecker, that is, all except Moise and Skates and myself.

  Skates struck a match and resumed her hissing. And Moise, still seeming not to hear it nor to have noticed the flight of guests, repeated her announcement with slight variation.

  “The world of reason has ceased being tenable to me. It was once somewhat but now is not anymore. I have used all my paints to exhaustion, linseed and turp are all gone, brushes worn to bristles on splintered sticks. So matters stand, you see, and to say that they stand may seem ironical to you, if this were a time when”

  “Sssssssssss!”