Crazy Cock (6 page)

Each day brought new faces to the Caravan: brokers back from the Riviera, artists who had done a little sketching in the provinces, actresses with fat contracts, buyers from the fashionable department stores who had picked up a few phrases of French and Italian during their sojourn abroad. All preparing to burrow in for the winter, resume again the nervous, unhealthy life in which they pretended to find release and exhilaration.

Vanya practically lived at the Caravan. When Hildred
appeared in the forenoon Vanya was already there waiting to have breakfast with her. They met each day as if they had been separated for years.

Curiously enough, whenever Tony Bring dropped in they were gone. It was always the same story—Hildred has gone off somewhere
with her friend
. No mention was made of these visits until one day, just as Hildred was getting ready to leave the house, one of those tiffs occurred which were daily becoming more numerous. She accused him of spying on her. She knew only too well how often he had dropped in, the questions he launched, the sly insinuations. As a matter of fact, she had seen him herself now and then, pressing his nose against the windowpanes. God only knew where he didn't poke his nose.

Finally Vanya's name popped up. Vanya . . . yes, she was the one who had started all the trouble.

“You're jealous of her, that's what the matter!” cried Hildred.

“Jealous of
her?”
For a moment he was at a loss to find an epithet low enough to convey the full measure of his disgust. A fine friend she was, trying to worm her way in here and there with a pinch of dope, hanging out with whores and syphilitic poets. “Do you expect me to take her seriously?” he yelled. “A genius, you call her. What has she to show for her genius? I mean something more than dirty fingernails!”

Hildred heard him out in scorching silence. She was in the act of rouging her lips. Her face had a beautiful cadaverous glow; as she examined herself in the mirror she became intoxicated with her beauty—like an undertaker who perceives suddenly what a beautiful corpse he has under his hand.

Tony Bring was enraged. “Stop it!” he yelled. “Don't you see what you look like?”

She peered at herself calmly in the mirror. “I suppose I look like a whore, is that what you mean?” she answered sweetly.

Finally she was ready to go. At the door, her hand on the knob, she paused.

“I wish you wouldn't go yet,” he said. “I want to say something. . . .”

“I thought you had finished.”

He leaned against the door, squeezing her to him. He kissed her lips, her cheeks, her eyes, and the throbbing little pulse in her throat. There was a greasy taste in his mouth.

Hildred pulled herself away, and as she dashed down the stairs, she flung back: “Get a grip on yourself!”

M
ORE THAN
once during the course of the night he jumped up, tossed aside the heavy volume he was reading, and dashed to the subway station. He waited in the arcade while one train after another pulled in. He walked over to the bridge plaza and waited some more. Cabs rolled by lugubriously. Cabs loaded with drunks. Cabs loaded with thugs. No Hildred. . . .

He went home and sat up the night. In the morning he learned that she had telephoned.

“What did she say?” he asked.

“She said she wanted to talk to you.”

“Didn't she leave any message?”

“No, she just asked if you were home.”

“That's all?”

“She said she wanted to talk to you.”

A
S A
reason for her absence Hildred explained that her mother had been taken ill.

O.K.

It was only several days later that he realized there were flaws in her story. When, acting on the impulse, he decided to telephone her mother he learned to his amazement that mother and daughter hadn't seen each other for over a year, that furthermore her mother didn't even know that her daughter was married.

When, several nights later while lying in each other's arms, he repeated word for word the conversation with her mother she commenced to laugh, she laughed as if her heart would burst.

“So my mother really said that?” Another gale of laughter. “And you swallowed it!” More laughter, slaughterhouse mirth. Then suddenly, abruptly, it was exhausted. He drew her to him. Her body was all atremble, dripping with perspiration. She tried to speak but there was only a gurgling in her throat. He lay very still and pressed her to him.

When she had grown very quiet he suddenly grasped her by the shoulders and shook her. “Why would your mother lie to me?” he demanded. “Why? Why?”

She commenced to laugh again, to laugh as if her heart would burst.

A
FEW
nights later he was called to the telephone. It was Hildred. Vanya had been taken ill and she thought she ought to stay with her. “Do you mind if I don't come home?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” he answered. “However, do as you think best.”

A pause ensued during which he caught the remnants of a gabfest between two operators who had been on a bust the night before. When her voice floated over the wire again there was a strange quiver in it. “I'm coming home,” she said. “I'm coming right away. . . .”

“Hildred!” he called. “Listen . . . listen!”

No answer. A buzzing in his ears mingled with the confusion in his brain. Just as he was about to hang up there came a faint, questioning
y-e-es?

“Hildred, listen to me. . . . You go ahead and stay with her. . . . Don't worry about me.”

“You're sure, dear? You're sure you won't feel badly?”

“Of course not! You know me . . . I'm just a big clown. Don't think about it anymore. It's all O.K. with me.” As he hung up he added: “Have a good time!”

When he got back to the room he felt as if his guts were
dropping out. “I knew it!” he murmured. “I knew it was going to be something like that.”

T
HE NIGHT
seemed endless. Every few minutes he awoke and stared at the vacant pillow. Toward morning he fell into a fitful sleep. Dreams came in kaleidoscopic fashion; between pulse beats they came and went. Some he dreamed over and over, one particularly in which he saw her rolled up on a horsehair sofa, her face decomposing. How could a human being sleep so soundly when the face was decomposing? But then he perceived that her slumber was only a sort of thick pea soup, which made everything right again. . . . There was another dream in which he lived with an old Jew who shuffled about all day in his carpet slippers. He wore a patriarchal beard that floated in majestic waves over his sunken chest; beneath the beard there were jewels, a thick cluster of them, arranged like those in the breastplate of the high priest. When they caught the light the beard took fire and the flesh burned away to the skull. . . . Finally he dreamed that he was in Paris. The street on which he stood was deserted, except for a pair of streetwalkers and a gendarme who followed them like a pimp. At the foot of the street, where there was a sprinkle of lights, he could make out a carousel under a striped awning and a patch of green studded with marble fauns. Under the awning the lions and tigers stood rigid, their backs enameled in gold and ivory. Immobile they stood, while the music played and the fountain dripped its rainbow tints.

O
N RISING
he went straight to the Caravan. Hildred hadn't arrived yet—it was much too early for breakfast. He bought a
paper and made for Washington Square. A few late ones were hurrying to work. He sat down on a bench. Foolish sitting there at that hour of the morning, cooling his heels in an empty square. He looked about listlessly. All the workers were at work. The drones were still in bed softly snoozing. Much too early for breakfast!

The air was crisp, invigorating. It was free, the air . . . one didn't have to pay a penny for it . . . not a mill. So Vanya was ill. The idea of that clodhopper taking sick struck him as ludicrous. God knows, women had their troubles, particularly when the moon and tides formed a mystic conjunction. Still. . . . In the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
it said that there was no such thing as a human hermaphrodite. A hermaphrodite was a creature containing both ovaries and testes. That was that. But Hildred knew a girl at the Caravan who had the stump of a tail. It was so, because someone had seen the young lady with her bloomers down. Some other young lady, most likely. . . .

When he returned to the Caravan there were three people seated at a table: a little boy, a woman of indeterminate age who appeared to be the boy's mother, and an elderly gentleman with a rapacious look who was engrossed in the task of picking his teeth. He observed that the little boy was unhappy. The idea of misery making its appearance at such an age was preposterous. He couldn't get it through his head at all.

The waitress came and took his order. Her face was fresh and rested-looking. Red apple cheeks and thick velvet strokes over the eyes. Marvelous to look at an eyebrow made of hair. He inquired if Hildred had arrived yet. No, none of the girls had shown up yet. “I'm the only one,” she said smilingly. “I'm the early bird that catches the worms.”

The worms? The expression struck him as remarkably thoughtless. He looked away and saw the little boy's mother smiling into the old man's eyes, smiling as if she had seen the Resurrection. Every now and then she turned to the youngster and pleaded with him to eat, but he merely rolled his eyes pathetically and wagged his little poodle dog's head. Tony Bring looked at the mother again. Strange, he said to himself, how women like to get themselves up like whores. At bottom they were all whores, every mother's daughter, even the angels.

The ten-o'clock breakfasters began to appear: nervous, little men, morose, preoccupied, who wiped their plates with crusts of bread; rude, massive women who, like primitive idols dug out of the soil, had grown rotten with the years; flowery dandies with repulsive faces, reminding him uncomfortably of illustrations in medical tracts. Everything he observed with sharp vigilance, with a cruel, remorseless eye. An old roué behind him was imploring the rosy-cheeked waitress to explain what a lamb's fry was. If only Hildred were here, he thought, she'd tell the horny old gaffer.
A lamb's fry!

One by one the other waitresses dawdled in. They yawned and sneezed before they had so much as touched a plate. One of them sat down and tinkled the yellow keys. The notes dribbled from her fingers like sweat dripping from the wall. She sang in a weird, squeaky voice—“O there's Egypt in your dreamy eyes.” The melody brought to her bucolic face the rapt expression of plugged nickels.

Eleven o'clock rolled around, and then a quarter after. No sign of Hildred, nor of Vanya. He inquired about her again. “Oh, Hildred—she's not coming in today,” said the sickly looking bitch at the piano. “No, she's not coming in today,
that's certain,” she repeated. She smiled feebly as she spoke, like a gas jet filled with dust.

He stumbled out into the yellow light of the street cursing the Bruga woman for a hairy son-of-a-bitch, a gamboge go-devil with a rose-madder bladder. He prayed that all the evils of the Aztec calendar would fall on her coal-black mane. He prayed that her teeth would drop out one by one and the hair on her body grow longer. . . . As he walked away there drifted to his ears the tinkling of the yellow keys. Egypt's dreamy, seamy, squeamy eyes. He could still see the frail, brittle fingers from which the mildewed notes perspired and her soft spine bent beneath the weight of her addled brains, her teeth rattling like dice in a dice box.

A H
ALF
hour later he was ringing Willie Hyslop's doorbell. No one answered. He hung around for a while, chatting with the children on the stoop. Then, in despair, he decided upon a thorough canvass of the Village. Cellars, garrets, speakeasies, studios, cafeterias—he hunted everywhere for them. Discouraged, he finally made his way back to the Caravan. It was like returning to the seat of a crime.

He learned that they had been in only a few moments ago. In and out again. He flew back to Willie Hyslop's dive over the bank on Hudson Street. Again he rang the bell. No answer. He walked across the street and stood gaping at the windows. Finally he sat down on a stoop opposite the house and fixed a blank gaze upon its weather-beaten facade. The street was choked with sewer gas. Concrete factories, shanties falling apart, dirty wash nocturnes. A desolate, crummy, woebegone bohemia. His limbs ached and over his thoughts
there spread a thin, nauseous slime. Sewer gas. His brains stank. The whole world stank.

As he was about to make off an old woman approached him. She carried leaflets under her arm.

“Are you a Catholic, my good man?” she asked.

“I am not!” he answered.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, “but there's sadness in your face. May it do you good to know that Christ loves you.”

“Christ be damned!” he said, and strode off.

In the subway he picked up a magazine that had been left on the seat. It was in German, and the cover was plastered with nudes. They all had big bottoms, like the women in Munich who spread themselves over the benches in the public gardens. He turned the pages at random.
“Guten Tag! Hat meine Kohlrübe heute nacht gut geschlafen?”

The housekeeper met him at the door.

“Any message?” he asked.

The housekeeper was too parsimonious even to open her mouth. Besides, she had a watery blue nose. She was from Nova Scotia. As he bounded up the stairs, half suspecting that he would find Hildred lying in bed, the old witch commenced to scrape her throat. “Yes?” he shouted. “What is it?” He shouted not because she was hard of hearing, but to show his insolence.

She was informing him that the rent was overdue.

“Are you sure there's been no phone call?” he said.

“No,” she replied. “Were you expecting one?”