Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (33 page)

The woman listened to him as if he were a broken shutter slapping against a stone wall. She had expected a radically different tune. If a palliative had been necessary she was there with a harmless little fib or two up her sleeve.

“A man’s home is his palace, eh what? God, that supper smells inviting! I should have said ‘an Englishman’s home.’ Come on in. Don’t stick your head in the crack like that. You’re not afraid of me, are you? How about some wine … or a little marmalade?”

The old harridan wagged her solemn, tousled head.

“Well, as you please,” he mumbled, and fell to.

He finished the meal hastily. The bottle he had dug up stood on the table untouched. “Drink deep,” said the poet, “or taste not of the Pierian spring.” He walked into the living room on pads of velvet. The disorder which greeted him was a philosophic disorder. It reminded him of a chapter from
Creative Evolution
.
He was accustomed to thinking of this room as a birdcage in which his intoxicated guests deposited their cigarette butts, crumbs of
Streusselkuchen
.
But now he thought, “Only a German can be annoyed by untidiness.” He sat down at the piano and crossed his legs. With his left foot on the right-hand pedal he
played the opening measures of Stojowski’s “Love Song.” His technique was rusty. He uncrossed his legs and turned to Czerny’s studies in velocity. “Bah!” he muttered disconsolately. “Life is too rich to be squandered in exercises.” Anyway, it was getting too late in the day to ever become a musician. He wished someone had taught him a ruder instrument. Somewhere he had once read of artists returning to their cold garrets in the Latin Quarter and silencing their hunger with an accordion…. Probably Delineator artists!

He got up and took a seat in a low-cushioned armless chair. Did Blanche ever think of the associations wrapped up in that chair? he asked himself. To tell the truth, he hadn’t thought about that chair for three years himself. It belonged to another period—the period called courtship. Marriage dissolves courtship just as vinegar dissolves pearls. (Cleopatra once dissolved her pearls in an effort to swallow a fortune.) A sentimental song from Laubscher’s Biergarten came to his lips: “Es War So Schon Gewesen.” … Try that on your piano when the sands of the desert grow cold.

His fingers were toying with the frazzled edges of an unframed picture. It was done in crayon on a piece of pasteboard. The edges were fat and greasy, like a well-used pack of playing cards. The picture had hung in the one spot so long it had almost lost its meaning. But it seemed a wonderful study now—an eloquent expression of the artist’s joy. The peace that hung in the room made the picture dance. The appearance of the room was, as usual, drab. If anything it was a trifle drabber, filthier. But the peace that was in his heart transformed everything.

The young lady who had made the sketch was dead. She had become so thoroughly saturated with the drunkenness of life that she up and killed herself one day. She up and killed herself out of sheer joy. It’s the fashion nowadays to deride such tales. It is said “people don’t do such things … out of joy!” Or some “smart aleck,” as Stanley would say, will mention Dostoevsky … as though only in Russian literature, among the epileptoid geniuses, do we encounter such … such—shall we call it—
bravado
?
But Milka had acted in precisely this manner. He
turned the sketch over. On the back she had penciled:
“
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
.”
That was her idea about everything. Wherever she went, she used to affix as her seal and signature this quotation from Augustus Caesar’s prime ballyhoo artist. Perhaps it sounds indelicate to mention this, but it was so—she had even put her signature on the toilet box one day. The sound of gurgling water trickling through the drainpipes—that, too, she had to lend the stamp of her approval … the
“
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
.”
A great girl, Milka!

He examined the work carefully. There was a great superabundance of vitality in it. He scrutinized it meticulously, as if it were the very first time he had looked upon it…
It represented a female nude, with Nile-green hair, squatting on her haunches. The interstices made by the junctions of her arms and legs were outlined by black triangles, some isosceles, some scalene. The one which a casual observer would notice first was a daring scalene, within the boundaries of which the artist had traced her initials. For the most part, the stuff of which this nude was made was nothing more than the untouched pasteboard. The crayon had been employed most liberally for the highlights and the luminous shadows of her contours, the artist being of the opinion of Mallarmé, whose dictum it was that “to name is to destroy, to suggest is to create.” If one looked more closely at these innocent highlights fantastic shapes emerged: the hostile poise of a cobra along the right forearm, a penguin airily traced along the shinbone of the left leg, and an Achilles heel (Milka insisted it was
“
Achilles
”)
on the visible breast, a great Amazonian breast that seemed chiseled in marble. The nipple of the breast was a bright drop of blood. It was the brightest spot, with the possible exception of the lips, in the entire conception. Despite the railway curves of her crouch, the subject revealed more straight lines than the human figure can be said to boast. One such line was made of the top of the right hand, which might conveniently have supported a card tray, only Milka had seen fit to rest on it a cumulus cloud through which a wild goose was flying. Milka had insisted it was a wild goose, though it was so conventionalized, and had such a rigidity, that everyone said it
resembled a roast turkey. However, if the artist saw a wild goose, a wild goose it must have been.... The reader must be aware, at this point, that Milka was untrammeled by academic canons.... Irritation was likewise often expressed by the liberties that Milka had taken with the right knee of the nude. The knee had been sacrificed to the imagination, owing to the enormous length of the upper leg, which which would have been cramped in the narrow confines of its pasteboard frame. When Milka was taken to task for this desecration, she observed in her quaint way that only a master could do justice to the knee of a virgin. But surely the nude had two knees? Absolutely! (Milka had not borrowed her subject from a Coney Island freak show.) But the other knee was hidden, you understand, and very skillfully, too, by a huge pendant breast which forever threatened to be metamorphosed into a cataract of human gore.… There was one other object, in the foreground, which deserves mention. It had no other reason for existence than the artist’s will. What it was can only be conjectured. Milka styled it a geranium
without a flower pot
.
She never said simply—a geranium. It was always a
geranium
without a flower pot
,
as if some mystic import were to be attached to the naming of an invisible object. It sounded very much as if one were to say—”Beethoven without a hat.”

Supposing you were in the habit of placing your cane in a certain corner of the office, and then one day you were to march in absentmindedly, like a proofreader, and place it in the spittoon. Now the same incongruity applied to this Amazon’s breast. It was as importunate as a harelip…. As Moloch concentrated his powers upon it his mind raced back to another Amazon … a buxom,
two-breasted
Amazon by the name of Cora. There was a time when to have possessed Cora would have meant his soul’s salvation.

But Cora is out of the picture....

“Can a man by taking thought add a cubit to his stature?” He pondered that as if the words were stuck under his nose in six-inch Goudy type.

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Aye, he pondered that, too.

When a man takes to feeling deeply he is apt to let the Bible go to his head; he is apt to forget that the love his wife bears him is a caldron of hate which she delights in heaping anew each day upon his head. For what did her love—
their
love—amount to? It was nothing less than an unholy antagonism that had reached such bounds as to resemble more the celebrated Darwinian struggle than a bed of roses. If his wife embraced him it was only to ask: “Whom do I remind you of now?” If he touched her familiarly, as a husband will, she bristled and said: “All you think of is sex.”

In his exalted spiritual condition much of the bitterness had dropped out of his soul. When a person loses the power of sight in one eye the other eye makes up for the deficiency … compensates, we say. So it was with these two. What he lost in powers of hatred Blanche supplied. No longer did he get up in the morning, draped in an old-fashioned nightshirt, and dance about her like a zany. It was disgustingly true that very often in the past he had carried on in a gross, buffoonish manner. It was true, also, that he had done so with the express purpose of irritating her. To rid his wife of that devastating glacial stare he had been capable, in the past, of resorting to any licentious prank. Better to see her rage than to withstand the cold, piercing hostility of the women. Sometimes, prompted by an inexplicable diabolism, he would stand before his wife, making abscence grimaces, pelting her with vile epithets that made her wince and blanche. Why? To goad her into behaving like a human being. To befoul her, if necessary, in order to get that “reaction” Prigozi always spoke about. You see, he had already committed himself to that belief that he was dealing with a type of pathologic abnormality. He never defined the type; he was satisfied to call her a “diseased soul.” Blanche, in turn, made her own diagnoses. She used the word “hyper-sexed.” No matter what the argument was about, no matter what turn the quarrel took, Blanche always ended up with “hyper-sexed.” She flung it at him as if it were a red-hot poker. Later, when he had time to reflect, and devoted his attention to analyzing her conduct, he found refuge behind such phrases as “vicious slut,” “ingrown Puritanism,” etc. And of all the afflictions that
humanity was heir to, he was ready to swear that Puritanism was the worst. There was something leprous about that condition of the soul. Its ravages brought a stench to the nostrils....

But this evening all such behavior, all the wanton, vicious thoughts which he was able to summon on the slightest provocation, vanished. He could scarcely wait for Blanche to appear. Never again was she to suffer for any deviltry of his … not even if she ridiculed him and taunted him. He looked back upon his cruel, senseless behavior with abhorrence. “By God!” he swore. “This madness must come to an end!”

He reviewed kaleidoscopically the stormy course of their marital career. A conviction began to steal over him that his had been the blame, his entirely. Thinking back to one quarrel upon another, he could put his finger on the root of every one …
himself
.

Oh, if Blanche would only walk in now, this very minute, that he might sweep away all her hatred, all her profound disgust, and prostrate himself at her feet. “Blanche,” he murmured aloud, “Blanche, my poor little dear, it is I who am guilty … I, I, I.”

At that moment he imagined himself another Raskolnikov, another assassin waiting for the words of a Sonya: “Go to the marketplace and kneel before the multitude. Go and confess your sins. Speak to God in the public square; pray to him on your knees, so that every one may hear….” He got down on his knees. He made his appeal to the Almighty. No snout-faced moujik ever prayed more lustily. His prayers were woven in the strands of her hair, in the letters of her name.

And, even as he did so, the door opened gently. Blanche stood there listening.

Her first temptation was to laugh. Never had she seen a more grotesque object than this figure, this obscene bedmate of hers, huddled in an attitude of reverence. She had a wanton desire to laugh outright—a spiteful, mocking laugh that would chill the very marrow of his bones. But the prayerful babble from his blasphemous lips, the earnest flood, so unlike the scoffer she had known, silenced her. She heard the sound of her name as she had never heard it before. For the instant she was touched; her hatred was at the point of melting before this devout furnace. But, at
that very moment when, overwhelmed by this example of sincerity, she was about to throw herself at his feet and pour out her affection so fiercely withheld, a morbid, blighting suspicion entered her brain. With a blinding radiance the idea flashed through her mind that he was … yes, that he was
jealous
.

The knowledge that he loved her increased her bitterness. Her faint lease of gladness was despoiled by the swollen floods of resentment that welled up in her and urged her impulsively to wrest from him the last drop of servitude.... Hitherto his jealousies had been the sullen, fitful fires of a vengeful spirit. They were of short duration and but added fuel to the flames of discord. Never had she witnessed such an attitude of contrition … the more convincing, too, since her arrival was unanticipated. Was it, though? She indulged in a fleeting perplexity, as if to diagnose from past performances the cause of this abject surrender.

When he realized her presence in the room, in spite of himself, a chill came over him. He had in mind, when this moment should arrive, to throw himself at her feet… and evacuate his emotions. He had imagined that when the door should open, and the miracle of his deliverance rend him, all the pent-up agonies of his shameful ways would bubble over and flood her in a glamorous spate of words. Now they stood face to face, each trying to pierce the veil which separated them. She was mute, impenetrable, unapproachable. And yet a passion stormed through her blood, took possession of her heart, and leaped with the turbulence of a freshet to the fastness of her lips. A wistful expression gathered between her eyes, like a low-hanging fog pressing against two arc lights. She no longer remembered that her soul had been smashed to bits on their Procrustean marriage bed; she was aware only of a gathering ache that clutched with tenacious fingers and hollowed her with groans.