Algren at Sea (63 page)

All he overlooked is that Hemingway wasn't talking of anything but snow. All the rest of the stuff is simply the Professor earning a living. Talentlessness, like asexuality, is never passive, but finds another outlet.

The Professor's trouble is simply that he himself cannot react to womanhood unless it is wrapped in erudition enfolded in a symbol tied by a ribbon made of concepts. What he demands is one of those Puritan euphemisms about “the mystery of femininity.” Hemingway disposed of the mystery and presented a woman.

“What Hemingway's emphasis on the ritual murder of fish conceals,” the Professor continues, “that it is not so much the sport as the occasion for immersion which is essential to the holy marriage of males. Water is
the symbol of the barrier between the Great Good Place and the busy world of women.”

He boasts of wounds who never bore a scar: he disbelieves that the earth can move who has never felt it move.

What is saddening about this piggish jargon is that young people with a love of literature pay for courses to learn how to speak it.

 

I was glad to be interrupted by a knock. It was Danielsen. “Manning bought the watches in Kowloon,” Danielsen told me, “the merchant tipped off the Customs police. They make a good raid now and then to cover bribery. This was their good one.”

“What happens with Manning?”

“If the company stands by him with an American lawyer he'll get the case transferred to the States. If the company fires him he might have to do time here—I wouldn't wish that on the worst dog that ever lived.”

“Can't he get his own lawyer?”

“Manning doesn't have a nickel. In debt. Alimony. More fouled up than Crooked-Neck.”

“I have to get back into town,” I told Danielsen, “are you coming?”

“I'll see you at Ezekiel's,” he told me.

“The hell you will,” I thought.

Chips, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, was lounging outside the door of the stateroom in which Manning was under arrest.

“I want to see
him
getting
his,
” he told me, “
with
the manacles.”

He crossed his wrists to be sure I understood what manacles were. “When am I getting mine?” I wanted to know.

“When I get a draw,” he promised me again.

The quai was full of old shadows. Out of one came a nine-year-old bureaucrat.

“Hello, Papa.”

He was smoking a cigar. “I paid you to go home,” I reminded him, “no more
baksheesh.
”

He skipped along as confidently as before.

“Cigar, Papa?”

When I got through the gate I jumped into a cab and slammed the door on him hard.

“Kanani Mansions,” I told the driver.

Black-market rascals came and went, sedate Sikhs moved Sikhishly about their Sikhish business; American seamen rapped all the wrong doors and
ayahs
skittered like withered leaves down the careworn corridors of Kanani Mansions.

The whores of Calcutta don't live like the whores of Bombay. In that bootlegging, Puritanical, black-marketing, dreadful Bombay, there are no bars for a seaman to find a wife for a week or a month. There are only the great cat-houses (more like curtained cow-houses) run on short-term love. These; and the animalized women of the cages of Kamathipura.

But in Calcutta's flashing bars, thronging with attractive girls from every port of Asia, a seaman can find long-term love. This circumstance makes it possible for such a woman as Martha to keep an apartment of her own with civilized appointments: Martha had a high bookshelf lined with books and records—mostly American—as well as her own bedroom, bath, kitchen and a small parlor. She supported an
ayah,
an infant son and her mother.

Martha's mother, Anna, did not live with her. Although Martha's trade was of her mother's devising, and Anna would have preferred to live with her daughter, Martha kept her at a distance in a small apartment down the hall.

A certain looseness in her look and a cleverness in her eyes distinguished mother from daughter more than her years. Anna's coldly whorish air left Martha seeming to be the more motherly woman of the two.

Martha was darker. Anna hennaed her hair and powdered her face too heavily; to make herself look less Asiatic. Every afternoon she came in dressed for a ball, with a copy of the trial of one Commander Nanavati, a naval officer who had shot and killed his wife's lover.

She would insist on reading excerpts of the trial to us whether we would or no.

Martha's little
ayah
ran for cover as soon as Anna came in. These homeless old women who serve as maids-of-all-work in return for a corner of a floor to sleep on and the leftovers of a table to subsist on, can be obtained anywhere in Calcutta simply by going down the street and finding one, already starving, on the curb.

“Get rid of that one,” Anna would command Martha, “she'll steal the carpet while you're asleep.”

“She is honest,” Martha defended the old dry leaf huddled, listening, behind a chair.

This
ayah,
whose past had no meaning, whose future no one cared about, knew that Anna was speaking of her unfavorably.

“Send her back to the street,” Anna urged.

“She is good with the boy,” Martha replied.

So many autumns had blown down from the north, since this wisp out of the hills of Assam had first come begging into the heat of Calcutta, that they were now beyond counting. Yet the old cracked brown grandmother had a life of her own along the floor; that she shared with Martha's infant son.

While Martha and I and Anna lived among records, shelves, chairs and windows, the infant boy and the very old woman crept in and out of caves made of pillows; or hid together under the divan.

Music, the sound of voices, arguments, orders, food and tea all came down to them mysteriously from somewhere above. And although the
ayah
did not understand what was being said when we spoke in English, she sensed enough to stay in hiding while Anna carried on about this “fairlooking person of thirty-seven and Commander of I.N.S.
Mysore,
who was accused in the murder case of PREM BHAGWANDAS AHUJA, an automobile dealer.”

Martha retired to the bedroom when Anna began reading.

Even The-Ayah-Who-Lived-On-The-Floor stopped crawling about when Anna got into the heart of the matter of Commander Nanavati.

But after a while Anna herself would grow bored with this endless Nanavati. Then she'd go for the Scotch.

The Scotch was
The Best Procurable,
the same brand that Hemingway had once offered me. A Hollywood producer, I remembered, also used to keep a bottle of the same handy—but
he
wouldn't open it.

“You are of New York?” Anna wanted to know while she was pouring. “Do you want ice?”

“Yes. I mean no. I mean yes, I want ice, but I am not of New York. I am of Chicago.”

“Is that far from Los Angeles?”

“As far as the width of India,” I answered; with no clearer notion of India's width than she had of Chicago.

“I understand you have written a biography of Frank Sinatra,” Anna told me. “He
must
be a
wonderful
person.”

“A
great
human being,” I assured the poor creature—why disenchant her?

“
All
that money,” she marveled, a dream all of glass spinning behind her eyes—“he must spend a great deal on women.”

“He gives most of it to charity,” I decided. As long as I was Frankie's biographer I might as well be on his side.

“He must give wonderful parties,” the woman dreamed on, “in Colorful Los Angeles.”

“The last one wasn't in Los Angeles,” I seemed to recall, “he threw it in the cove below Niagara Falls.”

Anna clasped her hands—“What
that
must have cost!”

“A pretty penny,” I guessed, “but the man has such marvelous luck he
always
ends up ahead. Somebody started a dice game when the guests started to leave, and Frank won more than enough to pay for renting the cove. I lost everything I had,” I added defensively.

“I'm sorry,” she told me.

“Small matter,” I assured her, “it's easy come easy go in Colorful Los Angeles.”

My mind returned to that bottle of
The Best Procurable
that I couldn't get the producer to open in Los Angeles. That city of Good Procurers.

There I'd lived in an encrusted crypt entitled The Garden of Allah Chateau—which ought to indicate how far ahead of the rest of the world L.A. was. It was already orbiting in 1950.

Most of the residents of The Chateau were independents—actors, writers and producers; and several were not only independent as artists but independent of the entire human race. The Chateau at sunset, in fact, looked like a reunion of the garden party Alice's Wicked Queen once gave. There were several wicked queens on the premises and a few wicked kings as well.

The Wickedest of any was the Wicked Producer. I knew he was wicked
because he toted this huge bottle about, tucked resolutely under his arm as if firmly determined to get everybody drunk. I saw immediately I would have to be careful.

I knew he was a producer because he wore sunglasses tinted chartreuse and open-toed sandals whose protruding toes were tinted a matching shade.

His name was Schlepker. Otto Schlepker.

It wouldn't be fair to call Otto grasping as he often let me hold his bottle for minutes at a time.

“
Read
that label,” he would say, and, after a moment—“Read it out
loudt.
”

“
The Best Scotch Procurable,
” I would read aloud, looking at him appealingly.

“Let me be open with you,” he offered, taking the bottle back and looking hooded, “you have noticed I am not a happy man?”

“Well, I didn't think of you as being downright happy so much as just gruesomely smug,” I had had to confess.

“I
force
myself to look contented,” Otto confessed, “actually, I am a tragic person. All my life I have thoughtlessly devoted my life to selfish interests and now I am paying the price—I have pangs of guilt so secret only my analyst knows where to find them. But unless I begin doing things for other people right away the secret pangs will destroy me. As I have already spent over three thousand dollars on my analyst I cannot afford doubt. That would be throwing money away. I'm going to start living for others if it kills me. I will make a movie that will show the terrible suffering of drug addicts that will make a million dollars.”

A human soul stood before me naked and imperiled. I would give him succor in his spiritual struggle. Nothing short of that was going to get him to open that bottle.

I ought to explain that I was in California on a Hollywood Fulbright. That is the kind whereby a studio will allot five hundred dollars to an independent producer toward the entertainment of an out-of-town writer upon the assumption that a week's free feeding will so fill the recipient with gratitude that he will sign anything just to show he is a good old sport.

When the word got around that a studio was picking up my tabs at Romanoff 's, a marvelous change came over the occupants of the Chateau.
Where they had heretofore appeared indifferent to my career, they now began competing good-naturedly with one another to give me friendly advice. When my allotment ran out we were blocking traffic.

With the allotment run out and still no signature, there was a danger that the Wicked Independent Producer would find himself merely Independently Wicked. He did not wish to threaten me, he threatened me, but unless I signed he would blacken my name with everyone in Schwartz's drugstore.

“‘Whatever am I to do in this crisis?”—I turned to my agent who was dealing himself a solitaire hand with mutuel tickets. “I am depending on your wisdom, acquired by long years of toiling in the vineyards of Art.”

“Jump ship and pan for gold,” the agent advised me, and won the hand. .

At that moment the large producer materialized, accompanied by a small gimp.

“I want you to meet a Dedicated Fan,” the producer introduced him.

“To whom, sir,” I inquired courteously, “are you dedicated?”

“Why,” he told me, “to
you.
May I see some identification?”

“You want me to
identify
myself?” I asked.

“I can't risk dedicating myself to an impostor,” the friendly fellow explained.

I showed him my library card and my army serial number. These distinctions satisfied him. For he handed me a packet of attractively colored papers and left looking even more dedicated.

As any process server ought when leaving a client properly subpoenaed. So this was Hollywood.

Otto handed me the bottle of the best procurable as if to apologize for threatening me with the law. It was the first time I'd been invited to a party and ordered to jail by the same man with a single gesture. I didn't know how to react to Otto. This may have been because Otto didn't know how to react to himself.

He turned on his heel in a lurching safari with myself lurching solemnly after him, my benefactor; clutching my subpoenas and my Scotch to my breast with equal ardor.

He did a hard right and braked. I almost ran the man down. He drew himself up and, literally striking his own breast, declaimed, “I'm a
nice
fellow! I do
good
for everybody!
Why do you make me act so damned cheap?
”

Transfixed by the realization of what I was doing to a fellow human being, my guilt was self-proclaiming.