Set This House on Fire (22 page)

“How does all of this apply to Mason?”

“Well first—Let me explain a little something. I don’t mean to be blowing my own horn, or singing the blues, either, but—well, I’ve come up where I am—I’ll admit it isn’t very far—pretty much the hard way, as I guess you know. I didn’t get past the second year up there in this miserable little high school in North Carolina, even now I have the toughest time writing and punctuating and so on. But I did learn to read and I’ve read a lot on my own hook, and I guess I’ve read ten times what the average American has, although God knows that could mean only one book. Anyway, I guess one of the big turning points in my life was right after the war, when I got discharged from the psycho ward of that naval hospital I was telling you about, in California. There was this chief noodle specialist there—one hell of a guy. He was a Navy captain, name of Slotkin. I’d told him about my schoolboy interest in painting, and he got me in one of these therapy painting classes, and I reckon I was a painter from then on out. That’s how I ended up after the war in New York instead of back in Carolina, I guess. Anyway, we couldn’t come to any agreement whatsoever about my melancholia or whatever it was, with its manic-depressive overtones, but I had a lot of long talks with him, and there was some patient gentle quality the guy had that almost swung me out of my blues, and just before I left the place—uncured—he gave me a two-volume edition of Greek drama. It was quite irregular and all, I guess, this gift from a full Navy captain to a buck private in the Marines, but I guess he saw something in me, even if I wasn’t about to buy any of his Freud. I remember he told me this: ‘Read this when you’re down and out.’ Something like: ‘The fact of the matter is this, you know, we haven’t advanced any farther than the Greeks, after all.’ Which you’ve got to admit is pretty cool talk, coming from a reverend brain doctor. He was quite a sweet guy, old Slotkin.

“Anyway, when you mentioned how I started quoting at length from Sophocles that night, it all came back to me. The sweat and the horror and this bleeding awful view into the abyss. Long before I ended up in Sambuco I’d memorized great hunks and sections. out of those two volumes. And when you saw me that night I was really in a bad way—as blind-drunk off of
Oedipus
as I was off of booze.” He paused and fingered ruminatively at the edge of the knife. “Yet here’s the thing, you see. Let me explain if I can.” He paused again and closed his eyes, almost prayerfully, as if coaxing reluctant memories from the confusion of the past. “I was so completely blind. Stoned. Something you said … which has to do with this evil I was talking about.” His eyelids parted, and he turned. “Yes, I think I’m getting some of it. More of it’s coming back now. I do remember just in the dimmest way going upstairs. The piano, no. But
Oedipus,
and Cripps, and you—yes, a little.” He shook his head. “No, there’s some connection I can’t make yet. Jesus Christ, you’d think we were having a bleeding seance. I was trying to search for something that night … But now it’s all gone again. Do you think it could be that I had come up there to chew Mason’s ass out with a little
Oedipus?
No, I doubt it.” He shook his head again, violently. “All I know now is that I had some sort of drunken truth that I’d dredged up out of that play, and that it sure as hell had to do with evil, and that Mason…”

He stopped and, very calmly, lit a cigar. “But I might be mistaken,” he added. “What did you really think of Mason?” he said then, turning.

“Oh I just don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to explain him, I never have known. He was a jerk. A big spoiled baby with too much money and a lot of pretensions. He was the world’s worst liar. He hated women. He was a lousy mess. And yet—”

“Yet what?”

“Yet he was great fun to be with sometimes. He was entertaining as hell. But he was more than an entertainer. Remove all the other stuff and he might have been quite a guy.”

“How long did you know him, really?”

“That’s an odd thing,” I said. “I knew him a couple of years at school. And then for a week or so in New York, right after the war. I can’t recall how long exactly. Ten days. Maybe a couple of weeks. We’ll call it a week. And then that day in Sambuco. And that was all. But—” I paused. “But still and all there was something about him. I mean you could see him for twenty-four hours and he would reveal more about himself than most people do in a lifetime. He was a—” I halted. I really didn’t know what he was.

“Tell me about him,” Cass said.

“Well, it’s not really a whole lot,” I said. “I don’t think I could exactly—”

“Tell
me anyway,” he said.

So I tried to tell him. I tried to tell him everything I could remember. I told him how at first I had lost track of Mason after that dismal week end down in Virginia and how, though we wrote each other for a while (he was in Palm Beach, Havana, Beverly Hills, New York, usually with Wendy; his letters were lewd and comical), our correspondence petered out and he dropped from sight altogether. I told him, too, how ten years—to the month—passed before I ran into him after the war, quite by accident, in a New York bar…

No doubt it is too easy to say that had I not met Mason again things would have turned out differently, that, having lost touch with one another, we would not have restored our old communion of spirit—a dignified phrase for “palship” or some other term equally American and specious, but which, once re-established, allowed him to invite me down to Sambuco. Most of our existence, though, is made up of such imponderables; the important thing is that we met again. It was in the late spring, a week or so before I got the Agency job and sailed for Europe. I had very little money at that time but a job with a veteran’s counseling service allowed me to eat after a fashion and to rent a tiny cardboard apartment on West Thirteenth Street. It was a humid season, with muggy twilights crowned high with thunderheads and a grumble of storms that never came, wilted faces along the avenues, and windows thrown open on the heat-blown air erupting blurred music and voices ballyhooing war, cold war, threats of war. Evenings I tried to read uplifting books in my apartment, but my soul was illequipped for the stress of loneliness. My room was a place of subterranean murk with a view of an airshaft and an adjoining hotel where old men constantly shambled by, scratching themselves, flushing remote toilets. But it was only in part because of my surroundings that this time of my life was not a very satisfactory one. There are certain periods in youth which are not touched by even a trace of nostalgia, one’s conduct at that time seems so regrettable. Never very fastidious anyway, I became wholly unkempt, and was sour and spiteful to the girls I tried to pick up in Village hangouts. And to top it all, Mason came into my life—in a jammed bar on Sheridan Square during an evening’s prowl that had left me more than usually lonesome and disheveled, and with my carcass burdened with mean-spirited lusts.

Except that he had taken on a little bit more weight, he had not changed at all. He was dressed in an elegant turtle-neck jersey and blue jeans, looking very much the artist from top to toe—though an artist with money—and he seemed to be enjoying himself. I saw his grinning face through the smoke of the room, one hand held high, flourishing a schooner of beer. Even now I remember how our eyes met in the flicker of a glance, my sudden shock of delight darkened by a half-hope that he had not recognized me—both of these feelings almost simultaneous and in such confusion that I had no time to make up my mind whether to rise and shout hello or to steal silently out, before he was on top of me, thumping me on the back—“Hey, Petesy, let’s flap off on a wild one!” he cried—and falling around my shoulders with loud hoots of recognition.

“What an absolutely fabulous coincidence,” he said, when he had quieted down. “At a dinner I was at last night I was talking to this guy—a very fine painter—and we got to talking about the people we had known at school. I said I couldn’t speak for Princeton, having been eased out my first year. Do you know, I got booted out for the most undistinguished reason. Petesy, dollbaby, let’s face it, I’m a brilliant man but as far as education goes I’m simply a horsefly on the ass of progress.”

I would have had to be a more stolid individual than I am not to have been warmed by his energy, his big grin, and by the note in his voice, as he clapped me on the shoulder, of honest affection. I must have smiled, saying: “But, Mason, how did you get
in?”

“You mean after I got kicked out of St. A.’s? Oh, Wendy pulled some wires through one of her relatives and got me into a chic reform school up in Rhode Island. They drilled you with rifles and all that crap but I bore down hard—you know, for the glory of Wendy-dear—and I got good grades. That, though, Petesy, is what they call a non sequitur. Because I
didn’t
get booted out of college for boffing or drinking or anything sordid. But for my grades! Grades! Can you imagine anything so absurd? And I tested out with an I.Q. of 156! This
gluttonous
widow I was week-ending with on Sutton Place just kept me away from the books. Poor Wendy. The old man had kicked in with I don’t know how many bushels of dough to the library, and when she came up to Princeton I thought she was going to take the place apart …”

“Look out, Mason, you’re spilling beer on your pants. How is Wendy, by the way?”

“Oh, she’s fine. She tried to go on the wagon after the old man died. I guess you heard about him. She goes on and off, poor thing, but I haven’t had to give her the cure for months and months. Chloral hydrate and Cream of Wheat. You know, it’s a funny thing. You know how she used to absolutely loathe Merryoaks? Well, after the old man went to his reward, as they say, you couldn’t get her away from there, absolutely fell in love with the place. Sits down there and slurps Old Crow all by herself, and rides around on this big horse. My wife and I—you’ll meet the wife—anyway, we were down there last week end. It’s the biggest goddam horse you ever saw. And off she goes, loping down the riverbank, with this new boy friend she’s got. He’s a seventy-year-old Belgian and he’s gotten her all interested in something called Zen. I think they shoot arrows at each other. Jesus sake, Petesy,” he chuckled, wiping foam from his lips, “I don’t know who’s sleeping with who down there. I think the horse is getting the best part of it.” He began to shake and tremble with quiet interior laughter. “Ah Jesus,” he sighed, “Petesy, it’s great to see you again. I knew if I ran into you at all it’d be in a purgatory of the spirit like this. You know, Wendy still asks about you all the time. She had a real sneaker for you, you know? I think it must have been because you kept your mouth shut. She was so sick and tired of the old man. He kept yowling into her ear all the time, trying to smoke out her psyche, no wonder she took to the sauce. Poor Wendy,” he said, with a sudden wistful look, “I’ll have to get her up here so she can see you. What with that spooky Belgian and that horse and all that sauce she’ll end up for certain in some laughing academy.

“Anyway,” he went on, “that’s beside the point.” He was not drunk (although he liked drinking, I recalled that even as a boy he was not particularly addicted to it, which always struck me as a noteworthy deliverance) but a bright hilarity burbled up in his voice, and his eyes were twinkly and agitated. “What I was telling that guy last night is that of all the dozens of little schoolmates I ever had there was only one I’d walk around the corner to see again. And then I mentioned your name—old Petesy—and I wondered what you were doing. It’s fantastic! It’s pure clairvoyance. So what are you doing? Tell me.” But before I could pop my mouth open to reply he was tugging at my sleeve. “The love of my life,” he was saying. “Come over here and meet her.”

I remember my surprise at the idea of Mason’s being married, and I studied the girl—a slow-stirring blonde named Carole who gave me a warmed-over smile and kept displaying her handsome bosom in a sort of habitual shrug of weariness. In the booth beside her sat a red-haired, blanched, unwell-looking young couple in blue jeans—I think they were called the Pennypackers—who like a pair of caged foxes stared up at me out of the gloom, fixing me with their feral, glittering eyes. They made no word of greeting, but doted on Mason in a conversation thick with small yaps and noises of innuendo—about a week end at Provincetown and someone named Gus and someone named Wally—and finally, when they got up to go, Mason lent them ten dollars from an enormous bankroll (I thought it must have been a lapse, for even as a boy he had never been so graceless as to be ostentatious about his cash), upon which they battened their little aqueous, lashless eyes in one brief hot glance of conspiratorial greed before slipping out into the night. I recall wondering how these two, who seemed so down-at-the-heel and uninspired, had come to be Mason’s friends, but even before I could begin tentatively to pump him, he had answered my question, saying: “He’s in Theater”—he capitalized the noun—“he hasn’t got a cent and he’s a terrible ass but he reads scripts for the Playwrights’ Company. He’s got the first act of this play I’m writing. If they don’t do it I’m almost certain Whitehead will put it on next year, once I get it finished. It’s that second act that’s such a ball-breaker. Did you catch those two? Funny thing is—did you notice?—they look exactly alike. I really think she’s his sister. And she’s the weirdest one in the act. Jesus, I’d love to see them in action. I bet it’s like trying to stuff a marshmallow into a piggy bank.”

None of Mason’s drolleries were lost on Carole, who punctuated his talk with throaty little commas of mirth and giggles which she employed without stint whenever he opened his mouth. She was a hefty, good-looking girl with milky skin and a rich, contralto, barrelhouse voice and elliptical green eyes that mirrored almost nothing save an imperturbably confident passion. She looked openminded and procreative, a soft acquiescent woman, dimly in love. Her raucous voice betrayed her—it was pure Greenpoint—depressing me about Mason’s taste in mates, though I couldn’t help feeling a bachelor’s itch and envy over what he had acquired otherwise.