I'm Dying Laughing (21 page)

‘Let’s keep the Party out of it.’

‘We’ll say she goes down south to incite the coloured people. She does,’ said Emily.

‘She’s just a progressive like us; won’t they point that out?’ said Stephen.

‘A progressive! Everything a progressive does is treason to the republic in which we live. We can get her on a hundred counts. What if we too are guilty? We can point that her shining witness too is a communist; his statements aren’t worth the paper they’re typed on. We can do anything. And we must, for we must keep Olivia; I need that child as I never needed anything.’

‘Not even me?’

‘Oh, oh, I need everything so badly so much, Stephen. I can’t do without anything. I need you all. Stephen, let’s get a new wallpaper, a good one, and French curtains.’

‘When we’re so broke, that’s the last thing we need. We have to pay for the lawyers, too.’

Her eyes sparkling, her face lively, enchanting, begging and teasing, she said, ‘Come, we must have a home suitable for Olivia, the others don’t matter to the court. And oh, think, darling, Olivia’s birthday party is coming; we’re having twenty little boys and girls; and oh, let’s make the place bright. I’m going to ring the man in the morning. These drapes don’t go with our pictures; we’ll have to get another rug, this is shoe-worn.’

Emily went to the kitchen to give advice to Manoel and Eva, then went to the telephone and told several people about Godfrey’s noble action in jackalling for Florence Howard and she invited them all to come to dinner on Friday when Godfrey and Millian and the rest were coming.

Stephen growled, ‘I can’t stand that woman, Millian. I don’t want any of ’em.’

Emily began fluttering and teetering towards the door, ‘Oh, yes? I have invited everyone who was there this evening except one or two.’

‘It’s late. Come on.’

He went upstairs. She ran into the kitchen through two heavy swing-doors and found on the red-tiled floor, a stray cat. The kitchen was in order and faultlessly clean; but an unwashed baking dish had been put on the floor for the cat to lick at. Emily shouted, with an ugly expression, ‘Who did that?’

She took the cat by the scruff of the neck and hauled it to the door. It was a bluish, shorthaired animal with a white hourglass on the belly. It had just had kittens. It was almost starved to death. She threw it out on the hillside which rose behind the house. There were always stray dogs and cats in the hills. People, when they were leaving, took their pets there, hurled them from the cars, and raced back down the glen. At nights, cats howled in the glens and sniffed round the doors. The cat threw itself against the bolted door. Emily put on an apron and scrubbed the floor all over again, saying, ‘Ugh, fooey!’ and scrubbed the baking dish inside and out. She dried it, scrubbed the draining board and sink. Stephen came through the door with a scowl and asked her what she was doing: the servants were paid to do that.

‘You took a drink while I was having my bath, I suppose.’

Emily said, ‘Manoel, your best friend, let in a stray cat that dirtied up the floor and it licked germs all over the baking dish. I pay four hundred dollars a month to your friend and your friend’s wife, and have to do all the housework twice a week, while they go to town to bank their savings, but at night the kitchen’s like a pigsty.’

‘Don’t talk to me about money,’ screamed Stephen.

‘Why not? Don’t we live for it? Isn’t it our be-all and end-all? Money! I hate the word! The damn people in New York look at me with a sort of crappy patronizing regard, because I write for money; at the same time, they don’t give a damn for my two serious books. I’m Emily Wilkes the famous writer, because I had a box-office success on Broadway and they tell me, leave that serious stuff alone, it’s out of date, muckrakers are dead, leave the labour problems to the deep thinkers, you go ahead and write comedy so we can panhandle more dough for our causes. Everyone to his trade: yours is to make money. And you, Stephen, instead of standing by me, you only want me to write for money, more and more money, too.’

Said Stephen, ‘How do you live without money? Do you expect to live off my family?’

Emily howled, ‘Oh, that is the absolutely final last limit of horror: that makes the evening totally complete. Oh, how can you speak like that to me of all people! What has your rich family done for us? And doesn’t it despise me, because I work? I’m classed with the ditch-diggers; and I don’t mind. And at the same time that I am keeping this whole goddamn circus going, you speak—’ She began to pant and wring her hands, ‘you speak of money to me, you make me live for it, when I hate it, I swear to you, Stephen, I hate it. I’m known as a money writer, but there’s nothing I hate and despise, and know—’

There was a deeper tone and with a faint ironic smile looking him in the face, she said after a slight pause, ‘There’s nothing I know more than money. I’ve never given a damn for money. I can make money. I’ll borrow it or steal it if I want to. No one has a conscience about it—’

She burst out laughing in an agonized way, and leaned on the table, ‘—but I don’t do it. I work like a lowdown Chinese coolie, much much harder than your friend Manoel and Holinshed’s friend Katsuri and I’m writing this grade B and not even good grade B, cheesy, smalltown stuff—for you, for us, for Manoel and Eva and our millionaire kids. God! I’m certainly a success. Wilkes-Barre girl makes bad. That’s what I’ve come to. I wish we were back in New York or Chicago. Chicago is gentler than this dump.’

She turned to him with a noble resentment and vision, ‘Stephen, you’ll never starve! We’ve done these stories, some of them have sold and I have got a great reputation for selling. But you know—and in fact all Hollywood knows—otherwise, they wouldn’t have dared attack me tonight, you know, they wouldn’t, you know these bastards—that I’ve got two stories circulating and at present neither has sold and it frightens me to death. When they started in on us, I knew they knew we hadn’t sold. You say about money. But I’m frightened to death, blasted, done for, withered up. Oh, I know I sound baffled and upset. I am dreadfully miserable, Stephen. You are my best friend; isn’t a husband a best and only friend? But how dreadfully the son of a rich family you are! You don’t even understand my misery, my agony, my hysteria. I know it’s hysteria, but it’s me; it’s the only way I can live—the Wilkes way of life and death.

‘Look, Stephen, I know your work requires a decent standard of life and we can’t keep the kids without a show of money. How right you are really! I am just all money. But think of my wasted weeks and I’m really raring to go. I want to work on a decent piece of work even if the back-room boys laugh at the poor humorist trying to go highbrow. I know damn well, Stephen, they take you for a real highbrow and good reason to; but why, for this reason, are we obliged to live beyond our means in a hellhole where everyone is tearing his neighbour’s skin off his back as he hauls him down to hell with him?’

She stopped and came up close to her husband and said in a tense voice, lifting her fists, her blue eyes shining with passion, ‘I am not as bad as they make me out to be, I mean, my work makes me out to be. This story I’m doing, Stephen, on which I have got a retainer and I have to do, is the most degrading thing I’ve ever done; including all the years I worked on scandal stories and gossip columns and night-court reports for the small-town newspapers—it’s so cheap! Jesus! I gag. I wake up at night in a sweat and think, “Is this me?” And I want to give up everything to write good literature for the working class. They need it and I can do it and I’m going to. What is the good of being a rebel at heart? And you think, they think that I’m like them, I care for money! This dreck! No wonder they pay you so much money. They ought to. For spewing filth in public they ought to pay you money. And we ourselves don’t say, “Throw it in the ashcan”, we say, “It’s the new art.” And we know. And what now? I write it. And this other thing hasn’t sold and I wake up in a sweat at night because the trash hasn’t sold. Stephen, think of my wasted life!’

There was silence for a while. Stephen looked sick. His eyes were shut. He at last exclaimed painfully, ‘If I’m ever allowed to say anything! How do I like the insult that I throw in my own face, that I’m living on you as a parasite? Aren’t I allowed to defend myself or is it only you? I’m trying to do a good job for the working-class movement for us both. Where would I be without this work?’

Emily shrugged her shoulders and hissed, ‘Phtish!’

‘Don’t hiss like a snake at me. If you’re paying your doit to capitalism, surely I have a right to try to earn it back, the shame, I mean, by doing good work. And I can’t do good work away from people. People have a message for me. I can’t think away from people. Maybe, that means I can’t think. Maybe, it means I’m just hanging around stealing and composing their ideas into a crazy quilt that’s only acceptable because it’s current scraps. Well, I can’t help it: That’s me, as you say.’

Emily made another odd sound.

He continued, ‘Don’t hiss at me. I know what you think of me; and goddamn it I’m going on just the same, drearily without meaning, but I’m going to do something on theoretical lines because if I didn’t I’d die. You’ve got some bee in your bonnet, you’ve got to do serious work, too. When it’s quite clear to everyone but yourself that you’re a humorist and just that.’

‘That’s what it seems to you,’ Emily groaned.

‘This idea of writing serious work, it isn’t you. You got it in school and thus far I agree with our friend, the New Yorkers, Easterners are Bohemians, they’re playing around; they all want to write their novel or their play. Here at least you’re in the centre of mass writing. You’re in a different business. Forget about the great American novel. Why should you write it more than another? Forget it, I tell you. You can make money. So make money. When we make enough money, we’ll go away, OK, goddamnit, we’ll go away and rot in some one-pump town, and you’ll write your great novel. But why you with your smart horse-sense should do it, beats me. Still, all I ask is that you make money first and let’s have some security and peace; and then we’ll see about the novel. The idea’s not you and not yours though. You’re not a social satirist, or a big time rain-in-the-face. You see things otherwise. You say your say in your own humane way and luckily for us it’s a selling way and we don’t have to starve in a shanty, while you’re revolving the novel of the century.’

Emily sat down at the table and looked across at Stephen, who was sitting in a large armchair. He had thrown his shoes and then his socks across the room.

She said, ‘You simply don’t see how cheap is this life we’re living.’

‘All right, I apologize, I have the cheapness of my forefathers, without their ability to turn it into business success.’

‘Oh, shut up. Don’t I love you and understand you? I wake up at night and think and think. I don’t get enough sleep.’

‘You’d get more sleep if you didn’t take those pills.’

She began to laugh, ‘What a stupidity is a woman’s life, those true women and mothers Godfrey was mewing about. Didn’t you gag yourself at his bold words? I know you do. You screech at me but then you go and hide your head in the library out of shame for us both.’

But Stephen began shrieking at her, ‘You make me mad: shut up! Do you think I’m so thick-skinned? And what are we to do? The Party is out to get me, God knows why; and here you go around making things more difficult for me. That attack was on me, not on you: Godfrey doesn’t know it. They think you’re a side-show already and instead of hanging your head and listening to the great man, the great stone faces of the Party, you argue back. I blushed for you tonight. Why can’t you let Moffat Byrd act the little tin Jesus and have his say. Suppose it is the line that Lenin said Rockefeller was progressive! Suppose he did say it? Suppose for once you’re wrong, the wisdom of the lumberjacks is cockeyed and American cannibalism-capitalism is progressive. Suppose the Russian system is a leap and we’re going round the easy way! Here I’ve come out, upped stakes in the east, come out here in a keenly competitive market where everyone’s watching every move and we’ve committed the unpardonable sin of really making big money as free-lances, which no one said anyone could; but the goddamn Howards did it and that’s why they’ve got it in for us—and so they’re trying to get us out on Party lines—’

‘Stephen! Stephen!’ shrieked Emily.

‘OK. Sacrilege! But you know it and I know it. So instead of bowing the head and keeping in with the boys, you’re sassing them all the evening and asking them about primitive socialism. Primitive socialism is just about as useful as primitive methodism in the war of the worlds. That’s all over. OK. I’m not going to give up the Party or the boys’ favour, because if I didn’t have that, I’d have nothing. I must have their esteem. I gave up my family, its money and its esteem. I must have something.’

Emily said, ‘Then it’s like religion or a desperate love affair, akin to waving the stars and stripes at the end of a Broadway flop, it’s a neck-saving, soul-saving device. I’m not looking to anyone to save me. Why? Because I’ve got my two fists, just like any Irish worker or bohunk back in the rolling mills. I’m sorry you were converted to socialism. Now you feel that there’s no ground under your feet. And so, though you hate and despise Browderism and you were always against it in the east, now you’re as mild as a ewe-lamb. It’s the Party boys or me.’

‘You’ve put it in a nutshell: the boys or you. I’m not going to fight with the boys. I didn’t go through all that just to be hoofed out on my ear by a lousy lot of opportunists that I know the inner smell of. I’m going to stick around till they acknowledge either I’m right or I’m so sticky with piety and holiness that they’ll have to keep me on even if it turns their stomachs.’

Emily’s broad chest was heaving and her cheeks were red. Her eyes sparkled and a tic continually lifted her mouth as if she were smiling ironically. Her tears dried up. She thoughtlessly began to make some coffee and laid out cups and plates, on a clean cloth. While the coffee was heating, she turned to her husband with a smile, ‘I’m prepared to fight Hollywood: why not you?’