A Fan's Notes (44 page)

“
Actually,
”
I said,
“
I just this moment left rehearsal and am fagged—
but fagged
.
”
As I thought he would be, he was impressed. Coming up on his tiptoes and listing toward me in anticipation, he demanded all the details.

“
It
’
s tremendous,
”
I said, pronouncing it
treee-MEN-dous
and stalling for time.
“
A real message play. Tennessee Williams
’
first original for TV!
”
Hadn
’
t he heard about it? Now that I mentioned it he thought he had read something that morning in the
Times
(oh, how bullshit begets bullshit!), but tell him more. Well, I played this Chicago-born surgeon, Horatio Vah-nee, married to an exquisite, aristocratic Southern belle, Miss Melissa Jennie Coker, from Charleston, South Carolina, and as the play opens I am living in an ocean-front mansion on Charleston
’
s Battery with her and my three sons, Legare, Manigault, and Ravenal, and am one of the two Northerners accepted in the community, the other being Paul Muni, who plays a four-star general, retired, and an ex-President of the United States,
“
sort of,
”
I offered,
“
a rough-hewn Ike, you might say,
”
and chuckled.
“
You have to get the back ground to get the full impact of what follows,
”
I said and went on to explain that as the curtain rises I am president of the Charleston Historical Society, on the board of the Confederate League of Respiratory Surgeons, a generous contributor to the Union for the Eternal Maintenance of the First Cannonball Fired on Fort Sumter, sergeant-at-arms for the St. Cecelia Ball, and musical minister to the Society for the Preservation of Carolina Spirituals.
“
Enter Fate, with a capital F,
”
I said, jamming my middle finger up into the smoky though virginal air. My brother, played by Mickey Rooney, who is a base and vindictive little garage mechanic in Chicago and who has always envied me my hard-won esteem, shows up in Charleston one sunny day and lightheartedly offers me documented and indisputable proof that I
’
m a
“
fucking nigger.
”
I let that sink in.
“
Oh, it
’
s
treee-MEN-dous
,
”
I repeated.
“
As pretty and sweet a thing as Williams has ever done. It
’
s all about the consequences of this discovery. A lot like
Hamlet
after the prince discovers that Claudius has all along been fornicating with his Mom and has done in his Pop.
”
Sighing, I told him I shouldn
’
t say more for fear of spoiling the drama for him. Enough to say, I said, that the consequences are not happy: all the better people get smashed one night down at the Carolina Yacht Club and come and burn down my water front mansion; Legare, Manigault, and Ravenal are taken from me and spirited off to their uncle, a mystical and besotted mining engineer in Cambodia; my mother-in-law locks herself in a steamer trunk in the attic and passes her days gnawing on chestnuts and acorns; and the last we hear of my wife, Miss Melissa Jennie Coker, she has taken to running naked up and down the concrete sea wall that runs along the Battery and protects the mansions from the arbitrary whims of the sea.

Thinking that ought to hold him till he dialed in Playhouse the following Thursday and found no Manigault, no Melissa, no Tennessee, no me, I changed the subject and began to query him about some of the madmen who had frequented the apartment. We discussed this one, having a laugh, and that one, having two laughs, and when I asked about Mr. Blue, my informant went preternaturally grave.
“
Mr. Blue,
”
he said,
“
is dead.
”
Not only was he dead, but because the attorney
’
s uncle had been the investigating officer I was able to get many of the details.

The calamity had occurred just prior to Christmas. Because the
U.S.S. Deborah
, a champion of robustness, had apostasized smoking, Mr. Blue, a nonsmoker, had acquired the habit of doing his chain-smoking in the can, his muscular buttocks

settled anxiously on the throne, fiendishly wolfing in the smoke, flicking his ashes into the sink, afterward washing them down with tap water and flushing his butts whirlingly down the toilet bowl. From a storage-rental warehouse Deborah had re

moved her plastic Yule tree and orange crates stuffed with her silver icicles, her canned snow, her tissue-wrapped green, yellow, red, and blue ornament balls, her papier-mache Magi, her delicate and gossamer-winged seraphs, her cardboard rep

resentation of the Nativity, her life-sized and jolly imitation Santa Claus, and her God only knows what other execrable prettyisms and, pressed for space, had these ghoulisms crammed cheek to jowl in the bathroom against the starry-eyed and anticipated ritual of Christmas Eve. Shortly after one of his smoking respites, Mr. Blue was curled up on the davenport reading (
“
The Surly Sodomite of Santa Rosa
”
?) when he smelled smoke and almost immediately thereafter caught the unmistakable crepitation of a fire in the making. Calling to the
U.S.S. Deborah
, who was in the kitchen, to grab a pail of water, Mr. Blue charged to the bathroom and flung open the door precisely at the instant a jumbo-sized can of mentholated shave cream detonated, a lethal and ragged piece of it careening with furious impact into his Adam
’
s apple, severing his carotid artery and causing him to topple headlong into the holocaust. By dousing both the flames and Mr. Blue
’
s inert body, an hysterical though resolute Deborah managed to quell the fire, by which time neighbors had summoned policemen and Mr. Blue had, in the eeriest scene ever witnessed by the uncle-policeman of the attorney, all but given up the ghost. He lay, according to the lawyer, face up in the burnt-odored bath room amidst the ruined rubble of those blackened, soaked, and ersatz Yule trappings, the piece of shaving can still wedged fiercely into his Adam
’
s apple, the hideous contractions still pumping a venous blood that already covered him from neck to waistline. The explosion had hurled shaving cream every which way, and that which had landed on Mr. Blue had freakishly formed a nearly perfect beard. So that with his naturally snow-topped dome, his beard of riotous and fluffy mentholated green, his shirt front so vividly cerise, and surrounded by the scorched Magi and seraphs, he looked a kind of pygmy
Sant Nikolaas
in his death throes.

Weirder than anything to the uncle-policeman, and which, till it was later explained, he had chalked up to the momentary dementia of excessive grief, was the behavior of Deborah. Apparently she had all along known that Mr. Blue
’
s claim to chronic cacation was a hoax and that his frequent trips to the can were for cigarettes. While the police had tried to minister to Mr. Blue, all the
U.S.S. Deborah
had done, to the bewilderment and embarrassment of the curious neighbors, was
thunder up and down the living room self-righteously pro claiming,
“
I knew cigarettes would kill him. … I knew cigarettes would kill him….
”

I didn
’
t want to hear any more, told the guy I didn
’
t need the twenty after all, walked across the barroom into the terminal, and started looking for a train to Scarsdale.

Mr. Blue
’
s way of death was fitting. He had been utterly corrupted by America, and I find it proper that his carotid artery should have been severed by flak from a jumbo-sized can of mentholated shave cream. Like James Joyce, who tried to bend and subjugate the ironmongery of the cosmos with words (wasn
’
t it The Word Joyce was after?), Mr. Blue tried to undo the empyrean mysteries with Seedy and his red carpet, with his elevated alligator shoes, with the ardent push-ups he seemed so sure would make him outlast time
’
s ravages, with his touching search for some golden pussy that would yield to his lips the elixir of eternal life. And like Joyce
’
s Leopold Bloom, like Quixote, Mr. Blue had become the perennial mock-epic hero of his country, the salesman, the boomer who believed that at the end of his American sojourn of demeaning doorbell-ringing, of faking and fawning, he would come to the Ultimate Sale, conquer, and soar.

And though Mr. Blue
’
s way of death was fitting, I never tell anybody the way it really happened; any more than in a hundred places in these pages I have told what
“
really
”
happened.

I can
’
t tell the mode of Mr. Blue
’
s death because in actuality it was so right as to force the reader
’
s credibility to the breaking point. Attempting to make Mr. Blue
’
s death more believable, I considered a number of possibilities. I thought of giving him the courage to go finally down between the
U.S.S. Deborah
’
s
legs and have her, in the moment of ecstasy, press those gymnast
’
s thighs about his head and thereupon extinguish the life from the luckless Mr. Blue. Standing on the lawn of some forlorn abode and mouthing his voiceless anger, Mr. Blue might have carried some typically bombarded American consumer round the bend and at point-blank got both barrels of a shotgun, scattering not aluminum siding but bloody bits of Mr. Blue all over the
“
dump.
”
Anxious about his impotence in this land of sexual gargantuans, he could have sent to a de generate mail-order house for a faradic device which attached to the genitals helps stimulate with electrical charges a more rapturous sexual act, only to have the device miscue and electrocute him, frying off his balls in the process. On my thirtieth birthday I learned that a quite respectable couple I knew vaguely had died in such a fashion, and at an age when I shouldn
’
t have been, I was shocked and grieved at soul. At odd moments over the next few years I reconstructed what I knew of them in the light of their death, like a would-be writer built their story from its end backward; and lying face up on a beach in Florida, my eyes opened to a universe of yellow blinding brightness, it one day occurred to me that, though had I lived to acquire the wisdom of Solomon I never would have ended their life in such a way, it really couldn
’
t have ended any other way. As for Mr. Blue
’
s death, there were any number of possibilities, none less credible than the severed carotid, and all more believable than the knowledge I carry in my heart.

Yet the endings, both the
“
real
”
and the imagined ones, I now know lack something for me, somehow don
’
t surfeit the romantic man, the hopeful creature, within me. With a stranger, two at the most, I am sitting at some distant saloon at two in the morning and, the bar empty now, we are sipping beer and recalling the childhood idol dead at nineteen at Anzio, the pulchritudinous creature who took our virginity, or that melancholy, self-deprecating teacher who gave so much more than all the others. And when I tell the story of Mr. Blue, and if I have good listeners I invariably do tell the story of Mr. Blue, surprisingly I have yet another ending. He died, I always say, doing a flip. He was at that point of the flip, his back arched, his face to the sky, at that point of his trajectory when he was closest to heaven, when for just an instant one was certain he was going to soar out and escape the meanness of his life, it was precisely at that moment, I say, that his heart gave out. And I always leave it to the listener to judge whether, so close to the sky and under the furious momentum of his flip, he continued toward heaven or simply thundered ignominiously back to earth.

And then I light a cigarette and take another sip of two-in-the-morning beer, and because I am embarrassed by my sentimentality and the paltry poet within me, I always add,
“
Whether he ever got around to kissing a snatch, I can
’
t say. But if he did,
”
I end the story of Mr. Blue,
“
I like to think it was some other than the U.S.S. Deborah
’
s.
”