Set This House on Fire (26 page)

Brooding over the outlandish picture, I had become wildly tickled in a helpless in-dwelling fashion, and I felt chuckles of laughter rising up in me and I turned around and let out a loud yuck, finally, which caused Mason to halt in mid-sentence, eyes level upon me.

“What’s so funny?” he said in an irritated voice. And as he spoke, the words he had been saying, so solemnly and with such passion, registered upon my mind belatedly, abruptly, as if a door had been thrown briskly open to let it all shamble in.

“Oh I don’t know, Mason,” I said, still grinning. “You aren’t serious about all this, are you? I’ve always thought sex was a lot of fun—wonderful, great, fabulous. The best thing on earth. But you seem to want to turn it into a cult, and a gloomy one at that.”

“You reveal yourself, dollbaby,” he said. His voice was airy, but a touch of irritation remained. “At its greatest, sex has always been a cult. Nurtured and refined like any other high art.” With a thin smile he removed the ostrich picture from my hand. “Squarest of the squares,” he added affably.

“A matter of taste, Mason,” I said.

But these two photographs—the one with Carole, and the one with Celia—still haunt me; they are as mnemonic as a fragrance, a scrap of music, a familiar voice which has not been heard for many years. I turn back to the first one, trying to extract its mood, comprehend it, place it in time—then all of a sudden (perhaps it’s only the memory in turn of the ostrich that does it, or the bedroom full of Swedes) I know what it is and I know what it means. Like one of those trick effects in the movies where for a long instant the scene becomes motionless—a skier suspended in mid-air, a diver rigid in a somersault or a comic prat fall with legs and arms stilled in frozen chaos above the floor—then once again rolls on, this picture suddenly achieves movement; indeed now, with very little effort of the imagination I am able to persuade myself that I am no longer viewing the scene, but am within it as I was so long ago, that my hand moves back just a bit, fidgeting, as, still half-blinded by the flashbulb, I watch Carole’s protuberant bulb of a tongue reach Mason’s neck and linger there, wet and fluttering, while at the same moment her well-fleshed paw steals forth to unzip his fly. Shades of the divine Marquis! How, after Mason’s dilations upon “group interplay” several nights before, it never occurred to me, until it was almost too late, that he had brought me to an orgy, mystified me then as it mystifies me now; I can only say in all honesty that I must have known, or suspected, that it was going to be one, and that deep down I desired orgiastic purgation, too.

Our host that evening, in a large, flossy apartment near Washington Square, was a famous young playwright called Harvey Glansner. Immediately after the war he achieved an astonishing success on Broadway with a play that with great courage, insight, and pity had laid bare, in terms of a lower-class New York family, the neurotic agony of our time. Then he had had several failures in a row, which in America, especially on Broadway, is the equivalent of the grave. Thereafter, to the distress of many who still saw in him the hope of American drama, his talent had gone to pieces; he took to writing a knotty kind of prose—articles mainly for the small quarterlies—in which he hymned and extolled the then burgeoning signs of juvenile delinquency, psychopaths, rapists, pimps, dope addicts and other maladjusted wretches until, finally descending into a sort of semicoherent pornography, he became unreadable (though not, as I expect he wished to be, unpunishable), except by a rather specialized intellectual in-group which applauded any sort of wicked stir, no matter how puerile. He wrote much about the solemnity of the orgasm, its lack and its pain, and its relationship to God. With all of this, he was a gifted writer, even after his fall from Broadway grace, and he might have found more general favor except for the fact that all of his essays gave to sex a reference of horror, discomfort and disgust: you may sentimentalize sex by confusing it with love, and still be read, but if you equate sex with unpleasurableness, you may expect your audience to be obscure, whether your bias is puritan or pornographic. “Like Dante, Harvey’s a real hater,” Mason said, adding that he was writing a biography called
Karl Marx: Giant in Orgasm.
I think it was from this Glansner that Mason drew his erotic inspiration. A pimply-faced, cadaverous young man, with a pot belly, beaked nose, and horn-rims, Glansner greeted us at the door with a meaningful (though to me, then, meaningless) smirk, and passed out the marijuana. I should describe the cast, which for an orgy I suppose was a meager one, though maybe not. There were eight of us—the forever-present Pennypackers, foxy as ever; Glansner and his wife, a sinuous golden-haired beauty with harlequin glasses, whose name I forget; and, as a kind of anchor man, myself, accompanied by a girl named Lila—whom Mason had dug up for me—a ripe and amiable stripper who from the beginning seemed far more knowing and dubious about the setup than I, drawing me aside early (it was not hard to do, for the sound of jazz was deafening and blue lightbulbs everywhere cast on each distant face a bruised, mortuary gloom) and saying, to my puzzlement: “Don’t let on now, baby, but I think I smell a fish.”

Now then, like many hectic recollections this one comes back to me in bits and flickers—blue lights, howling saxophones and the bittersweet odor of marijuana predominating. Glansner meandered back and forth for a while, snapping pictures with a huge Graflex. I think it was then that Carole went through the routine with Mason’s fly, only to be chided by him for her crudeness. Eschewing the weed, which seemed to have almost no effect on me, I stuck to a little red wine, and for most of the time sat hip to hip with Lila on a large white leather ottoman. Jazz, the music not of fusion but of fission, was a constant explosion in my face, and when it ceased, to allow the record-changer to softly whir and plip-plop, the silence was eerie and burdensome, and I recall wondering at the
tone
of this gathering, which from the outset had the mingled features of despair, hostility, and the deplorable inertia of a meeting of southern Baptist young people. I have since learned that marijuana stills the desire for speech; it certainly laid a heavy hand on conversation that night. Only Lila and I, islanded on our ottoman, tried to talk; as for the others, they had paired off on sofas and were puffing from cupped palms, wreathed in bluish fumes. After a time, however, came a slight stir of activity; there was now considerable faint, high, hollow giggling and our host arose to put some dance music on the phonograph: it had a soft bourgeois sound after all the jazz, but it must have been part of the ritual, because for one thing it allowed Mason to get up and with a tight tense look on his face to take Glansner’s beautiful wife in his arms and conduct her around the dim room in the semblance of a dance, rather falteringly, and with a great deal of unabashed and mutual hanky-panky in the lower regions.

I wish I could go into more generous detail about this orgy, but at just about this point the whole affair—for me, anyway, and for Lila—began to terminate. Outside of Mason’s pelvic work the only overt sexual act I stayed long enough to witness was between the Pennypackers, who climbed atop each other on a couch and, fully clothed, went through some frantic copulatory motions which, since they were married, brought from the others lazy, tolerant sniggers of laughter, as one might laugh at children who know the rudiments but nothing of the spirit of the game, and are also a bit touchingly anxious. A little later, while Mason danced, Glansner was nuzzling Carole in the shadows, muttering to her in a strange you-all, cotton-picking dialect (a few years later this became known as hip talk, but I did not know it at the time); the words he crooned drowsily were the gamiest in the language, and there was a compulsive, metronomic desolation in the way he said them that chilled me to the marrow, but if he calculated them to excite, and if my Lila was any barometer, he had made a serious miscalculation. Lila was a big healthy girl with a fine elastic bosom; she had been around, and there was no nonsense about her. When I turned to her—more than smelling that fish now—she said in a low voice: “I stopped smoking pot when I was sixteen years old. Somebody ought to tell that poor square to grow up and stop diddling himself. Does he think he’s giving her
kicks?
Look out, honey, here comes trouble.” The Pennypackers, down off their couch, were slithering toward us; we rose in unison, Lila and I, self-protectively, and danced off through the gloom, hugging the walls. “When I was performing in London,” she said, “they called a deal like this a na
h
sty. Which is just about exactly the word for it. Mason should have better sense. I’m a good party girl, but this is strictly not my cup of tea. What does he think I am, anyway, some sort of
tart?”
And then she pressed close. “Let’s get out of here, baby, and have something good and private.”

We danced for quite some time, close together, monogamously welded. There was a lot of stirring and groaning behind us and when at last we decided to go I turned to see Mason, standing fully illuminated in the doorway to the bedroom, his arm around a glassy-eyed and now unbodiced Mrs. Glansner, the two figures obscuring all except the face of Glansner himself, propped against the headboard of an enormous bed, and wearing (to my surprise, for I had expected something more mellow) the impotent, sepulchral look of a man separated by five minutes from the gallows.

As for Mason’s own expression: I think I must have anticipated the smoldering lust that one reads about in romantic novels, but all that was there—or so it seemed to me—was a kind of miserable and forsaken innocence.

“What’s the matter, Petesy?” he said. “You aren’t leaving, are you?” If there was not what one might call anguish in his voice, there was a sudden broken sense of loneliness, of abandonment, and as he said these words again, his voice rising—“You aren’t
leaving,
are you?”—I realized that he was honestly hurt by my defection. “Come on now, dollbaby,” he said cajolingly, though the hurt was still there, “you’re not going to chicken out,
really,”

“Lila’s not feeling well, Mason,” I lied.

I do not want to say which of us, Mason or I, was right or wrong; the question, if there is a question, is not a matter of either. But at the moment, aflame though I was with desire for Lila, I felt that it was exceedingly thick of Mason to fail to understand why I might not wish to take down my trousers and in harsh light, sweating cheek by jowl with the whole crowd—their eyes on me and mine on them—despairingly perform the joyous rites of love.

“O.K., Peter,” Mason said. “Back to Squaresville.”

Next morning, breakfasting with Lila after a full night, I think we discerned the most fitting irony of all when it occurred to us that though Mason might have had Mrs. Glansner, and Glansner Carole, the Pennypackers—like an abbreviated Paolo and Fran-cesca—had most probably had only each other. But then Lila grew sad. “Gee,” she said. “What do you suppose is eating Mason? With that wife of his—you know her?—a real doll. I think he must be flipping his lid, if you want to know the honest to God’s truth.”

There are gestures that linger in the mind. One bright day as Mason and Celia and I were driving to Long Island for lunch, Celia’s hand went up to the back of his head. “Look at his hair,” she said. “Look how it shines in the sunlight. Isn’t it just beautiful, Peter?” I cannot help but remark upon this characteristic that Celia shared with Wendy: the most outrageous flattery of their darling boy. But here the resemblance ends. Celia was something apart and by herself.

If Carole remains in my memory a large nocturnal blur, Celia was leaf, cloud, light, a daytime creature who had no part at all in Mason’s night-crawling. Indeed, so separate were Mason’s evenings and days, his life with Carole and his life with Celia, that except for one or two instances I cannot remember Celia except in daylight, as in that photograph, her face upturned toward Mason’s, as toward the sun. How she adored him! And with what inner restlessness I watched the casual fashion in which he accepted her adoration, her tenderness, her flattery. Not just because I had fallen for her myself, in a distant hopeless way, but because like Lila I could not understand how he could reject this
haute cuisine
in favor of Carole’s slumgullion.

Yet to give Mason credit, he was courteous and even gentle with Celia—at least when I was around; in conspiracy with the sunlight she seemed to be able to alter his character, subdue him, tenderize him. She was as soft as silk; she had a kitteny way about her that was not in the least coy or undesirable, and in her splendid voice there were all sorts of warm, delectable modulations, all of them sexy, and all of them fine. She had dignity, too, and that kind of radiant poise, so rare in beautiful women, which comes from the consciousness that one’s beauty is meant to please men, and not oneself. I suspect that the single thing she lacked was the small streak of bitchiness that even the most angelic of women can muster, given the provocation: there are some men who despise a good woman even more than a virago, and I would be inclined to guess that it was Celia’s decency, generosity, and goodness that drove Mason into Carole’s swollen embrace, were it not for the fact that Mason would always find his Carole, no matter what.

Anyway, we had a fine time, the three of us, during the last four or five days before I sailed to Europe. I had to some extent moved in on Mason, using my apartment only to sleep in; I breakfasted with Mason and Celia, had lunch with them, and with the two of them I spent long and lazy afternoons. A rather sedate and platonic
ménage à  trois
it was, come to think of it; we felt very close, warm, familial. Mason curbed his tongue when around Celia, I noticed; the nagging, compulsive smuttiness in his talk was gone, as was all the leering cabala about
le nouveau libertinage,
and every now and then, when he would tell an amusing story, and as I stole a glance at Celia and watched her gay charming face crinkle up in delicious merriment, with the innocent and wonder-struck delight of a child who has seen some strange new animal, some clown, some fresh marvel, I had a difficult time envisioning her as a helpmate sharing Mason’s interest in pyramidal arrangements of naked Turks, or having anything to do with Glansner’s stews. Though naturally I need not have concerned myself on this account because, as I have said, Mason kept his nights and days distinctly apart: toward the end of the afternoon I would leave them and when, later, I joined Mason, it would be in some smoky Village pad thronged with people who, it seemed to me, were always in a state of desperate lethargy and hunched-up near-collapse (though, “Peter, these cats are crazy,” Mason told me once. “Kicks and excitement are all they want, they’re the last rebels left.”) and where there was always Carole, slow and sleepylidded, asking for another Scotch.