Algren at Sea (3 page)

Rapietta put her hands on my shoulders in event I should begin jumping again, but I was feeling too faint for that.

“Do you mean Norman Manlifellow, Boyish Author, might come to a party for
me?
”

“Might?”
Rapietta scoffed. “He wouldn't
dare
stay away.”

“And what of Leon Urine, author of
The Whole World Looks Jewish When You're in Love?”

Rapietta touched forefinger to thumb in the gesture employed by the fast international set to indicate Leon was in the bag.

“And shall we play
Verités?”

“No, dear, Françoise won't make it. But Giovanni Johnson
shall!”

My breath caught.

“You don't mean
Sixteenth Arrondissement
Johnson, America's greatest gift to Mecca since Ahmad Jamal?”

“None other.”

“And will he wear his fez?”

“I
guarantee
it.”

She was too late to hold me down. I got in six jumps before I could stop.

“Roger Blueblade is our man!” I cried, coming down for the last time. “Give me the papers, dear girl, dear girl”—and I reached for the shining sheaf.

Rapietta snatched it back.

“You've already signed them when I wasn't looking, you mischievous marmoset,” she taunted me. The clever creature had been on to my game all along!

She flung herself across my lap in a burst of
gaité Parisienne
but slipped through my knees to the floor with her dirndl tumbling capriciously under her armpits. This was a woman I had never glimpsed before.

“Is that what is called a
foundation garment,
sweetheart?” I made bold to ask.

“Why do you
ask,
awful boy?”

“Because it's raking the hell off my sternum, awful girl.”

“It's a
foundation
garment alright,” she chuckled merrily—“a
Guggenheim
Foundation garment—Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!” and in an access of womanly passion she grasped me to her change belt.

I extricated myself from her grip and filled two long-stemmed glasses with imported manzanilla, taking care not to spill a drop.

“There is one question I
have
to ask, sweetheart,” I told her seriously.

“You have only to ask.”

“Did
Ethiopia finally get free?”

“They
must
have. They now belong to us.”

“Then here is to Haile Selassie,” I proposed, clinking my glass against hers although she was nowhere near it.

“The Lion of Judah!” Rapietta responded, seizing her glass and flinging the contents full in my face.

Taking me upon
her
lap, the changeful creature dried my face on her doeskin bag while reproaching me for not keeping my knees together when
she
had sat upon mine. As her fingers kept trailing the catch of my change purse, I had to shift position now and again.

Yet in trading a cabin-class hallway for a first-class stateroom on a first-class ocean, I could not help but feel I
must
have outwitted somebody.

“I feel I've made a shrewd move for a layman,” I assured my friend and legal counsel, Rapietta Greensponge, Decorous Public Defender.

“Son,” Rapietta confided in me, “you are
all
layman.”

So much for World War II.

 

If all that was needed for a successful
Bon Voyage
party was one clever move, I'd already made it by buying a gallon of sauterne for $2.98, putting it under the soda recharger until it fizzed, and then pouring it into bottles labeled “Mumm's.” Because if there was one thing I wanted my New York friends to have, it was the aura of success. I didn't wish them success itself—in fact, I longed passionately for the total ruin of them one by one—but I did want to arrange some sort of aura for them.

“How does a hack like that manage to serve champagne at all hours?” my New York friends often marvel. My Chicago friends don't bother with that. They just say, “Where'd you get the cheap wine?” and toss the remains of their drink in the sink. So much for bobsledding at Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

My next move was to snip whiskey ads of Scotsmen playing bagpipes and glue them onto old root-beer bottles, into which I poured the contents of a curious brew distilled on Amsterdam Avenue to which nobody has yet given a name, probably because it has to be got down without fooling around or it won't go down at all. Labeling these “The Best Scotch Procurable” would, I hoped, raise the fascinating issue of where one might purchase the best scotch that is unprocurable; thus providing even inarticulate guests with a topic of conversation.

Rapietta arrived first, as might have been expected, with the excuse that she had news so good it couldn't wait.

“I am as much for good news as your next client,” I reproached her, “but couldn't it have waited till you'd finished dressing?”

“Just because a person's girdle snags on her navel is no sign a person isn't well dressed,” Rapietta pointed out.

“A flimsy alibi,” I had to tell her, for she is the only counselor in the jurisdiction of New York State with a dollar-shaped navel.

“Any jury that has eyes in its head,” she began, but I cut her off. “I
know,
I
know,”
I told her quickly. I just didn't want to go through that blind-judge routine again.

New York was sharpening me up, as the reader may have noticed.

What the SS
Meyer Davis
could do for me remained to be seen.

“What I want to know is how much we're going to wipe them jackals out
for,
Rapietta,” I demanded.

“A good round sum,” she assured me. “I am dropping a writ of
Non Compis Barracuda
into the hopper, and when it hops out we will be legally entitled to bone our opponents like a fish.”

“Then that's one of the best kinds there are,” I realized, doing a
Bon Voyage
jig even though the party hadn't begun.

“Now slip me five hundred in small bills, and into the hopper she goes,” Rapietta invited me.

“Five hundred?” I asked, bewildered anew.

“For
Non Compis Bonefish
just like I said,” she reminded me.

I lacked eleven dollars of five hundred, but Rapietta, generous friend, drew the balance out of the dollar-shaped navel, accepted my Parker 51 as collateral at 40 per cent, and glanced at her watch to check the hour of the transaction. A moment later we were friends again.

But where were my guests?

A rich Old-Plantation contralto came wafting up the cotton-pickin' stairs. It mounted ahead of the singer flight after flight:

“Giovanni is here!” I cried, and I had barely cried it when a small, sandpiperish person, wearing a fez, and deeply tanned, sandpipered into the room.

“Où sont tous les garçons?”
He skipped gaily about.
“Allons-nous jouer?”
He stretched out on a divan, put his fez under his head for a pillow, picked up the phone, crossed his sandals, and dialed languidly.

“Hello, Da-aady,” he informed the phone, “still angwy with me? No, I
can't
see you; I'm flying south, and one goodbye is enough. Yes, I'm holding Roy Wilkens responsible for my nephew's well-being while I'm gone. No, I don't have to worry about my niece;
they
take care of themselves. Of
course
I don't like my nephew as well I do you; it's a different thing, like
related—oooo,
aren't you the
dzealous
daddy! Did I tell you Normy has decided to be mayor, and I'm
infuriated
with him, sacrificing himself that way? Why should
he
be responsible for juvenile delinquency and technocracy and all like
that,
Da-aaady? Isn't that Jack Kerouac's job? The first thing you know, he's going to want to be
president
of something, I don't think he cares of what. But what I say, let
that
to somebody who is ready for the responsibility, like Eddie Fisher. Well, kiss-kiss and huggy-vous, see you in the
Seizième Arrondissement,
Daddy-doo.
No. Don't
bring Faulkner.” And he hung up.

I was pleased to see a young man devoted to his father but I didn't understand why he didn't want anybody to bring Faulkner.

“For the same reason I don't want anybody to bring Hemingway,” he
read my mind; “Faulkner is full of soupy rhetoric, and Papa wrote a novel that is boyish and romantic.”

“What we need is more novels that are girlish and unromantic,” I hurried to agree, because I saw his point.

“No!” he refuted me fiercely, “all we need is as much truth as we can bear!”

He stood up, the better to look commanding. I quailed.

“I can't stand much of
that
crazy stuff,” I had to admit. “Can
you?”

“All
I
can do,” he informed me proudly, “is attempt to prove, by hard precept and harder example, that people
can
be better than they are!”

“Oh, good for
you,
Giovanni Johnson,” I exclaimed, “and I'll
help
you—between us we'll make the rats better than they are whether they like it or not! We'll cram goodness down their stinking throats! By
God,
you and I are going to show the scum a few tricks—in three months we'll
both
be rich!”

“Where's the booze?” he asked me quietly, “you
nut.”

And it is a pure wonder how many people you've never met will go out of their way to wish you a pleasant journey if you'll only keep liquor on hand. In the space of several minutes there were more people partying about me than I could have hoped to meet in a year on Milwaukee Avenue.

“Have you been in a Bwoadway Pwoduction wecently?” I would ask a guest, and then move to another. When they began replying, “You've asked me that twice,” I refused to be offended.

A fellow wearing a sandwich-board advertising himself approached me.

“I am Norman Manlifellow,” he introduced himself, sheathing a nine-inch jackknife, “Hemingway never wrote anything that would disturb an eight-year old.” He began working the lighting of the board by a battery concealed in his pocket, with the result that his candidacy for the Presidency of American Writers was spelled out alternately in red and blue lights. I realized that I was dealing with none other than the boyish author of
The Elk Paddock,
or
Look, Ma, My Fly Is Open.

“It's a nice thing if a fellow can hold down two jobs,” I offered, thus intimating that I knew he was running for two offices, but before he could pick up the intimation someone began kicking the door in and I had to hurry there before the hinges gave way.

It was Ginny Ginstruck, whose own hinges gave way some decades ago.

“I
may
stagger—but I
never
fall down!” Ginny trumpeted triumphantly, swinging her handbag heavily at my head. Ginny
may
hold onto that bag when she swings it. Then again, she may let go. As it holds a one-pound jar of Pond's cold cream and a fifth of Haig & Haig, you're better off if she lets go. Somebody farther off is more likely to go down then than yourself.

They never stagger. They just go down.

“I may fall down,” Ginny explained, knocking guests sidewise and every whichway, “but you can't pinch me without a warrant!”

It's true that Ginny has never been pinched. Ever since forming a literary agency with Zazubelle Zany, in fact, she has been picking victories out of defeat.

“We may have returned that rotten book to the wrong writer,” is the view of Ginstruck & Zany, “but god
damn
it,
we got it in the mails,
didn't we? Alright, so that rotten novel got thrown out with that rotten
Sunday-Times Book Review
but god
damn
it, we got the rotten carbon around the joint
somewhere. Ain't
we? Alright, maybe we
did
sell something to Hollywood without asking some idiot's permission, but god
damn,
that agent
acted like he was drunk too.”

Typewritten pages fluttered across the floor every time Ginny opened her bag to take a drink. She fell across the divan, using a dozen crumpled pages for a pillow.

“Did you misplace these, Ginny?” I asked, after I had assembled sections of a treatise entitled
Cerebrum to Cerebellum: How We Think,
the lifework of a brain surgeon whose own mind had recently snapped. Or he wouldn't have dispatched it to Ginstruck & Zany.

“I never lose
nothin',
you sonofabitch,” she reassured me; “they just keep saying that so their rotten friends won't think a publisher turned them down. Get me a drink, you rotten crook; get out of my sightline, Whoever-You-Are; I done everything I could for you, you cheap ape; the least you can do is get a lady a drink, you lickspittle baboon. Who the hell let
you
in?”

“I'm the fellow the party's for, Ginny,” I reminded her. “I invited you to show you there weren't any hard feelings on my part just because you lost that book and gave away the other one and told me you'd sue if I got another agent.”

Ginny pulled herself up by holding onto a floor lamp. I stepped on its
base to keep it from falling, as Ginny weighs three pounds more than a porpoise.