Hunger and Thirst (31 page)

They sang old songs and new songs. Cowboy songs and songs from the South. The second baritone introduced the rest of them. This is Gene Cole from Alabama. Applause, sighs, laughter, muffled sobs as though Gene Cole from Alabama was the greatest thing since the crucifixion. This is John Foster from Kentucky …

They were a decent quartet. They sang in tune. But it seemed funny to Erick. It had an air about it. Old people and the old opera house. And a quartet singing humorous songs in four part harmony and an old raggedy man stabbing at a keyboard.

“This is glorious, haah Lynn?” Erick asked.

Lynn put his hands over his face and moaned softly. Erick laughed. The three of them laughed at Lynn. Leo held onto Erick’s arm and looked at him with a look of affectionate hunger.

The quartet finished. They strode off stage. They strode on again. Lynn sank down in his seat. The quartet sang an encore.
Moonlight on the Campus
. A sad memory song. It made the old people melancholy and they smiled tender smiles to themselves. When I was young—the words hovered in hundreds of brains, Erick thought. When I was a boy. When I was a girl. You don’t appreciate. If I only had the things that. Why if someone offered me a. You young folks have no idea what.

Yup.

Down went the red curtain. People chatted. Good, wasn’t it.

He looked at Leo. “Glorious?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” she said.

“Is
there a picture, Lynnie?” Marie asked.

“I’ve lost contact with reality,” Lynn said, “You’ll forgive me. I thought I was coming to see a film partially made by a young lady I knew at college. Instead I have been subjected to a hideous round of shocking sights and sounds. I apologize to you all. Shall we depart?”

“Maybe is next, Lynn,” Erick said, “Maybe is the pitcha now.”

The curtain went up. A white sheet hung down.

“Thank God,” said Lynn.

The lights went down and a stocky, bustling woman came out. That would be Adelaide, Erick thought.

“Good evening fellow travelers,” she said, simpering.

* * * *

The film was asinine to Erick.

Adelaide Cross kept rattling off platitudes about the lovely Mexican woman who never wore mascara while behind her on the screen would be pictures of writhing, pop-eyed fish gasping for life in a fisherman’s net. She spoke about beautiful capework and the camera reported the dragging of a dead bull from the arena.

A lot of the film was about bullfighting.

First the film showed Mexico in recent times. The horses padded around the body thickly. You see how they are protected from the bull’s horns, Adelaide Cross told blithely.

Then the film showed pictures taken in Spain in the 1920s with the horses getting gored and lying in heaps with their blue guts hanging out and throbbing on the hot bloody sands.

“So you see,” Adelaide Cross said, “Things are
much
better.”

“Oh, what excellent capework,” she said, “How indomitable the man is.”

In went the razor point banderillas into the muscle of the bull’s neck. A banderillero misses. “He’ll get the boos,” said Adelaide Cross. “Then, like a flash, the sword is plunged into the heart of the bull,” she said, “It drops dead instantly.” As though in indication that instantaneous death was not death at all.

It wasn’t a travelogue at all, Erick thought.

It was a satire on travelogues. Sunsets every few moments of film bringing inevitable applause. Idiotic women giggling as they picked flowers. Rooftop shots of the various cities. And Adelaide Cross giving full measure of clichés in her faltering prose.

“The women never have to wear mascara,” she said.

* * * *

“Good God,” Lynn said despairingly, “My poor friend Virginia Green teamed up with that female cretin.”

They were in a small Village restaurant, stone walled, travel posters slapped on the walls. The white-covered tables glowed in the candle light and shadows flickered on the walls. A recorder played Shostakovich’s Fifth.

“It sure was interesting,” Erick said, mockingly earnest.

“I think that woman is the most ignorant female I have ever come across,” Lynn said.

“Can I have a little more wine,” Marie asked, as if reminding Lynn that she possessed that title. Lynn poured her some from the bottle. Erick looked at Leo and offered her wine. She still had some.

He looked at her carefully.

Her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. The jacket of her grey plaid suit was open and her firm breasts showed through the sheer white silk of her blouse. She held her wine glass in both hands. She smiled at him.

He turned away.

“How’d you like that stuff about bullfighting,” he asked.

Lynn wrinkled his nose. “Sickening,” he said.

Erick mimicked Adelaide Cross. “The bull drops dead instantly.” They all grinned.

“As if that condones it,” Erick said, “If that isn’t a grisly sport, I don’t know what is. To kill for sport.”

“One of glorious man’s most monstrous moments.” Lynn said.

“It is,” Erick said and noticed how Leo looked at him intently as he spoke. “Man at his lowest ebb,” he said. He shook his head. “It isn’t death itself that’s unnatural. When it’s done for food, for self-protection, then it’s natural. It’s part of evolution, each seeking to survive. It isn’t cruel or uncruel, it isn’t good or bad. It simply
is.”

Lynn nodded. “That’s right.”

“Killing for sport though,” Erick said, “To destroy a life,
any
life, just for the killing itself. Just to amuse a bunch of jerks on a hot Sunday afternoon, to give them entertainment. That’s brutal.”

Leo took a deep breath and, for a moment, her eyes were Sally’s eyes on him and he saw Sally across from in the little cellar place they used to attend at college. He swallowed, returning forcibly to intellect, its detachment and its relative security.

“Well, at least it’s honest hypocrisy,” he said, “They’re killing outright, they don’t try to hide it. For brutality it’s the most honest kind. Not like our prize fighting.”

He drank and felt the clutching heat of the wine roll down his chest.

“In prize fighting,” he went on, “Death comes slow, treading on the footsteps of a ruptured vein, a severed ligament, a swollen lobe. That’s the prime stupidity, the most horrifying cruelty. The same crowds, the same betting, the same roar of the beast. Only the crowd is the beast now. And the thing that dies is the man. The making of dollars and the loss of vitality, the presenting as entertainment of the destruction of life.”

“Superb brainlessness,” Lynn agreed.

Erick noticed how Marie was staring at the table cloth. He wondered briefly if she was contemplating what he said or whether she was just wishing she were somewhere else, in someone’s bed.

“They don’t drag a boxer out by his heels,” he said, “The dead and bloody victim of sport. No, he walks out. Perhaps he smiles and raises his arms in a grimace of victory.”

His teeth clenched. Cynicism washed over him now, a vicious view of the world which was, now, as attainable to him as hunger or thirst.

“But he’s closer to death,” he said, “There are differences. His muscles are different. His brain is less efficient. His eyes see more poorly. And with every fight he dies a little more. More of his greatest gift is dissipated. He trods quickly and yet more quickly toward the grave. Soon, he dies too, a swollen dead victim of the endless pummeling. And even if he dies in bed, he’s died sooner because he gave himself up to the lights and the flailing of commercial demand. It’s insidious. At least the bulls haven’t the reasoning power to know what horrors they’re taking part in. They run and rage and try to kill and finally are killed themselves. They don’t know.

“But the fighter knows. He can detach himself and know that he’s being slaughtered piecemeal. But he can’t give up. Not easily. He’s in too deep. He needs money. There are contracts. And he can’t do anything else anyway. So he surrenders to the inevitable. And he makes money and he digs his grave with clotted blood vessels.”

“I don’t like boxing anyway,” Marie said, “It’s boring.”

Erick looked at her, almost turning his general hate toward her. Then he relaxed. “Amen,” he said.

“And so much for Hemingway,” said Lynn. Then he looked at Erick for a moment with the old interest, with the look that was almost always there at college.

“If you’d write something like that,” he said, “You’d sell it.”

Erick felt suddenly embarrassed, peeved at Lynn for bringing it up. He thought it made him appear ridiculous; like a stubborn jackass who wouldn’t do what he was best at.

“Yeah,” he said.

And saw the look fade quickly from Lynn’s eyes and knew that college days were over. And wished they weren’t because he wanted to be back in the past, even knowing that it was absurd to desire such a thing.

“I like it here,” Leo said, changing the subject, “Who discovered it?”

“Columbus,” he said.

“No,” she said, “Who?”

“Lynn.”

“No, I did,” Marie said, “I used to come here long ago. When they first opened and nobody used to come here during those days.”

“That was during the Harding administration wasn’t it?” Erick asked. Lynn smiled. Marie simpered.

“Ha ha ha,” she said but she wasn’t laughing.

“You know,” Erick said, “If it wasn’t for sex, I don’t think men and women would stand for each other.”

“Have you two had sex together yet?” Marie asked casually.

“Not yet,” Leo said.

Erick felt himself start and he almost spilled his wine. It happened so fast, so unexpectedly. It was spoken so simply that the shock kept growing.

Not yet
. The words haunted him all the rest of the evening. As if she had said—Well, really, we just met but as soon as things get a little settled we’ll pop into bed together and have at it. The thought made his throat dry and he felt weak.

But he kept talking all night and no one noticed at all because he had spent twenty-four years keeping all revelation from his face.

“Thumb me a woman,” Lynn said soon after that and Marie groaned, “Oh no, not again!”

“Her arms reached the floor,” Erick said quickly and the rest of the night he forced himself to be light. At least on the surface. Before the evening ended Marie impulsively insisted that they all have dinner at Lynn’s place the following Saturday night, Lynn was forced into it and they all accepted.

* * * *

“Yes, I think you should have her,” Lynn said the next Tuesday evening when Erick dropped in. Lynn was lying on the couch with a copy of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
on his shallow chest. A glass of wine rested on the coffee table.

Erick slouched in the big armchair next to the television set.

“Why the hell are you so anxious?” he asked.

“You know why,” Lynn said coldly, “Because you still aren’t sure, that’s why.”

Erick swallowed. He looked away from Lynn, feeling very uneasy at the candid way Lynn approached it.

“I guess she wants it,” he said vaguely.

“You bet she wants it,” Lynn said sharply, “There’s nothing of the vestal virgin in that bitch.”

“You’re drunk,” Erick said, “She’ll probably say no.”

“Ridiculous,” Lynn said, “
No
girl will say no indefinitely. Not if your sense of direction doesn’t fail you. A girl’s objections to laying are like a wall you come up against. When you reach it, you climb over it. If you can’t, you drill a hole through it. If you can’t, you burrow under it. If you can’t, you go around it. And if you can’t, you prove to the girl that there never was a wall there in the first place.”

Erick sat there quietly. “Yeah, yeah,” he said.

“Your time has come,” Lynn said, “You could have gotten this crap out of your system with Sally if you’d had any sense.”

“What the hell makes you think I didn’t?” Erick said, trying to sound bland.

“Did you?”

“None of your business.”

Lynn shrugged, blew out a snickering breath. “From this,” he said, “I take the assumption that you never did.” He snickered again. “She would have been just the one to disgust you good and properly.”

Erick stared bleakly at the rug.

“I should have married Sally,” he said.

“Nonsense!” Lynn snapped, “You should have married the past. You’re living with it all the time anyway.”

“Goodnight,” Erick said, rising.

Lynn picked up his book and affected the look of pure boredom that no one else Erick ever knew could manage so well.

“Good night,” he said, “Go home and write yourself a best seller.”

* * * *

When he called for Leo on Saturday night, she told him to wait for her in the bar and order two sidecars. He hung up the phone, feeling uncomfortable again. He couldn’t have managed the first date if Lynn hadn’t paid for the wine. Yet how could he say—I’m sorry, I’m broke, I can’t afford to buy you a drink. It was a feeling of utmost humiliation. It made the inside of his stomach feel hot and uncomfortable.

He sat in the bar, in the booth of cool, green leather waiting for her. He kept thinking about their first date. About how when they got back to the hotel she looked into her mailbox when it was obvious to both of them that there could be no mail that late at night. But it gave them the chance to stand out of sight of the night clerk and the night porter. And he’d held her arms and kissed her forehead and then she’d tilted her head back because he was so much taller. And her warm lips yielded fully. It was the way she kissed. As if she were taking it all, frantically absorbing every bit of it for fear that it was the last one in her life. Her hands caught at his elbows and her breath was quick.

Then she pressed her cheek against his. He felt awkward bent over like that, hoping that no one saw him.

“Thanks a lot,” she said, “I had a swell time.”

“Quartet and all?”

“Quartet and all,” she repeated softly as though it were a sort of declaration of love.

“Shall I call you before next Saturday?” he asked.

“I wish you would.”

“All right,” he told her. Then he’d kissed her again and she had pressed against him, smiled at him as he straightened up.