Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (46 page)

1969

PETER DE VRIES

THE HIGH GROUND, OR LOOK, MA, I’M EXPLICATING

W
HEN
the helpmate pointed out how I tended to mumble and grunt in confrontation with paintings and other works of art, and suggested I might try framing my reactions in more articulate English, or at least sentences that parsed, I was at first resentful. I remembered T. S. Eliot’s remark about how he hated being pressed for his opinions when strolling through galleries and museums, preferring to accumulate and discharge them at his leisure, if at all. Yet that position is hardly tenable under circumstances such as formed the occasion for my wife’s whispered stricture—the black-tie opening of a one-man retrospective that we attended with some newly acquired friends, Bill and Jessie Gmelch. Such an event is in its nature half social—something one cannot in all conscience negotiate with a mouthful of teeth. So I made an effort to hitch up my responses onto a plane more nearly approximating that of ordered evaluation—with results that surprised and, I must say, delighted me.

“What we have here seems to me an organic fusion of form and content,” I said, of an oil before which we four collectively stood, shortly after the murmured complaint for which the helpmate had momentarily drawn me out of the Gmelches’ hearing, “one in which linear and compositional values are also happily resolved. I like especially the juxtaposition of contrasts, which are at once subtle and intrepid, forthright without being obtrusive.”

Bill Gmelch nodded, tapping against pursed lips a catalogue which he had rolled into a tube. “Hmm,” Jessie said, gazing at the picture. I continued.

“The amalgamation of subject and object, which was but tentatively realized in the artist’s earlier period—in such efforts as the ‘Blue Configuration’ over there, where an ostensibly abstract intention is still somewhat qualified by representational elements—seems to me consummately achieved in this more recent ‘City Modality,’ where the object qua object, the
Ding an sich,
if you will, disappears in the chromatic boil.”

“Oh, there are the McConkeys,” Jessie said, and made for the new arrivals, hastily followed by Bill. The helpmate again waited till they were out of earshot. Then she said, “Go back to the way you were.”

This was more easily said than done. When a man has found his tongue on the level I had, the cat is not likely to get it again very soon. I could hardly wait for the next chance to practice my newly discovered gift, which was like a heady wine. It came the very next week when we attended an all-Chopin concert by a Brazilian pianist, again with the Gmelches.

“Like him?” Bill said in the lobby during the intermission, eying me warily as he shook a cigarette from a pack. “I think he’s good. His reading of the sonata struck me as especially fine.”

“Except in the slow movement,” I said, “where I detected a certain viscosity in the phrasing. Also his tempi were at times heretical, to say the least, notably in the more reflective passages, where the lyrical intent of the original was distorted by an overinflation of its rhythmic values, I thought. I find the performance in general somewhat marred by a willful pyrotechnicality, which repeatedly sacrifices the composer’s avowed melodic line to a heedless personal panache. Where is everyone going?”

Bill gesticulated through the doorway to a bar across the street, sucking back a large mouthful of smoke. “Time for a quick one before the buzzer.”

I chased them through a light drizzle, shouting explications lost in the noise of the traffic and then that of the bar, which discouraged all but the small talk into which my three companions seemed, for some reason, eagerly to plunge. I listened with abstracted smiles to their gossip as I mentally drafted amplifications of the points I had raised. I was now beginning to wonder about Eliot. The pleasures of pontification were none he had ever passed up in his prose writings!

Something or other was causing a steady decline in the Gmelches’ state of mind. They were in quite a foul humor when we got up to our place for a nightcap after the concert. I noticed them whispering angrily together in a corner of the living room, glancing in my direction and breaking off as I approached with brandies. Evidently a little domestic spat of some sort. It showed me how urgent the need for a bit of stimulating talk. A new novel, lying on a coffee table, offered just the opportunity.

“I felt it a distinct advance over the author’s previous work,” I said, “particularly compelling in its portrayal of the slob as counter-culture. Here the grubby romanticism of asphalt vagabondage, long familiar to us in a rash of ‘road’ fiction from those still into words, is elevated into an outright arraignment of the work ethos as more puritanic dregs. Especially notable are the scenes in which the protagonist takes to the streets and asks nonentities for their autographs, as Whitmanesque gestures of democracy. Would, alas, the style were more Whitmanesque.”

They all watched in hangdog silence as I packed and lit a pipe.

“My quarrel is not that it’s recycled Faulkner—what isn’t these days!—but that rhetoric is,
en principe,
incongruous with so putatively skeptical a vision. Let me just get the book and read a passage illustrating—”

“No.” Both Gmelches spoke as they rose simultaneously and stood with clenched fists, as though prepared to bar my passage to the book with physical force if necessary. “We have to toddle along,” Bill said, levelly. “We have to get up tomorrow,” Jessie explained. The helpmate now climbed to her feet, like a third guest I must see to the door. Until we actually reached it, there was the eeriest sense that she might indeed sail through it and out into the night, remembering only at the last moment that she lived here.

“Well, you’ve driven them away,” she said when we were alone. “Probably for good. In God’s name, can’t you stop it? Talking like that?”

“It would be dishonest to guarantee anything. Once you’ve got the hang of something—”

“Then I’ll guarantee something. That I can’t take much more of this phase. Look. We’re all going to the Bilkingtons’ cocktail party Saturday, and you’d damn well better talk United States there, is all I can say, Buster.”

THE helpmate’s misgivings were not without foundation. Bo Bilkington is a tired businessman who encourages canards such as that he carries a hip flask to the opera. When he shakes hands, he will fold his fingers back two joints, so that you think you are grasping stumps, and say, with a laugh, “Lost ’em on a minesweeper.” Saturday evening saw me being greeted again in that vein, and smilin’ through in my own, as I rolled an eye around the apartment to see who was on deck. A large mixture of friends and strangers. Plucking a drink from a passing tray, I made for a group at the far end of the living room who were listening to an L.P. of some new poet reading his stuff—an album entitled “Vibes,” of which I caught the last ten minutes.

“Like it?” Jenny Bilkington said, when the stereo had clicked off.

There were murmurs of approval, a few polite shrugs and exclamations. I could feel the helpmate’s eye on me, though from behind. I made an effort to get a grip on myself. The brief, foredoomed struggle of a man hooked on exegesis. I cleared my throat as Jenny moved to play the flip side.

“I find it on the whole creditable of its kind, allowing for the element of naïveté in colloquial art generally,” I said. “The style is basically folk collage rather than formalized song, of course. The use of slang, clichés, and the like, wedged arbitrarily into what systematic verse there is, offers a literary counterpart of the ‘found objects’ incorporated into contemporary junk sculpture—yet another example of the fragmentation that has marked our art for half a century, reflecting a dilapidated Western psyche. Each generation espouses its argot with more bravado than the last (the hippie lexicon is almost all cult verbiage), a development hardly surprising, for in the beginning may have been the word but the end is always jargon.”

“How about that?” said Bo. He glanced wretchedly over at another group as he reached for his highball. “Let’s—”

“I liked especially the passage beginning, ‘What availeth it a lawnmower?,’ as a wry commentary on certain pernickety homeowning elements comprising in fact a culture in midslide. Also effective was the symbolism of the carpenter’s apprentice who throws down his tools and leaves Scarsdale, as allusion to the current Jesus bag.”

The plan to hear a little of the flip side was abandoned as the group dispersed, to re-form into smaller knots of muttering guests. One especially exercised little cluster, incidentally including Bill Gmelch, were shaking their heads and even their fists. A mob can be an ugly thing. I caught the words “be allowed out” and other such inflamed scraps. In this way the party now began to take more discernible shape. The helpmate grasped my hand at one point and towed me across the long living room to a group clear at the other end. “They’re discussing movies,” she said with a smile intended for public consumption, adding, through gritted teeth, “
thank God.
”

That lot were talking about a picture I happened to have seen, and so was fortunately able to join in the conversation. A groan went up from some woman as I approached, probably someone bored with Al Herndon’s two cents about the film, for he was holding forth in typical style on its merits. One thing is, he’s loaded with inherited money, which always sets people’s backs up. I stood with the flat of a hand against the wall, hearing him out like the rest.

“The art that conceals art,” I said the instant Plentykins paused for breath, “is nowhere more important than in the cinema, where we have such a variety of techniques to keep scrupulously in line. I found both the photography and the direction in ‘Bus to Scranton’ obtrusive. The long coalpit and slag-heap shots were beautifully realized as anti-scenery, but the close-ups became much too studied, as did the raffishness of the male principal, whose exposition of the role was an uneasy hash of Bogart and Mastroianni, which any director worth his salt could have disciplined . . .”

AMONG the last to arrive, we were the first to leave. The helpmate seemed anxious to get me alone in a taxicab.

“Well, that tears it,” she said as we sped for home. “Did you notice the Herndons and the Gmelches and the Bustamentes talking about getting theatre tickets to something and breaking it off when we came up? We’ll never be invited anywhere again, except to a dogfight. I swear I don’t know what makes you tick. One minute you’re the soul of concession, the next you can’t be budged, especially if it involves something that gives you some kind of subcutaneous gratification.”

“Can I help it if it’s my mature period?”

“Oh, God, who knows what anybody is like!” she said, ignoring me. “Before a woman can begin telling you what a prince you are, you’ve become a pain. You know what I think?
I
think,” she went on, warming to her subject, “you mask a genuine aggression under a façade of compliance, and vice versa—a sort of basic insecurity inside this husk of independence. You seem unable to divorce your societal from your ego drives, your gregarious from your competitional . . .”

She can go on like that for days. Ah, well, it’s an age of criticism, isn’t it? It’s nothing if not that.

1971

IAN FRAZIER

APARTMENT 6-A: AFTER THE FALL

I
T
has been over a year now since, in the wake of demoralizing setbacks, I finally abandoned my West Village apartment to the North Vietnamese. It was a time of great chaos. In my haste I had no choice but to leave behind hundreds of dollars’ worth of appliances, clothing, and plants. The panic, the loss of my security deposit, getting my phone turned off, packing my small travelling bag, grabbing a taxi—all that seems like a dim nightmare to me now. But as the painful memories have lost some of their sharpness, my curiosity has grown. How has my apartment changed in the past year and a half? What have the Communists managed to make of the place where I sustained a free and democratic life for the better part of two years? I, of course, have not been allowed to visit my old pied-à-terre, but from accounts of Taiwanese businessmen and Belgian journalists who have been allowed in I have managed to piece together a picture of the new Apartment 6-A at 226 Waverly Place.

More than a year after its fall, 6-A appears to be an apartment still in transition. In the living room, the Communists have retained much of my furniture, including my stereo and my portable color-TV. All the furniture and appliances that used to belong to me have been registered and given identity cards. My two end tables have been removed, under the Communists’ Return to Deco Shop of Origin program. My terra-cotta fish poacher and horseshoe-crab-shell lamps have been relocated out into the country. My couch has submitted to voluntary reupholstering. The Communists have kept all my record albums, and I am told that they play them a lot. My cat, Bill, who likes to watch pigeons, seems perfectly happy with his new name, Ho Chi Minh Domestic Animal. My clippings of “Ziggy” and “Today’s Chuckle” are no longer taped to the refrigerator, and in their place are Communist maxims: “Advance in the Flush of Victory with New Vigor and Remember to Get an Extra Set of Keys Made!,” “Strive Resolutely to Pick Up the People’s Laundry Before Five!,” and “Work for a Striking Development of Our Sunny Breakfast Nook!” In general, the kitchen has a more functional, lived-in look than before, when I mainly used it to prepare cans of Campbell’s Chunky Beef Soup.

Among the more important dynamics at work in the redesign of my apartment is a division between two schools of thought in the Politburo of the Workers’ Party. One school, the moderates, maintains that illiterate peasants who have only recently emerged from the jungles and paddies after a twenty-year period of war and apartment-hunting cannot be expected to have any sense of design, style, color, or fabric, and that the new government should not be afraid to hire interior decorators who may be foreign-born or who even may not hold to the strict Communist Party line. The hard-liners, on the other hand, believe that coming up with a decorating scheme is well within the powers of the North Vietnamese Army, and that all they really have to do is put a couple of coats of barn-red deck paint on the floor, paint the walls and ceiling off-white, buy a couple of nice rugs and some hanging plants and some big pillows, and then get a wheel of Brie and throw a party to break the place in. A similar theoretical split exists among the members of the Phong-trao Phu-nu Giai-phong, or Freed Women Movement, whose efforts to fix the bathroom so that the cold-water pipe under the sink doesn’t leak on the physical therapist in 5-A have been beset with problems. The moderates advocate trying Liquid-plumr or an Epoxi-Patch, while the hard-liners believe it is the landlord’s problem, and if he doesn’t do something about it pretty soon they favor going after the windshield of his Mercury Montego with a Volkswagen jack. At present, the moderates hold sway in most areas of the renovation of Apartment 6-A, and the success of their efforts over the next few months will very likely determine whether they or the hard-liners will continue to formulate apartment policy in such unresolved areas as the potentially divisive matchstick versus traditional-plastic-venetian window-blind issue.