City of Night (14 page)

           Outside, the malenurse stared frozenly at me.

        
5

           The next day I received a third telegram: “NECESSARY” had become “VITAL,” and now “VITAL” was replaced by “URGENT.” The implied desperation of the telegrams, by now, didnt surprise me, and when I saw the Professor the next day, I expected he would be as composed as I had left him. I was wrong.

           Now he seemed very tired. During the “interview” he reached incessantly for a glass of water, swallowed pills. I noticed that the red mark on the tape-measure had been discarded, or it had fallen off.... The words still tumbled on anarchically: He strung a necklace on which the beads were his love affairs: describing them intimately.

           Suddenly—at the end of the interview, as I stood by the bed, his huge arms hugged me to him.

           The smooth rubbery flesh of his gigantic face brushed briefly against my cheek.

           I pushed him away—moved back quickly.

           From a distance of about two feet his great eyes stared at me, very long. Then, after many moments of such intense wordless relentless staring, he gasped at me: “Those papers!—under the album!—get them!”

           Responding quickly to his sudden urgency, I brought the papers to him. He went through them feverishly, and then he brought out three closely printed sheets bound together. He flung them at me. “Read it if you can read!” he shouted viciously.

           At the top of the sheet was his name—and then: “RESUME,” was printed beneath it: It listed his years at Yale, his many degrees—including honorary ones. “Read it all!” he shouted at me; he trembles. “Go on!”... The list continued: foreign service appointments, honorary titles, publications in scholarly reviews, foreign publications, books he had written, citations awarded him....

           I looked up from the list and saw the man who had accomplished all this:

           And the balloon face, pitiably tilted like a sad dog’s, is staring at me with something that could be only racking pain....

           “That is me too!” he shouts at me. “I am Respected, Admired, listened to, read!—but what do you care about that? You see only the ridiculous man who made you stand by the bed with your pants down. But do you know
the rest?”

           The transformation was sudden and incredible. His great head was thrust forward toward me, almost beseechingly, like that of a great wounded animal, the eyes almost popping from his face behind the glasses.

           “The angels who drained my life!” he said contemptuously. I watch his eyes in fascination, wondering if the tears that may emerge will be giant tears coming from the giant eyes in the giant face.

           “The angels! The voracious angels!” he shouts. “The ones who drained me—who never knew
Me!
—never respected Me. Love? Bought! Bought for the prospect of a trip to America, a wedding ring which I would never wear, pairs of shoes and bottles of wine—
bought!
Bought for $7.50 an hour! Bought!... for a hundred dollars... which was... cunningly... expected... when the word... Love... was spoken....” There were no tears, the eyes had already run dry.

           The malenurse rushes in. “Professor!” he calls urgently, reaching for pills, water. The Professor continues sobbing. The malenurse hugs him to him, closely, tenderly, sheltering him, rocking his head in his arms like a baby, soothing him—his lips kissing the shaved head.... The malenurse glares at me suddenly, eyes brimming with hatred. “What Did You Do To Him?” He shoots the words at me like bullets.

           “Leave him alone,” the Professor sighs, freeing himself from the youngman’s sheltering embrace.

           The malenurse marches out.

           “Larry—” the Professor says, the sobs slowly subsiding, “—Larry is not—... an angel....”

           And now, spent, he leans back in the propped-up bed. He reaches for a cigarette, shuffling through the box; he finds a black gold-banded one, puts it into his mouth; sighs calmly now: “Forgive me, child. My nerves. It’s lying here so long. I spoke rashly. We all do at times. I had no right to—... And actually,” he said sadly, “actually I dont—really like—... to kiss.... And after all—the terms—were made—at the beginning—of the interviews.... They were, in fact, made long, long ago.... Now, child, stand near me again, please.... Let me—let me—express—” He stopped. And then with something of contempt aimed both at himself and me, he finishes: “Let me express—My Love....”

           When he was through, he said: “God bless you, darling angel. Yes—” he sighed wearily “—God Bless All of You—... And me....” He waved his fat hand in the familiar airy benediction, his eyes drooping. For the first time since I had known him, I see him remove the glasses now. The eyes look at me intently. The huge eyes behind the glasses were actually tiny....

           “Now go—” he sighed “—yes—fly away—join that endless—
endless!
—flight of angels....” The eyes closed. His hand moves to the very tip of the tape-measure.

           I received no more telegrams. After a week, I telephoned the apartment, and the malenurse answered. “The Professor is dead,” he said. His voice was shaken; controlling tears. “The interviews are over,” he said, and I knew that in a moment he would be crying. But before I could hear the inevitable sobs, he had hung up.

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           AND THEN THE DAY CAME IN NEW YORK
when, standing on a street or in a park, I would see someone and wonder whether I had been with him—or just talked... one night... somewhere
.

           Briefly, I went to Southampton with someone I had just met I lay on the beach all day turning brown, trying in idleness to squelch the recurring panic, longing for something still vastly undefined. And briefly, with the same person, I went to Vermont, to a cool, cool summer interlude in a house set in the midst of the green mountains.

           As we drove back into the islandcity—into the jungle of knifegleaming buildings—I knew suddenly I wouldnt stay much longer in New York.

           I would return to El Paso.

           And once again I got a job—determined that the money I would go home with would not be street money.

           I said goodbye to Gene de Lancey in the hallway where I had met her, as she had drifted out of the dark corridor of that enormous building. Of all the faces that I would remember from that time in New York—hers, branded with years-long loneliness, was the only one that was around to say to me:

           “I hate to see you go. I’ll miss you, lambie-pie—much, much more than I can say!”

           I walked west to the Greyhound station on 34th Street. I would leave this city unmissed except by Gene de Lancey, even my absence undiscovered. New people would replace me on Times Square and in the park.... As I remembered those short, short, short interludes with the streetpeople (sometimes remembered with wryness, sometimes with huge sadness for something undiscovered within them), would they also remember me?—as someone of a long line who had expelled, with them, mementarily, the loneliness: yet, ironically, increased it perhaps in the instants following the vagrant soon-to-recur contacts—with others?

           I had an acute sense of the incompleteness intrinsic in sharing in another’s life. You touch those other lives, barely—however intimately it may be sexually—you may sense things roiling in them. Yet the climax in your immediate relationship with them is merely an interlude. Their lives will continue, youll merely step out. A series of encounters multiplying geometrically.... A prismatic network of... (I remember the Professor, I see the tiny eyes behind the thick glasses) “interviews.”

           Like mechanical dolls, people around me along the blocks proceed doggedly to their various morning destinations; wait, mobbed, at the stoplights, restlessly pausing before rushing at each other, meeting in a melée in the middle of the street. They will brush shoulders, unaware, stumble, move on: each person enclosed by his own immediate world.

           Suddenly, unexplainably, I wanted to laugh.

           The grinding journey to—... Where?

           In a few days, by the beginning of autumn, I was back in El Paso.

           As I opened the door of my mother’s house, I saw her standing there waiting for me. She hugged me fiercely to her, and I glanced beyond her at the fragile case with the glass angels....

           Now there were steps to retrace.

           I called the girl I had climbed Cristo Rey with. Her father answered: She was gone; married; she had a baby....

           Alone, I returned to climb that mountain.

           Here, on Holy days, I had seen long processions of people from El Paso, Ysleta, Canutillo, Smeltertown, Juarez, as they marched up chanting devout prayers—kneeling at intervals, shawled ladies gripping rosaries. The priests leading the procession; men carrying sadfaced saints.... Under the hot white sun, I had wanted to be... then... a part of that belief that transfixed those faces as they climbed.

           And at the top of that mountain—now, years later—I wondered suddenly if emotionally I had really ever left this city.

           Almost physically, as I walked down, I could feel those very mountains which awesomely rim the city crushing me as in that childhood dream. But of course it was something else: the memories of that childhood which I had tried to bandage by fleeing the spurious innocence. Returning here again, I felt how easily I could regress to those early attitudes. The memory of the guarded isolation of that window (in that house which we had vacated, that house where my dog had died) drew me again to a craving for a powerful symbolic window away from the world.

           If I was to resist these lulling echoes, within this very city I had to usurp those memories....

           Once, years ago, El Paso had been a crossroads, between the Eastcoast and the Westcoast, for the stray fairies leaving other cities for whatever restless reason. As a young boy, crossing San Jacinto Plaza (sleepy crocodiles in a round pond, then, so tired and sleepy they wouldnt even wake up when little kids grabbed them by their tails and flipped them into the water), I had seen the giggling groups of birls camping with the soldiers. I had walked quickly past that park.... Now the inevitable smalltimecity roundup had come. The cops had swooped jealously on the fairies and to jail they went—and from jail: Away Again.

           Still, in this plaza, stray hunters turn up.

           But I couldnt remain there long.

           I went to a movie theater in South El Paso—resolved, that night, to slaughter those seducing memories in this way:

           The man followed, me to the head, propositioned me there. I pretended I was a transient, reverting to the poses learned in New York. I told him I needed money. He agreed. In a parked car, in a dark section of this childhood city, I made it.

           Crushing into my pocket the ten-dollar bill he had given me: rather than feeling liberated as I had expected, I felt a scorching horrendous guilt.

           And I knew that no matter how long I would be in El Paso, I would never again allow that other life of New York to touch me here.

           The next day, with my mother, I went to the cemetery where my father was buried. There was only a tiny weather-faded marker over his grave. Memories of his pride at having once been so widely recognized swarmed over me. (And when he had died, as if the world had chosen belatedly to nod once more to him, his picture had appeared with the notice of his death on the front page of the newspaper, and my mother had received telegrams from as far as Mexico City.)... But that tiny marker over his grave seemed to acknowledge what life had done to him. When we left the cemetery, we went across the street, and we chose a marble stone for his grave.

           A few days later, I returned to the cemetery, alone. The tiny marker had been replaced by the marble stone. Within that ground, his body had decayed. He lived only in my thoughts of him. I looked at the childhood-coveted ring which he had given me the last time I had seen him alive. To a great extent, for me, it was all that was left of him.

           Now I drove around the city in my brother’s car, still retracing those early years.

           I stopped before the house where Winnie had died, where I had grown up. The porch no longer slanted. The skeleton vine was gone. The walls had been painted white. A dark shade was pulled over the window where I had looked out at the cactus garden, the street... my dead dog in the wind.... I tried from the sidewalk to look into the backyard.... My mother’s white sheets had hung on a line there, and I had watched her in unfocused fascination. Those remembered clean, clean sheets in the Texas wind.... Now a new fence blocked my view. But without seeing it, I knew the yard had changed too.

           About that house there remained no trace of those angry years.

           I listen for the wind.

           But the air was completely calm.

           The sun looks down blindly at me.

        
Part Two

           “They’ve been so long on lonely street
They never will go back....”

          
—Heartbreak Hotel

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, WHICH IS SHAPED SOMEWHAT like a coffin, is a giant sanatorium with flowers where people come to be cured of life itself in whatever way.... This is the last stop before the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black ocean, and night—usually starless here—comes down.