Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (26 page)
Read Moloch: Or, This Gentile World Online
Authors: Henry Miller
Tags: #Literary, #Romance, #Brooklyn (New York; N.Y.), #Fiction, #General
“Sour music with a vengeance,” chuckled Moloch.
“I love it, love it!” Valeska ripped out with becoming passion.
A nigger, dancing lightly, brought the gin, and as he poured the drinks his feet kept moving, shuffling, working with the music.
Valeska looked up at Moloch with frank admiration, her lips slightly parted, luscious-looking, warm as the tip of Ceylon. Someone said of a great tragedienne that her eyes were like a drowsy flame. So were Valeska’s. She wore a pale yellow gown that was almost transparent; it matched the faint bronze of her skin. It became her admirably, and she knew it.
“I want to do as I please tonight,” she said, squeezing the hand that rested on her knee, that burned her like a branding iron. “You didn’t tell me what happened when you got home this evening.” She made a little pout, as though she were ruffled by his thoughtlessness.
“You haven’t given me a chance! God, you look wonderful, do you know it?”
“Say that again!” She gave his hand another squeeze. He felt her limbs trembling between his own. “Now tell me,” she went on as if nothing had happened, “wasn’t Blanche curious about the money?”
He smiled blandly. “Naturally!”
“Well, what did she say? Don’t make me drag it out of you.”
“Oh, I gave her another one of my fifty-seven cock-and-bull stories.” He topped this off with a gulp of gin which twisted his face into a wry grimace.
Valeska’s gaiety seemed at the point of evaporation. “I suppose I’ll be listening to them, too, someday,” she added with a pensive air.
He was enjoying the flavor of the place too much to permit himself to become annoyed by her pensive mood. Women were always talking about the end. There was time to develop that theme later. Just now—he looked at her tenderly, raised the glass to his lips again, and threw a glance above her head at the colorful throng on the floor, huddled in grotesque embraces. They were being jostled and pushed about by a turbid mass of glistening humanity. The voluptuous tide lapped against the frail tables that formed a cordon about the dance floor. The reek of perfume and barbaric crash of sound almost whipped them into one another’s arms.
“Come on and dance,” he whispered hoarsely.
She closed her eyes and permitted him to crush her like a sheaf of wind bending before a storm. He murmured something in her ear, over and over. The words fell on her ears like a torrent of liquid fire. Whatever barriers had existed between them were beaten down like chaff.... They were gyrating in the midst of a turbulent mob whose civilized veneer had been checked at the door. Above the raucous din rose exhausting trombone smears and the libidinous wail of the saxophones. “Hold me tight,” whispered Valeska, “hug me, squeeze me....” Her pleas were like the snarl of an exasperated bitch.
Here and there were a few white faces, women sheathed in silk, with gleaming arms and necks, men in dinner coats—just a sprinkling of pale faces in a grotto of wide-eyed, expectant blacks. Dusky limbs and bodies flashed and poised, and flashed again in a frenzied ritual of eccentric gestures. With bland, sylphlike motions the leader distilled a blare of vertiginous fanfares: barrel-organ tunes, orchestrion studies, ocarina solos. The sourish, velvety tones of the clarinet were lost in a sonorous snuffle. Jazz reared its anonymous bestial voice.
The dance ended spectacularly in one final discordant wail. Valeska and Moloch sat down to drink and stare intoxicatingly at each other. Suddenly the lights were dimmed and a stocky
mulatto in full-length saffron tights appeared.
“She has the refined grandeur of a murderess,” cried Valeska, quoting for Moloch’s approval the words of an immortal Frenchman. Her eyes were flashing, her entire body alive with the vigor of an unrestrained imagination. They sat back and watched this “murderess” with the brass bellows as she paused for a space at each tiny table to do her stunt, and then pass on.
“Mah daddy rocks me with one steady roll;
Dere ain't
no slippin’ when he once takes hol’
…”
With repetition of this verse at each glutted table she threw in a few suggestive movements and held out her hand like an organ grinder. Valeska extracted a greenback from her purse in readiness for her coming. A dazzling spotlight accompanied the movements of the saffron tights as the “murderess” passed from table to table, repeating the performance, shoving greenbacks down her flaccid bosom. Meanwhile the epileptics on the dais kept pouring forth an explosive mixture of trip-hammer rhythms that affected the very chemistry of the blood. With nervous, angular pulsations they shook out a gorgeous fretwork of counterpoint, like vague theorems of watered silk. Glittering clusters of lapidary chords, following upon one another like the incessant beat of a tom-tom, disclosed gusts of wind and fading sounds, fluffy clouds of silk with flowers, skeletons in decollete, athletic robust limbs swelling with sap and blood. There was a fury in their eyes, at the climax, like dark hot coals, and in their cavernous flapping mouths the thick blood beat.
The mulatto’s performance ended on a split in a parrot-blue spotlight.
“You should have brought me here before,” murmured Valeska, breathing heavily. A riot of sensations deluged her in quick succession. The cheap gin permeated her guts. She was like a house afire.
Her eyes roamed over the boisterous groups. They brimmed with unfeigned admiration.
“They’re real, aren’t they?” she said excitedly.
“Real?” echoed Moloch. “I’ll say so! No neuroses, no inhibitions, eh?” It seemed to him that he had darned few himself.
Valeska had expected a different response. “Do you find them attractive, that’s what I mean,” she asked. “Could you make love to them—to one like that over there?” She pointed to a tawny female with straight black hair and aquiline features who reclined in the arms of a ferocious-looking buck.
“
He
seems to find her attractive.”
Apparently Moloch was unwilling to commit himself. Valeska had broached an idea that was not at all new to him. There were Negresses he had glimpsed on the street, not necessarily pale ones, either, who proved more enticing—some of them, at least—than any white woman he could think of. He had even followed them on occasion, wondering if he could screw up sufficient courage to engage them in conversation.
He realized that Valeska’s enthusiasm was not a mere expression of idle rapture. She was fully aware of the dark blood in her veins. At times she became morbid about it and shrunk out of sight like a leper, or she would ask him at the most unexpected moments (when they were riding in a bus, or dancing in a public place) if he wasn’t just a little bit ashamed of her.
This unwonted ardor of hers, this curious medley of exultation, of savage pride and ostentatious affection, made him slightly uncomfortable. He looked her straight in the eyes as she went on to accuse him of discarding his habitual frankness. Her eyes were smoldering; they leaped ahead of her words, inflaming his senses, making him sick with desire.
What was she going to do—start a scene? Was it the cheap booze talking, or had she dragged him here purposely to reveal her inmost self? She was pretty well oiled. He hoped she wouldn’t go blotto … not in this Eldorado of lust.
Another entertainer had taken the floor. “Get the words of this, Valeska.” As he spoke he detected the big buck with the woman Valeska had pointed out ogling the latter wickedly. He nodded toward the amorous couple and whispered: “You have an admirer over there.”
Meanwhile the performer was crooning:
“Ah wouldn’t be where Ah am,
Feelin’ lak Ah am,
Doin’ what Ah am,
Ef you hadn’t gone away.
…”
When the entertainer had concluded Moloch nodded toward the big buck again and said: “Let’s call him over, what do you say?”
“Splendid!” she answered. “And you take his woman, eh?”
The music opened with a crash of carbolic tartness. He reeled among the swirling figures in a shaft of cobalt blue. In the middle of the floor stood a big Ethiopian with a red sweater. He acted as master of ceremonies. His nostrils, the color of roast veal, were distended and quivering. His ears had the puffy quality of a frankfurter skin. He glowered ferociously at the reeking bodies, taut and tingling, which brushed by him in all directions.
Moloch kept his eyes riveted on Valeska. Now and then he stole a timid glance at the dusky creature whose body was fastened to his with the impersonality of a brassiere clinging to the redoubtable bosom of a courtesan. Two splotches of rouge overlaid the deep cinammon of her cheeks. As she moved, with tigerish grace and vigor, the clanking of her crude adornments accompanied the violence of her gestures.
“Are you nervous, honey?” she inquired. At the same time she increased the convulsive movements of her loins.
Moloch forgot about Valeska entirely. He had a dry, indescribable sensation in his palate; his temples throbbed madly. He clasped his hands about her back and strove to imitate the careless freedom of his more primitive associates. “Your hands are hot, honey,” she murmured, resting her cheek softly against his. This simple gesture so completely unnerved him that he lost the power of locomotion. He stood still and crushed her to him, his lips fastened to her odorous throat.
There was nothing repulsive about it
.
The fragrance of her body exhilarated him. The warm blood tingled in his veins and gave him the illusive strength of a stallion.
“You’ve got to keep moving, honey,” came the voice of the
creature panting in his arms. Out of the corner of her eye she surveyed the bouncer in the red sweater.
They moved in closer to the voodoo workers on the platform. A brass whine, like a little child’s fear, yammered MOM-MER … MOM-MER! The brazen impudence of the cornet smote his ears and sent a chill down his spine. From the trombone came exasperating mocking glissades which made him tighten his steely grip on the fluttering form that shivered in his arms. She looked up at him and sang with burning lips:
“Not on the first night, baby,
An’ mebbe not a-tall!”
Whirling in and out among the reeking, glistening figures, flecked with quixotic shadows, he pushed her before him savagely. The maddening, hurried flurries of the strings swept them away into a limbo of insensate lust. From time to time, in breathless interludes, the musicians leaned forward over the edge of the platform, the full moon of their faces wrinkled and creased by huge steeplechase grins; brusque jets of creosote spilled over the heads of the revolving figures.
“Well, how was it?” asked Valeska, trembling and breathless, as he rejoined her at the table.
“Like nothing that ever was before.” He wiped the beads of perspiration from his forehead.
“Want to try it again?”
“Hell,
no!
”
he stammered. “I’d go hermantile.” He suggested leaving.
Nevertheless they stayed. They stayed until the last horn brayed its last. When the lights went out it was on a scene of utter pandemonium.
“I wonder what the hour is,” he remarked, as he led Valeska to the cloakroom. It had just occurred to him that his wife had a serious engagement with the doctor in the next few hours. Perhaps she’d expect him to go along with her.
Valeska was singing to herself, staggering all over the place, oblivious of everything but her own pleasurable sensations. He grasped her arm, not too gently, and looked at her wristwatch.
Just then the performer with the full-length saffron tights came along. She was full of gin and song. She began to hum:
“Ah looked at the clock and the clock struck six;
Ah said, Now daddy, do you know any more tricks?”
He listened indulgently, flung a wrap over Valeska’s shoulders, and started to carry her up the stairs. Valeska clung to him as if he were a fireman rescuing her from the burning flames. “Love me, Dion, love me,” she murmured, kissing him with an ardor that he found impossible to match. A few grinning bucks passed them on the stairs, offering silent congratulations, happy because they were happy.
A string of cabs were lined up at the curb. It was an everyday dawn in Harlem: drab, dingy, streaked with tenement cornices. A bevy of sawdust dolls, some white, some brown, some black as the royal prostitute of the Apocalypse, bounced out upon the chalky streets of Bedlam. They teetered at the gutter, stacked like a deck of cards waiting for a new deal. Thought Moloch: “Me for the laminated queen of diamonds gleaming like a bunch of carbuncles under the blue arc light … or that tall venereal flower in the buttonhole of the ace of spades whose mug is so wonderfully damasked with eruptions!”
As they flung a last glance out of the cab window out came the Great-I-Am, with his starch-front hierarchy, marching splayfooted down the Avenue. Mr. Mumbo-Jumbo (in full-dress suit and celluloid collar) walking home to the “Paludal Ooze Blues.” Under his right arm he carried a black funerary case containing a breath from the plagues of Egypt.