Blue Voyage: A Novel (16 page)

.” Perfectly serious! Isn’t it incredible, the singular things people will do … I do them myself … Yes … From time to time … I am a poet of the Greenwich Village school—slightly eccentric, but really quite commonplace. I make a point of never sleeping more than once with the same woman. Hilda J—? Yes. Sophie S—? Yes. Irma R—? Yes. Madeline T—? Yes. And Irma’s sister, too. And her seven cousins from Utica. And every actress in the Jack-in-the-box Theater. Typists, poetesses, dancers, reciters, fiddlers, and organists. I have a particular passion for organists. You can see me any noontime at that charming little café in Sixth Avenue—you know the one. I look pale and bored. I carry yellow gloves and a stick, and my utter indifference to everything around me convinces you that I am distinguished. I can tell you all the secrets of all these people. That girl in the corner? Takes morphia. For ten years has been writing a novel, which nobody has seen. Smokes, drinks, swears, twice attempted suicide. M—, the dancer, gave her an “an unmentionable disease” … That other little girl, dark and pale, with one eye higher than the other? A hanger-on—the hetaira type. A nice girl, nevertheless, and once or twice has really fallen in love. No moral sense whatever—a rotten family in Flatbush. She is hard up most of the time—on the one occasion when I slept with her I found it necessary (or charitable) to give her a pair of my B.V.D.’s … I am an unsuccessful artist, wandering from one city to another: New York, Chicago, Boston. Everywhere I carry with me a portfolio of my sketches, drawings, etchings, color washes, pastels. I show them to people on trains, I show them to people in restaurants, or on park benches. I have a large pale head with shiny sleek yellow hair and the yellow stubble on my cheeks and chin glistens in the sunlight. Once I grew a beard—but although I adopt the pose of indifference to public opinion, I must admit that the jokes of small boys, and the more violent comments of roughs, finally led me to shave it off. “Look at the Bowery Jesus!” they cried: “Pipe the Christ!” … One critic referred to me as “that immoral and hypocritical
fin de siécle
Jesus” … In Chicago, I ran a private dance hall. In Boston, I conducted a tea shop and edited a little magazine. In New York, I have sold cigars, dictionaries, soap and fountain pens. In St. Louis, I nearly died of flu. When Hurwitz, the poet, came to see me I was lying under a sheet, like a corpse. “Why don’t you take your shoes off?” he said, seeing my feet which protruded. “They
are
off,” I said. It was only that I hadn’t washed them for some time. I practice a saintly contempt for the physical … Yes … I am all these. A little flower of the slime … For a time, I was X, the novelist, the dabbler in black arts, alchemy, hashish, and all known perversions. How fearfully wicked I was! Women shuddered when I was pointed out to them: when I touched them, they fainted. I collected slippers—a hundred and sixty-three. The fifty-seven varieties were child’s play to me, and the sixty-nine, and the one thousand. You know that poem of Whitman’s—something about “bussing my body all over with soft balsamic busses”? That’s me—the omnibus. In my rooms, with a few expensively dressed women who considered themselves New York’s most refined, I celebrated The Black Mass. One of these women, I discovered, was a cynomaniac … Several women have supported me … While the stenographer was paying my bills, I was absorbed in a passion for an Italian
castrato
… You hear me, Cynthia?… Darling William! You do not deceive me for a minute—not for a minute. I see through all this absurd pretense of naughtiness!—I see the dear frightened, fugitive little saint you are!—Ah, Cynthia, I knew I could trust you to understand me! I knew it, I knew it!—Come, William, it is spring in New England, and we will wander through fields of Quaker Ladies. Don’t you adore the pale-blue Quaker Ladies?—Yes, yes, Cynthia! Four petals they have, and sometimes they are blue, but sometimes ash color!—Come, darling William, and we will romp among them joyfully. We will climb birches. We will discover the purple-banded Jack-in-the-pulpit, hiding in the snaky swamp. We will tease the painted turtle, and give flies to the high-backed wood tortoise.—Yes yes yes. They sun themselves on stones. Plop, and they are gone into the water.—And the tree toads, William! Their ethereal jingling at twilight in the water meadows! Their exquisite little whisper bells!—Ah! the tintinnabulation of the toads! Poe wrote a poem about them.—How melancholy your New England is, William! One misses the hand of man. Deserted, forlorn, shapeless—but beautiful, wildly beautiful. I could cry when I see it. It fills me with nostalgia … A poor thing but mine own, Cynthia. These gray-lichened pasture rocks—I created them out of my tears. Out of my bitter heart grew these sumacs with blood-colored bloom. Out of my afflicted flesh came these white, white birches. Nothing of me but doth change into something rich and strange.—And those huge desolate frost-scarred mountains, the white and the green, lightning-riven, scree-stripped, ravaged by hail and fire—ah, William, my dearest, what a terrible weight upon the soul are they!… My burden, Cynthia—the burden of my thought …
Aaaaahhh-oo-oo-oo … aaaahhh-oo-oo-oo-oooo …
M
ISERY
… Damn that child, why doesn’t it go to sleep. Or damn its mother, anyway. Women are so extraordinarily unperceptive. All nonsense, this theory that the perceptions of women are acuter than men’s—or intuitions. No. I’ve never met one with perceptions as quick as mine—I can skate rings around them. You hear me, vain, intellectual, snobbish Cynthia?—To me, William, you would yield in this—to me alone. So sensitive am I to impressions, that … that … that … that …
Quack … quack …
And you beside me, quacking in the wood. For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love … The sagacious eye of the duck—something of that in Helen. And how she loved to quack. And how she loved to sprawl ungainly and kick her heels in the air and laugh and fling her slippers about and make absurd, hideous faces! Too young—it was merely the joy of release, rebellion, that she was experiencing—she was, at the moment, incapable of love. Listen, chaste Cynthia! And I will tell you … tell you … Speak fearlessly, William, as you always do—I am looking at you with wide deep eyes of understanding. I see the pebbles at the bottom of your soul.—Yes, Pyrrha’s pebbles. Arranged in pairs. Rose quartz, white quartz, gneiss. Rose quartz, white quartz, gneiss. And did you see that little trout hiding among them? That was my very me. My little trout soul … But I was going to tell you, Cynthia—tell you——Wait, dearest—first let us find some quiet little backwater of the Cher. There! the very thing. Under that low-hanging willow, to which we can fasten our punt. Now we cannot be seen or heard. Oxford two miles away—Lady Tirrell, my dear, dear friend, unsuspecting. Arrange the cushion under my head. Is my dress pulled down properly? Put the bottles in the shade to keep cool, or hang them in the water. I bought this dress especially for the occasion, so that none of my friends on the river would recognize me. All the castles of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in the pattern. Here is Dover. Here is Harlech. Bodiam there, and there, on my left knee, Kenilworth. Why
will
these stupid people bring their wretched phonographs? So vulgar, so very vulgar …
Aaaaahhhh-oo-oo-oo-ooo
… I was going to tell you, Cynthia, of one night with Helen Shafter. Would you like to hear it?—Is it something I
ought
to hear?—Certainly. Why not? I believe in absolute frankness between the sexes—don’t you? Tooth brushes, sponges, cascara—everything. Our comings in and our goings forth. Our sittings down and our standings up. One egg or two. Linen changed once a week—twice a week—four times a week—daily. The matutinal dose of salts. The nocturnal suppository. The application of lip salves, clouds of powder, rouge, and deodorizers. The tweezers forextracting superfluous eyebrows—henna and orange-sticks for the nails. The stale sweetness of the clothes cupboard. All … Then, William, it is my painful duty to inform the police that you are a
voyeur
. Need I remind you of certain episodes of this character in your childhood—adolescence—youth—and early manhood? There was that time in … But this, Cynthia, has a kind of beauty!—Beauty, smutbird? Beauty? Beauty is that lascivious life of yours? No—it’s quite impossible. Quite.—But I assure you! I go down on my knees! I swear to God! I kiss the Bible, the Koran, and the Wisdom of Lao Tzü. This experience, although sensual and sexual in origin and fundamentals, nevertheless had a certain beauty. I swear it had, Cynthia! Listen, and you will see! You will be moved by it, I’m sure!—Poor Little William—I recognize in you this imperative impulse to confess—it is not for nothing that I go to confession myself and tell the holy father of my little white sins. But are you sure I am the proper repository for this secret?—Cynthia! Orbèd maiden with white fire laden! Moon-daughter, snow-cold and pure, but fiery at heart! It is from you alone that my absolution can come. I will tell you—But not so fast, William! This is Sunday, and I have tickets for the Zoo. Don’t you adore the Zoo—simply adore it? The toucans. The pelicans. The ring-tailed tallula-bird. The whiffenpoof. The tigers, miaowing, and the lions reverberating, rimbombinando. The polar bear—trying to lift from the wintry water, with hooked claws, a pane of ice. The elephants, swaying from one rubber foot to the other, swinging their trunks, and lifting their teakettle spouts for peanuts. And the little baboons and monkeys, so ingeniously and ingenuously obscene!—te hee!—Oh yes yes yes, Cynthia! I saw a madonna and child, once, swinging in a little trapeze! The mother was searching intensely …
Aaaahhhh … oo-oo-oo-oo-oo …
This is really passing endurance. It shouldn’t be allowed on a ship. Steward, take this child and throw it overboard. Push it head first through a porthole. Weight it with lead, or tie the anchor to it. Drape it with the star-spangled banner. Taps. The time the men in Company K, 4th Illinois, lent me a bugle and four bayonets—we paraded three times around the square. It was magnificent. The hot tropical sun on the asphalt. The trumpet flowers bugling on the graves, and Dr. Scott’s terrapins scrambling in the tubs and bins. Then there was that terrifying green sea turtle with soft flat flappers flapping softly in a separate tub. The cook said they would have to build a fire behind it to make it put its head out for the ax. Turtle’s eggs—soft, tough, puckered. They find them by thrusting a sharp stick into the hot sand—if it comes up stained, they dig … It must be the law of tetrahedral collapse that gives them that peculiar shape … Oh, that cartridge! I blush. I stole it—stole it from Private Davis’s tent—after he had been so nice to me, too. Good God, how awful it was. It was Butch Gleason who suggested it—he said he always took money out of a cash register in his father’s store. It must have been arranged. Sergeant Williams went out, and in a minute came back. I was leaning against the tent pole at the door. As he came in again, brushing against me, his large hand fell naturally (so I thought!) against my jacket, and he closed it on my pocket. Why, what’s this? he said. O God, O God. Then they were all silent and ashamed—they wouldn’t look at me. Why didn’t you say you wanted one, Billy? That’s no way to go about it, stealing from your best friends!… Here, take it! You can have it … I didn’t want it, but I took it. I wanted to give it back to them—I wanted to explain everything—I wanted to cry, to wash the episode out of history with a vast torrent of tears. But I could say nothing. I crept home and put it on the mantelpiece in my room, above the toy battleship, and never touched it again … By George, how nice they were to me: that first day it was—I took them a big paper bag full of animal crackers, when they were just off the train, hungry. I believed them when they said they’d been living for months on nothing but tinned mule. Afterward I used to march into mess with them in the penitentiary yard—under a long wooden shed which had been built there, with long tables under it, tables of new pine. A tin cup, a tin plate, tin fork and spoon.
Soupy, soupy, soupy, without a single bean
. That heavenly melancholy nostalgic tune the bugler played when they marched along the shell road into the country—over and over … I was again given a bayonet and marched at the side, giving orders. Close up the ranks there!… Get me a coupla chinquapins, willya, Billy?… Then they were singing.
Good-by Dolly, I must leave you … Just tell her that I love her
… I wonder what place that was where they had their new camp. I got lost that time coming back from it—the conductor gave us transfers, but we didn’t know what to do with them, when to transfer, and finally got off and walked. We walked miles through the Negro quarters in the dark. Mysterious lights. Noisy slatternly houses. Smells. That might be where the gang we were always fighting came from. Gang fights with stones. Sling shots. Pluffers, pluffing chinaberries. I cut down an elderbush in the park to make one … Sneaky Williams it was who saw me cutting down a young cedar to make a bow and arrow and took me home by my sleeve, my feet barely touching the ground … I thought I was being arrested … Ah, that delicious dense little grove of saplings with a hut in the middle! What was it that made it seem so wonderful? It was dark, gloomy, little leaf-mold paths wound here and there intersecting, twigs snapped. There was something Virgilian—I remember thinking about it four years later when I began reading Virgil.
Et vox in faucibus haesit
. It must have been the sacred terror. I can remember the time when I hadn’t yet been into it. That day, when, after being ill for two months, I went out for the first time—my mother sat on the bench near it, and I made little houses out of dry twigs in the grass. The only moment at which I can
see
her—she sits there, absent-minded in the sun, smiling a little, not seeing the path and the cactus bed at which she appears to be looking. The penitentiary walls were behind us—the tall barred windows, behind one of which I saw a man looking down at us. He was moving his arms up along the bars high above his head. And the Sacred Grove was near us, and the red brick vaults, and the table tombs of white stone … Are you watching me, Cynthia? Surely I was harmless enough on that day? Surely you like my mother sitting there with her parasol? And isn’t it nice of me to remember it all so clearly, after a quarter of a century?… O God, that swooning sensation, anguish that contracts the belly and travels slowly down the body … M