Moise and the World of Reason Read online

  I remained after the others tumbled out of the classroom as if it had caught fire, some even out of the open windows, throwing their books before them, but I remained in the warm chalk-smelling room and went up very close to the P.&O. map, looking senselessly for the Marquesas and noticing the Solomons at the top of a long archipelago of little islands called the Louisiade. I see them distinctly now as I did in the desolate languor of that schoolroom in Thelma.

  Where is the libido located, inflamed? In the unconscious, of course, as surely as the island of San Cristoval is located at the western end of the archipelago called the Louisiade but much more prominently and in brighter color since it is so inflamed by the absence of faithless Charlie, oh, much more prominently with much more inflammation.

  “Hysterical, see a doctor.”

  Never mind geography and Miss Dames . . .

  But I have seen doctors and don’t care to see them again, would rather see Big Lot and Charlie intimately sequestered in a dark booth at Phoebe’s than a doctor ever again in my life, inflamed libido, hysterical, or whatever.

  (I shall have to go on but you may stop when you please. . . .)

  And by the way, who are you? I always have to be introduced at least twice as the panic that overtakes me at first meeting a person deafens me to the name.

  After a cup of Gallo, “I am sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” whether or not I wished to, a bit of Southern gentility in my nature or simply

  Inflamed libido, liking the contours of . . .

  Hawaii 50 is located in the Sandwich Islands somewhere in the suspiciously quivering space between, sorry but never catch names.

  But there’s one thing about me that you can count on. I am not dishonest. I do not write “unintelligible” or “inaudible” on my transcripts but of course they are nonexistent as the restraints of my libido on the rejection slips of my life or not on old dusty rectangular cardboards that once returned with shirts for love number one from the laundry named Oriental.

  I jump up from BON AMI, crying out Lance and the outcry seems to be echoed all through the panicky corridors of my memory, nine-tenths of which are submerged in dark, icy waters like the great iceberg that so gently but fatally nudged the Titanic on its first “unsinkable” crossing of the Atlantic, and so I think about death, his completed, mine now surely approaching, and how the band played on in the grand ballroom of that worlds greatest steamship, the dancers unaware of what the slight nudge portended.

  Lance is reverberated as if through the whole empty warehouse which is the size of my heart at this moment in Blue Jay. . . .

  So what do I do? I run to the improvised bathroom and dash the water, miraculously unfrozen, over my face, inflamed as my libido, and I realize that my chronic hysteria is now augmented by Charlie’s fever as my libido is by his absence.

  What did the ancient mariner say to the wedding guest? Stay with me and I will tell?

  A cordial invitation.

  A truly confident person is one who does not attend a banquet to which he has been invited and sends no word of regret—compliments of Jules Renard. . . .

  Also this: Sarah Bernhardt descends the winding stairs as if she were standing still and the staircase unwinding about her. And in her salon, no chairs, just luxurious furs and pillows on which to recline, and she has five pumas which are ceremonially led in by footmen on chains, yes, both, footmen and pumas are led in on metal chains, captivity, bondage, love.

  Success of Rostand’s Cyrano and her fury that she is not in it for she is not Coquelin, but she carries it off with bravado, she rushes from her theater to his and she exclaims to Rostand, “I hastened through my death scene to catch your last act.” And if one artist will do that for another, the world is still not lost.

  But that was years later. I also remember this verse about Sarah.

  “How thin was Sarah Bernhardt, Pa,

  That shadow of a shade?”

  “As thin, my son,” his Pa replied,

  “As picnic lemonade.”

  I remember no rhymes about Duse, only that she died in a second-class hotel in an American city of no distinction on farewell tour. But I recall one more about La Bernhardt.

  Sarah Bernhardt had one leg,

  The other was a wooden peg.

  But good she did, yep, she did good,

  Clumping on a stump of wood.

  Yes, I am with the clock which locksteps with me martially through the wolf’s hours till morning. I say alone with the clock and underline alone to mean more intensely alone. Of course in a sense I am also with the Blue Jay, but in a stronger sense the Blue Jay is an extension of myself and so the accurate thing to say is that the Blue Jay and I are alone with the clock.

  And the wolf has a varying number of hours, not just one. I would say that the wolf’s hours are those spent alone, uncomforted by sleep, during a period of night, post meridial, when you are accustomed to a loved living presence which is not that of a clock, nor even of an “extension of yourself,” although

  It is now after two by the one-legged clock which I have placed as far away from me as the limits of the rectangle permit, not only because its noise is much too assertive tonight but because it is the subject of Charlie’s latest painting, executed in the style of that progenitor of pop art, Mr. Gerald Murphy. To do this sort of thing, this marvelously precise representation in pigment of such things as matchboxes and cocktail glasses and the interior mechanism of a watch, requires an all but impossible control of a brush as fine as a penpoint or finer, and Charlie’s portrait of the exterior face of the one-legged clock shows an appreciation of Murphy’s work and the others of that genre but doesn’t approach the marvelous precision which was even more precise than the actual object.

  I have now placed Charlie’s portrait of the clock in the same place as the clock.

  Fuck you, clock, you one-legged nickel-plated little mockery of my heart, and fuck les points de suspension too, those triple dots that betray an unwillingness to call it quits or truly completed. The clock completes each sentence with one tick, they’re short and decided quite definitely, and going right on till the clock stops mocking your heart only because it’s run down.

  An admirable pursuit of a single course, no deviation from it, and one I’ll attempt to

  But it’s no fucking use, deviation being the course of my life.

  Chronological order means arrangement according to time: that much I will try to accomplish.

  To begin it, a simple declarative statement.

  I fled from home at fifteen.

  There was much about me like the precocious Rimbaud when he started his literary career about five years before its completion. I had the (deceptively) innocent features, the dreamy-pale eyes, the very light and fine hair that stopped the star skater short outside the old San Remo bar, a landmark of the Village (and of my history) which exists no longer. I met them simultaneously, Lance and Moise, they were emerging together from the San Remo, the beautiful light-skinned Negro looming a foot above the crowd at the entrance and a foot above Moise who was exceptionally tall for a lady. They were in the doorway and I was on the edge of the crowd pushing in. I was not pushing in. I am not a pusher of anything but a pencil or pen, and that is part of my huge problem in life. Oh, I know it would have been quite different, my history in Manhattan, if those hazel-speckled green eyes had not slanted down at me from the San Remo doorway with the intensity of headlights turned on me just preceding a crash. The eyes were luminous and they were hypnotic. They blazed at me and transfixed me to the pavement and, well, I wouldn’t have moved if I could and couldn’t have moved if I would.

  I heard him shouting, “Jesus, Moise, dig this dish of chicken à la reine!”

  (The reference was to me.)

  It was Moise who said, “Come along with us, dear.”

  “I beg your pardon. Where to?”

  By this time he had seized my arm as if he thought I could fly.

  “Your place or mine?” Moise i
nquired of Lance.

  “Let’s introduce him to yours,” said Lance. “He don’t look ready for the warehouse yet.”

  “I think I could paint him by candlelight,” said Moise.

  And so Moise was complicit in my ravishment by the ice skater which occured in her world on Bleecker.

  It was a place of curious enchantment from the first. The one great window in the back wall of the room was glazed with frost which refracted the gleam of that almost indispensable accessory to her life, the amber-tinted aromatic candle set upon a blue saucer. And as I went down the long corridor into the room, I felt that it was unheated except by the entrance of Lance. He gave it warmth and vibration which made the frost coating on the window crack a little.

  “How nice to get in out of the cold,” said Moise. “Please excuse me a moment.”

  She then retired to her bathroom where she remained long enough to plaster and paint the walls.

  “Where you come from, baby?”

  “From Alabama.”

  ‘Where stars fell one night?”

  “Oh, yes, I”

  “That’s a long haul, you better lie down and rest and recover your breath. You are panting like you’d run the whole way.”

  “I had no idea the city was so big.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  When Moise returned to the room the skater’s long legs had a scissor hold on my body, there was blood on the bed, the burning eyes had blurred with loving contrition.

  Moise was the soul of sympathy and discretion. She made no reference to what she observed or what she had heard. She was almost soundless in her goings about the room, fetching a towel and glasses of red wine.

  I recovered enough to say, when she offered me the red wine, “Do you think that’ll put a little blood back in me?”

  Well, actually, I hadn’t bled all that much despite my defloration by the well-endowed light-colored black ice skater.

  Now I know I have said that everything in the last fifteen years of my life might have been quite different if I had not had this experience which I have told you with that respect for reserve (?) which is the one thing that I hope may justify my claim to some distinction as a failed writer at thirty.

  You may very well be warranted in demanding that I explain how such an apparently fairly commonplace experience could have changed my life since then. All right, I will try to explain. For thirteen years after that there was nothing of much importance in my life besides that ice skater and Moise and this practice of mine of trying to write things out in a long series of Blue Jay notebooks.

  I may have been a chicken à la queen when the ice skater first saw me but I was not and never have been intended for the use that he made of me that first night, and as I ran my fingers down his silky thighs, I interrupted his whispers to ask, “Isn’t it my turn now?”

  “Baby, I never took the sheets in my life.”

  “Yes, but your life isn’t over.”

  With strength from somewhere beyond me, I had extricated myself from his scissor hold and was moving gradually into the dominant position.

  “Moise, this chicken is turning to a rooster. Have you got some lubricant in the room?”

  “I think there’s a bit of petroleum jelly under the bed,” she murmured vaguely. “Now please excuse me again. I want to finish a mural in the bathroom.”

  Even with the lubricant on, I made him say “Wow!”

  “Too much?”

  “Too soon, take it easier, love, yours wasn’t the only cherry.”

  Then, having been joined in wedlock by mutual penetration (a complete sort of wedlock that’s often denied to straights), we went to his pad together. It was colder than Moise’s, and far stranger, but again his entrance warmed an unheated space.

  About the homelife, now, in Thelma, Alabama. You’ve doubtless surmised that I had a possessively devoted mother and a father that loved her but was brutal to me because, when he stumbled home drunk from the stave mill he worked for and the bar he frequented, he’d often find the bedroom locked against him and would break in the door and find my mother clinging to me on the bed as if I could protect her from his liquored ravishment of her.

  One night when I was fifteen he snatched me off the bed and shouted, “Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back here ever!” which is just what I did, heading North that night like a bird migrating instinctively that way.

  They had no idea at home that I’d thumbed my way to New York till six months later when Lance discovered that I was listed among those listed by the Bureau of Missing Persons on a nationwide scale. Well, the Bureau never tracked me down but a few days later I wrote a letter to Mother, giving her Moise’s address for mine, and then began the flow of Mother’s letters pleading that I come home, which were delivered to me by Moise. At first she tried to get me back to Thelma with pitifully false enticements, such as “Your father is a changed man, quit drinking, and is anxious as me about you.” “Son, you must come home, you must continue your schooling and develop your talent, your English teacher has told me you write the most beautiful themes she’s ever read in her thirty years of teaching.”

  But then the tone of her letters changed into reproaches and into confessions of illness.

  I couldn’t read them alone, I would read them aloud to Moise and Lance.

  “Son, you broke my heart and I can’t recover, I have lost twenty pounds since you ran away to that city which I hear is a modern Babylon that will ruin you body and soul. The doctor says that my grief has affected my nerves and my heart and is bringing on female trouble.

  “Son, you know you love Thelma and you are the star of my life which has not been easy. I’m selling garden products to send you bus fare back here and you couldn’t be so heartless as not to return. But if you don’t, I will catch a bus myself and come up there if it kills me. So far I haven’t informed the truant officer, but you are a runaway schoolboy and can be arrested up there and brought home willing or not. Now please don’t force me to do that but you know that I will if you don’t. Meanwhile it is winter and you left in wrong clothes. Tomorrow I’m going to pack your corduroy suit and heavy things in a box and take them to the post office and mail them to you at that address you gave me which I suspect is a false one. Now, son, write me at once, say you’re coming back to us, don’t break the heart of your mother with time running out so fast. Do not ignore this letter, I mean every word I say! Your father sends his love. He comes straight home from the mill, never stops off at the bar, drinks nothing but milk and sweet cider.”

  I read this letter to Moise and to Lance at Moise’s.

  Moise said, “Love, I think”

  She didn’t continue the sentence so I don’t know what she thought, but Lance embraced me and said, “Child, think of them as dead without recollection!”

  The letters kept coming from Mother but this was the last one I opened and read aloud or alone. I kept them all, though. They are still with me now. They are stacked up in a corner of the rectangle, turning yellow from time and damp, and unopened.

  But late in April that year my mother arrived at Moise’s. She’d come up on a bus line called the Gray Goose and she collapsed at the door on Bleecker when Moise opened it for her. Moise supported her to the bed and gave her an aspirin and a toddy and then she rushed over to the warehouse and said, “Your mother is here in a dreadful condition, you have got to come with me.”

  I said, “I can’t.”

  She kept saying, “You’ve got to, you know you’ve got to!” And she caught hold of my arm and wouldn’t let go of it till I went along with her like a marching convict on his way to death row.

  Mother was sitting up on Moise’s bed when I got there. She had on her good dress, the one that she wore to the Baptist Church in Thelma, but it was terribly wrinkled from the long bus trip and it was now too big for her. I stood there looking in silence as she cried out to me, attempting to get off the bed and toppling back down and babbling away about the
reforms of my father and how I was missed by everybody in Thelma and she removed from her purse two return tickets to it on the Gray Goose bus line.

  I crossed to Moise’s table and stood there drinking her white port till I was able to look again at the babbling ghost of my mother. When I looked at her I said, “You’ve took off a lot of weight, Mother.”

  “Son, you know I have worked myself to the bone with the garden products and selling them to the markets. The whole garden’s full of products, tomatoes, pole beans, cabbages, carrots, rutabagas and”

  She stopped for a moment to breathe, and I wonder if maybe I might not have gone back with her if she hadn’t begun to reproach me when she had caught her breath.

  “Your father has quit drinking and you have started. You stood at that table drinking liquor till you could turn to face me, your eyes red with the liquor. Now, son, don’t bother to pack, we are leaving this awful place right away for the Gray Goose station.”

  Then I panicked and I ran to the door and out of it, and to my horror, I was pursued by my mother. I looked back and saw she had outrun Moise and was babbling crazily and staggering this way and that. I turned every corner I came to and still she followed. Then I heard a policeman’s whistle and I looked back once more. She had fallen onto the sidewalk and was being arrested as drunk.

  Still she shouted, “Catch him, catch him, he is my son, a truant!” not understanding that it was her being caught, not me.

  I have heard people say they can’t sleep alone and others say they can’t eat alone or drink alone or simply not live alone or die alone. I have heard many people say they can’t do almost anything alone but I have never heard a writer say that he can’t write alone. In fact most writers I’ve known, despite my instinctive aversion to knowing others engaged in the same kind of existence, preferring to know painters and hustlers and practically anything but lawyers and persons who enforce law and others who have commitments to order, an exciting number of whom have recently been exposed as compulsive violators of the same