Crazy Cock (14 page)

“Sure! And they're _____ ________ too!”

It was an ugly term. Hildred turned white, and for the moment she was tongue-tied. But then Vanya broke in. “Not all perverts go about soliciting,” she said, quite as if this were a most important detail.

“Good,” he said, growing more excited, “good . . . I can get somewhere with
you
. At least you know how to talk straight.”

He strode up and down several times and finally, planting himself square in front of Vanya, he said: “Will you give a frank answer to a frank question?”

The words seemed to explode in Vanya's ears. No doubt she meant, by the nod of her head, to convey her assent, but Tony Bring stood in front of her like a tormentor waiting for that word
yes
which she seemed incapable of formulating.

“Will you? Will you?” he demanded, bending forward until their noses almost touched.

Vanya's head was twitching from side to side as if she had been suddenly stricken with chorea. Her eyes were large and fixed.

Once again Hildred interposed. “I won't let her answer,” she said. “You're a fool if you think you can extract things this way. If you had any intelligence you wouldn't need to ask any questions. Read your books—that's the only way you learn anything.”

“Oh, is that so?” he said. They were standing close to each other, their lips curled back in a snarl, just like two mangy curs fighting over a bone. “Perhaps I don't know everything, but I know enough already to railroad her to jail. Laugh that off!”

“You fool!” cried Hildred, tossing her head defiantly. “What do you mean by that?”

“What do I mean? I mean just this—that Platonic love is
one thing and calling a woman
a darling little Lesbian
quite another. Perhaps your good friend here understands what I'm talking about.” He paused a second. “Eh, Vanya, what have you to say for yourself? You know what I'm driving at. Why don't you speak?”

Vanya leaned against the wall, her hands buried in her jeans. She looked at him piercingly and with the utmost coolness and deliberation responded: “So you're convinced now that I'm a Lesbian, are you? And your wife, what is she?”

She paused just long enough for this to sink in. She was about to continue when Hildred broke in: “Exactly! If she's a Lesbian, then I'm one too.” There was a rapid exchange of glances. “Crack that, you poor boob!” they seemed to say.

Says Vanya, with perfect control: “What is your idea of a Lesbian, anyway? You say I'm a Lesbian. Why? Because you were reading my letters again? I know you, you sneak. I left the letters lying about purposely . . . yes, purposely. I want to put an end to this nonsense. I'm sick of this beating about the bush. Make up your mind one way or other. . . .”

Hildred intervened. “I'll settle this question myself,” she said, turning on Tony Bring, her face scarlet. “I won't stand for this abuse any longer . . . do you hear that? If there's anything wrong in this house I'm the one who's responsible. Why don't you let up on her? Why don't you attack me, you coward? I can answer everything you want to know.”

“All right then,
do it!”
he said.

Silence for a moment. A truck rolled by, shaking the building to its foundations.

“Well . . .
what is it you want to know?” Hildred's foot is tapping impatiently.

“Everything,”
he answered simply.

“Be specific. A minute ago you were making all sorts of
charges. Let's have them now, one by one . . . I'm ready for you.”

A distressing weariness came over him. Suddenly it became too stupid for words. Like three balls on a billiard table. With the cue ball one took aim, and if the wrist worked in obedience to the laws of mechanics, ballistics, trigonometry, and whatnot, the red ball kissed the white ball and all three balls clicked. And if all three balls clicked that meant another shot. And if one could manage to keep all three balls bunched together, if one could nurse them along, as they say, one could have X over Y shots. He took a long shot and closed his eyes. He missed. It was somebody else's turn. He stood for a few moments looking on dumbly, dividing his attention between their silly, lying talk and his own restless fears.

Suddenly a remark of Hildred's reached him with telling effect. “What's that you're saying?” he shouted fiercely. “Stop it, do you hear? Another word and I'll crack you! By God, you people are capable of anything . . .
anything
. You stand there trying to tell me that you thought I might be . . . ? Listen, if you ever use that word in connection with me I'll brain you. You tell me you were jealous . . . jealous of a friend of mine. God damn it, if I thought you were telling me the truth I'd kick the guts out of you. But I don't believe you . . . I don't! You're a liar from the bottom up. You'd lie if they were putting the noose around your neck. You're lying now because you don't know how to crawl out of it. You'd say I was insane if you thought you could save your face. You'd say anything! You're corrupt, you're poisoned, you're diseased! So you thought I was a homo once . . . or almost one. That's rich . . . rich . . . rich. Jesus, I'm going to put on a red necktie and advertise myself. Maybe I could bring a little money in too if I were persevering. A homo to rent—by the week or
month—moderate terms. A
respectable
homo, with a wife and family. . . .”

Throughout this scene, which became increasingly violent and coarse, Vanya sat rigid, her lips sealed, a look of stony impenetrability on her countenance. Now and then, when some particularly vile epithet was hurled in her direction, a shudder went through her. As for Tony Bring, he seemed to have lost his senses. Back and forth he strode, shaking his fist first at Hildred, then at Vanya. The most shocking, virulent obscenity poured from his lips. He cursed them up and down, denounced them in the foulest terms. Through it all Vanya had managed to preserve her Sphinx-like imperturbability. But when, in a final gust of passion, when dancing before her on tiptoes, threatening her, reviling her, spitting at her feet, he shouted “Louse!” she could tolerate no more. Springing to her feet, her eyes twitching like a maniac's, she returned insult for insult, curse for curse. It ended with hysterical convulsions of grief and rage. Hildred flung herself on the bed and tried to stifle her sobs in the pillow. Her sobs left Tony Bring cold. It's gone home at last, has it? he thought to himself. Good! Let her lie there and taste some of the agony of life.

After a lull he turned to Vanya, who had by now calmed down a bit, and said in his most conciliatory vein: “Now that the fireworks are over, let's talk things over sensibly. Let's see if we can't understand one another.”

Vanya was pacing to and fro, her eyes still wild, her fingers working frantically. Thin streams of smoke spurted from her nostrils, her bosom was covered with ash. Keen as a blade, venomous, belligerent, she was on fire from tip to toe. What had just transpired was simply a workout for her. She was furious to think that Hildred had succumbed so wretchedly. It was cowardice, sheer, feminine cowardice, and it
was disgusting. She was not only ready with her tongue, but with her hands. Let him only try . . . let him only put a little finger on her! She'd break him in half . . . splinter him . . . mangle him.

Asked if she felt like participating, Hildred made no answer; her shoulders shook convulsively, her head sunk a little deeper into the pillow. Clearly then it was between the two of them. And it was clear too that Vanya approved as, with lips grimly compressed and eyes wide and unseeing, she nodded for him to continue.

But from the moment he opened his lips and as if in accompaniment to his words, there began to pass through her head a strange procession of figures—grotesques in wood and ivory, with taut, elongated breasts, their strange limbs embellished by dyes of raw blue and red. One of them, a figure from the Sudan, sat on a tabouret upheld by a cluster of smaller figures. A thin, delicate column shot from the cavity of the thorax to the genitals. But its phenomenal aspect resided rather in an object which elevated itself from the plateau formed by the monster's lap. In the museum, where she had seen it recently, people scrutinized it minutely, shook their heads, held whispered, animated conversations to one side, their gaze still riveted to the object clasped by the rigid, painted fingers. Bisexual it was—phallus and lingam combined, though to say this was to give nothing of its exotic character. To penetrate its significance one would be obliged to retrace the entire development of the race, to enter not only into the mystic ceremonials of primitive man, but to go back further still, back to the ferocious nuptial orgies of the insect world, world of sexual anomalies, world of lust and terror beyond all power of human conception.

Such were the thoughts that passed through her head as
she listened to his words. God knows, his thoughts too were anything but ordinary. They seemed to follow the course of his words like a river canalized by the shoulders of a gorge. The solid, resisting walls were choking the tumultuous stream that rose somewhere far back in the myriad roots of his soul; it was their function, doubtless, to stand thus unyielding, throttling the blind, destructive energism which would otherwise devastate the world and itself come to naught. His thoughts surging forward and upward swirled in vast eddies, rose in dazzling foam and spray to collapse again and be borne along in a lathery chute. The most that could be hoped for in this ceaseless struggle was a triumph of erosion. Thus, confusedly, the conflict shaped itself in his thought. His language was far less complicated. It was like the difference between sound and script in music. What the tongue expressed was but the thin melody which held the extravagant weave of thought and feeling together.

As he went on his voice became more soothing and gentle; he paused now and then, expecting that she would seize the occasion to inject a word, but she remained silent, her hostility falling away more and more. He reminded her briefly of a scene only a few days back when Hildred had locked herself in the little room. What went on in there behind the bolted door? Ah, what a question to ask. As if he could expect them ever to tell. But this much they had admitted—after frightful wrangling, after he had literally extorted it from them—
they went in there to kiss each other!
Well, no use running on in this vein. Perhaps the best solution was to submit the case to a jury—an impartial tribunal of experts. Let each one choose his man. Let each one tell his own story.

At this point Hildred suddenly came to life.

“You shut your bloody mouth!” he yelled.

“No, leave her be!” said Vanya. “She's in this just as much as we.”

“She's out of it, and she's to keep her mouth shut, I say. Are you willing to agree to my suggestion?” he said, turning his back on Hildred.

It was like the critical moment in a fight, when one of the contestants suddenly softens under a damaging blow. He was for rushing her to her knees, but again Hildred intervened. “She will do no such thing,” she said, rising from the bed with a sort of dying-empress dignity. It was a ridiculous proposal through and through. There
were
no experts competent to pass judgment. And besides . . .

“You mean to say . . .”

“I mean that no matter what anyone said it would make no difference to me.”

“Even . . .”

“Even if the whole world agreed . . .”

“Agreed that what?”

“That she was queer . . . invert, pervert, whatever you like. No matter what they said I would never desert her. . . . Is that clear?”

It was quite enough. There comes a stage when the touch of reality becomes so sharp that one is no longer an individual harassed by circumstances, but a living being cut into slices. . . . That which a moment ago might have seemed like a living planet, a throb of splendor in a universe of night, becomes of a sudden a dead thing like the moon burning with fire of ice. In such moments all things are made clear—the meaning of dreams, the wisdom that precedes birth, the survival of faith, the stupidity of being a god, etc., etc.

T
ONY
B
RING
sat in the dark with his hands buried in his overcoat pockets, the collar turned up, his hat falling over his eyes. The place was cold and damp; it was like sitting in a tomb without even a taper burning. A fetid odor seeped from the walls—a sweet, sickening stench, full of leprosy. Thoughts gurgled through his brain like the music of the drains in Vanya's room. He thought about his thoughts as if they were smears under a lens.

The bell rang. Let it ring, he thought, I'm not here. There was a rap at the window, followed by a tattoo. He got up and pulled the curtain aside. His friend Dredge stood there grinning. He went through the lower hall and swung open the big gate. Dredge was still grinning.

“What are you doing with yourself in the dark?” asked Dredge.

“I was thinking, that's all.”

“Thinking?”

“Yeah, don't you think sometimes?”

“Do you have to sit in the dark to think?”

He lit a candle while Dredge deposited himself in the most comfortable-looking seat and smiled his usual weak, affable
smile. It was Dredge's twenty-eighth birthday and he had had a drink or two in his room before stopping by. “You know,” he said, “people go crazy from sitting around in the dark like this. I'll tell you what, you come over to my joint and have a little snifter with me. Then we'll go out and celebrate.”

A L
ITTLE
later they were sitting in Paulino's in the Village. The place was upside down. Everybody scrooched. A swell fraternity: gamblers, plainclothesmen, thugs, federal agents, big stews from the big papers, vaudeville teams, wisecracking Jews, faggots with dirty mouths, chorus girls, college boys with the signs of the zodiac stenciled on their slickers. . . . A free bottle of wine stood on every table. While they ate a crowd gathered in the hallway waiting to grab the vacated seats.