City of Night (59 page)

           I got up from the bed and I walked to the mirror in the bathroom. (And I remember the times, the many times, when I had stood before such a mirror, forcing myself to think: I have only Me!)

           I still look Young.

           The streets outside.... The Carnival....

           In this room, the world is flaunting before me what could, if tested and found false, be its most deadly myth... love... love which, even at the beginning, was revealing itself as partly resignation; perhaps offering only the memory of an attempt to touch... implying hope of a miracle in a world so sadly devoid of miracles. Surrender to a myth constantly belied (a myth which could lull you again falsely in order to seduce you—like that belief in God—into a trap—away from the only thing which made sense—rebellion—no matter how futilely rendered by the fact of decay, of death)—belied, yet sought—sought over and over—as this man himself has searched from person to person... unfound.

           I returned to the bed.

           “Well?” he asked me.

           And I was thinking: It has to happen—I have to be liberated again. No matter what kind of whirling his words have set off within me, I must undo it all.

           Yes, I knew suddenly... as if it would be the last time... that he must want me again, on my own terms—and that, then, his probing words, their impact on me (my own dangerous thoughts, even now, slowly threatening to succumb to what everything in the world indicates is the most murderous of all myths... Love)—all will be erased....

           I took the money he had placed earlier on the table for me—the money which, I knew clearly now, had rested there as a test, and I put it into the pocket of my pants on the floor. Then I lay beside him. I reached again for his hand, and I placed it again on my body. And this time his hand was very, very, cold....

           His hand didnt move. And then I pushed it with mine. He turned sideways, toward me, and our bodies touched closely.... For a moment I didnt move—and then I turned away quickly. I leaned back. Now the movements of his hands are his own.

           “This is the answer?” he asked, smiling strangely.

           “Yes,” I said.

           And this time, beyond what I was coaxing him to do, it had to be something else. The symbolic significance! I thought—echoing his words and many other words? And so it had to be this: He turned over on his stomach. My body pressed against his, entering him....

           Then it was over. The orgasms have made us strangers again. All the words between us are somehow lost, as if, at least for this moment, they have never been spoken.

           I washed slowly and dressed. The sound of the anarchy outside is beating on my senses, summoning me.

           If only for this dangerous time, something vastly important, for me, had been reestablished, I told myself.

           And yet—...

           Yet, instead of triumph... I felt abject, crushing defeat.

           I stood over Jeremy still lying in bed. Complete strangers. I looked at the crumpled white sheets.

           But was that so? Were we indeed strangers? Or had we, rather, known each other too intimately? Had we searched too hard and found too much of the despised world in each of us?

           He was looking at me smiling. Smiling at me, perhaps. Perhaps smiling at himself. Smiling wryly maybe at the whole world which had determined all that had been said in this room—by him, by me. All that had happened.

           That wry smile seemed to be a judgment on the world.

           I leaned over him and I kissed him on the lips.

           And I was thinking: Yes, maybe youre right. Maybe I could love you. But I wont.

           The grinding streets awaited me.

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           FROM ST CHARLES AVENUE, THE PARADE of Rex passed in front of the Mayor, who drank champagne, standing on a platform attended by a Negro in white gloves, while the King of the parade smashed his own wine glass into the street and the people screamed with joy, and someone sang, “If I ever cease to love....” The floats passed opening and closing giant mechanical eyes Insanely and the girls with chilled rosy legs twirled their nervous batons and the Air Force marched by in Military Style, playing a march and feeling much a part of Something—The Parade, in Military Style: winding through the staggering crowds threatening to storm the police-cleared street. Somewhere in the distance a shot sounded with a sharp, unreal
crack!
—and someone gasped: “They was fightin ovuh some beads, an he shot him”—because as the parade passes, men in masks mounted on floats throw beads to the crowds—necklaces and bracelets and one-inch elephants and miniature parasols and whistles, and the people jump up to get them as if swatting flies; and since this is Mardi Gras Day—the day before Ash Wednesday—if you havent caught a bracelet or a necklace, youre as frantic as if life had deprived you of even that mere trinket.

           From that room with Jeremy, I had emerged mythless to face the world of the masked pageant. Quickly reinforced by liquor—gulped drink after drink at a bar only moments after walking out of that room—and the previously dormant pills tugging at my senses with renewed fury as I watch the parade in the harsh sun (floats passing vividly beyond their bare physical reality)—I feel myself at last on the very threshold of drunkenness, beyond which, I already know, waits a pit of terror.

           And the bright sun directly in my eyes erupted violently, the liquor jolted me anew, the pills were like claws ripping mercilessly inside me. I shut my eyes momentarily. And when I opened them:

           Suddenly!

           The clown on the float became an angel before my exploding eyes, and it raised sun-luminous wings as if to catapult to Heaven... leaving me sadly alone. Down here. Alone. I began to follow it, reeling through the crowds blocking my path; and the angel leaned from the float toward me.
And he threw me a silver star!
And I jumped to catch it but someone else did too, and the cheap necklace the clown-angel had thrown spilled on the street, all pink and blue pieces of glass, my silver star.

           And already the disdainful angel, only vaguely visible to my shattered eyes, has been replaced by clowns on other passing floats.

           An angel....

           Miss Destiny’s angel!

           The angry angel who plays the swinger in the childgame of statues: here to sentence everyone to pass Eternity doing the same things over and over, with our own huge guilty knowledge of things done—
because we had to do them.
Or perhaps, more importantly, of things undone—
because we couldnt do them
.... Here to sentence us for living the only way we could....

          
Caught!
—
in whatever absurd fate life has apathetically but elaborately chosen to trap us in....

           The Negroes in torn muslin tunics over their pants jazzed It with flaming sticks; a white band played
Dixie;
and a southunn laydy said to a southunn genelmun in a southunn voice: “Aint that gorjus now, all them coluhs?”—and a woman: “Y’all come rought on back,” to the stray cotton-candied children, “this instant—y’heuh?”

           And the Parade like a long column of giant worms passed squirming slowly: dragon heads, clown heads, monster heads: all with enormous rolling eyes: all peopled by sad mad clowns throwing out the glass beads. They flowed mysteriously along the streets like ships sailing on the surface of my mind.

           Then I had the feeling that I was in hell. To be swallowed by those monstrous apparitions; but before I can be swallowed, is it Possible that this nightmare city will suddenly flare into flames—set off from one of the torches carried by the contorted dancing snaking bodies? I imagine the floats devoured by flames, the clowns-turned-angels, the clowns-turned-devils sprouting wings to join that vast exodus to heaven... or hell... or nowhere; and seeing the costumed people determinedly laughing—and the skeletons, the jesters, the cannibals, the vampires, the ragdolls, the witches, the leopard-people—I imagined the razing fire sweeping this rotten city. People scream! Attempt to Escape! Flee the holocaust!... Entrapped!... I imagine the rubble of French irongrillwork, the cockroaches of this city scurrying out of their dank places, the balconies toppling—
crash!
—the peeling falling walls of the Cathedral.... The purification.

           Vengefully, I cling to the vision of that terrible apocalyptic fire.

           But the Parade winds on.

           Little children in weird hats run like scurrying, lost mice... in a maze.

           The Parade.

           The Caravan.

           The dark masked Ritual.

           Clowns passing dumbly throwing out glass beads: a pantomime of life itself.

           Later, I’ll remember....

           Along Royal, the redwigged woman in the tight peppermint skirt leaned toward the half-naked blond Indian covered with rouge and whispered, “Screw me please, dear,” where the burgeoning Parade-crowds, released for the afternoon, have been heaved into the Quarter; and youngmen prowl Jackson Square restlessly watching the tourists anxious to wait anxiously in line to have coffee and donuts at the French Market, while Marie Antoinette and Robin Hood are being chased into the Cathedral by a band of cannibals that later caught on fire as the beautiful wideboned Tarzana posed for the newsreel cameras with her scarletpainted nails—while dejectedly at Pirates Alley (the saddest single sight I saw), Scarlett O’Hara, Miss Ange, her hooped skirt high up revealing hairy man’s legs—drunk, dead drunk—and frantic and lost and lonesome and sad and desperate—wailed to no one:

           “Tara
burned!
And I aint got the money to pay the
taxes!”

           And to escape the sad, sad sight, I think: If I take the subway, I’ll be on Times Square....

           Times Square, Pershing Square, Market Street, the concrete beach in Chicago... movie balconies, bars, dark hunting parks: fusing for me into one City.... Yes, If I take the subway, I’ll be on 42nd Street. Or in Bryant Park, or on the steps of the library, waiting for Mr King.... Or in the park in Chicago, also waiting.... Or if I hitchhike on this street, I’ll be on Hollywood Boulevard, which will be lighted like a huge electric snake—and there, I’ll meet—...

           And ghostfaces, ghostwords, ghostrooms haunt me: Cities joined together by that emotional emptiness, blending with dark-city into a vastly stretching plain, into the city of night of the soul.

           I see—or I imagine I see—Jeremy within the mobs of people....

           Jeremy....

           The undiscovered country which may not even exist and which I was too frightened even to attempt to discover.

           Life conspiring to trap us!

           And I feel trapped by the world which I know now has sought me out as ineluctably as a shadow seeks its source in the bright sunlight...

           That world which Ive loved and hated, that submerged gray world; this world which is not unlike your own.... Out of the darkness and the shadowed loneliness, like you I tried to find a substitute for Salvation. And the loneliness and the panic have something to do with that: with surfeit; something to do with the spectacle of everyone trying to touch and giving up, surrendering, finding those substitutes which are only momentary, in order to justify the meaningless struggle toward death....

           Outside the Bourbon House, another blond Indian, much more cunning and much more naked, danced while cameras clicked, flashed and rolled—until the fat bald man whispered in the Indian’s ear, would he consider giving a private performance for himself And Friends?

           Now at Les Petits, where, on a small crowded platform, to the blaring of a record at full blast, a few couples try to dance, twisting and squirming as if to leave even their own bodies. Among them, Sonny danced with a small blackhaired girl (while the two scores who have promised to take him to Paris wait coldly for him). The girl’s hair is long and straight to her waist. As she bent from her knees, arching her thighs toward him, her hair sweeps the floor behind. Sonny twists before her. Male and female untouching, merely going through the distant gyrations of sex, as if to see how close they can come to each other without touching: carried into that limbo where savage music becomes the expression of life.

           And Sonny puts his hands in his pockets and arches his back sensually like a cat’s—the hair tumbles over his eyes; and he danced with such frenzy, such abandon, that the other couples left the floor, circled him and the girl—and soon even the girl steps aside, superfluous, while Sonny dances on alone as if with an imaginary partner: the world. He seemed suddenly to be all our defiant youth—desperate to spring from the Cage, futilely defying the world in that twisting dance. In the heat of the feverish dancing, he throws open his shirt, removes it—twirls his hand in the air as if he held a rope—“Yahoo!” he shouted—and he dances shirtless, chest gleaming with sweat—and the crowd applauds as he goes through the sex-gyrations. Alone.

           Leaving quickly, Im carried by the rivers of people outside.... White-robed mummers from the parade. Spears, plumed helmets catch the light. Devils dance with angels. Skirts part, invite.... The dusty-yellow wintersky. Tinseled bodies. Sequined faces.

           “The City That Care Forgot”: New Orleans.

           The Parade of Comus.... The last parade of Mardi Gras—a gaudy funeral....

           And then, it was as if I were imprisoned in a glass room, looking out—isolated from the world, which could see me, which I could see—which couldnt hear me. Locked inside, away from the million people. And each of those million people in turn is separated within his own glass chamber from the others....