Set This House on Fire (29 page)

But when, gaining the outside deck, we pushed up toward the bow through a tourist group of Portland Oregonians, he had recovered from his depression and chattered away at me with jolly gusto. It was a balmy day with a hazeless and sapphire sky across which two planes had sketched straight white trails of vapor, like scratches from phantom fingernails. Erect against the blue, the towers of Manhattan rose up in monolithic glitter, and before this backdrop Mason posed me, talking the whole time as he fiddled with his Leica. “What
seized
you, to go tourist class?” he said. “I mean for kicks a couple of guys like that are fine, but a week in the same room—murder. Oh, Peter! I can tell you already just who you’re going to share a table with. I saw the list. A chiropodist from Jackson Heights and a hideous old Lesbian with a hearingaid. Why didn’t you fly?”

“I’m trying to save dough, Mason,” I said. “What do you mean you saw the list?”

He snickered and clicked the camera. “I was just kidding, doll-baby. Don’t worry. The trip’s going to be a dream.”

For a minute, without speaking, we drank champagne from paper cups at the rail. In the silence I was embarrassed, but I felt a slow, intolerable hardening of my heart toward Mason, not in spite of his generosity but almost because of it, and because now, singled out so uniquely for his grotesque affections, I felt no rare warmth or gratitude but only resentment, a soiled and debased feeling, as if I were the receiver of bribes. Anyway, something—my pride, or only an outraged sensibility—refused to let me speak, and it was Mason finally, in solemn, even sorrowful tones which surprised me, who broke the silence. “Well, Peter, I’m going to miss your homely face. Drop me a line every now and then, will you? I’m going to miss you, boy. I don’t know why. You’re really outrageously dull and prissy as an old biddy of seventy-two. But you know, I guess, how fond I’ve always been of you. Celia put her finger on it, I think. She said, ‘He understands people,’ whatever the hell that means. You probably conned her into that thought by nodding gravely and stroking your whiskers and nonchalantly scratching your ass at the right time. Anyway, Pierre—anyway, I’m going to miss you.”

“What are you going to be doing now, Mason?” I said idly.

He was silent for a moment. It was a peculiar and meaningful silence, one that I had learned to arm myself against. It involved an amount of deep rumination, a sparkle in the eye: and by now I felt I knew him so well that I could almost hear the crafty currents of his brain at work, regimenting those shamelessly naked falsehoods which when made vocal—made glib and honey-smooth by his expressive tongue—would wear the illustrious garb of truth. Inelegantly, he spat over the side. “Oh, I don’t know, Petesy. Finish the play, I guess. That’s first on the agenda. Whitehead’s about to go out of his mind, he wants me to finish it so badly. But, you know, a play isn’t something you can do right off the top of your head, like a Ford commercial. You’ve got to think and think and suffer and suffer and think. Then there’s that eternal problem of accuracy—verisimilitude, I should say. For instance, this play of mine—well, I might as well tell you. It’s about those experiences I had during the war in Yugoslavia. Did I tell you that? The fact just in itself slows me down from the very beginning. Because in order to get this—this verisimilitude I need so badly—well, for instance, details about the Serbian language, and certain street names in Dubrovnik, and various partisan passwords that I’ve forgotten, things like that—well, in order to get these things really down pat the way I should, I’ve been having to carry on this endlessly long correspondence with old Plaja. Remember the old guy I was telling you about—”

“You mean that old
hoax?”
I said. “That old
fraud?”
To have to contain myself any longer, to continue to allow myself to be stuffed with his forgeries and fictions, with his crooked inventions, with all the other indigestible by-products of his peerless quackery, was a prospect which at this moment I couldn’t bear. I felt that at least he should have spared me the degradation of a final lie; but he hadn’t, and I was bursting to tell him so. “You mean that figment!” I said.

He hadn’t caught on. “You remember old Plaja,” he said, “the old guy’s still hale and hearty. Plans to come over for a visit soon. He’s been sort of my technical advis—”

“Look, Mason,” I said, “why do you feel you have to lie to me? Do you think I’m a—a
fool
or something? An idiot?
Do you?”

His face went pale. One shoulder pitched upward and he raised his hands, fingers outstretched placatingly toward me. “Now I don’t understand, Petesy. Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t said—”

“What do you mean you haven’t!” I said. “You tell me these creepy cock-and-bull stories, standing there with a solemn look on your face like a Baptist deacon, and expect me to believe them! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You think I’m a moron? You think I wouldn’t eventually somehow learn what’s true? You call me your confidant, your pal, your dollbaby, and pull all this buddy-buddy stuff and every time I turn around you’re telling me a dreary
lie!
You were never in Yugoslavia! You were a draft dodger! That play of yours is a
soap bubbler
I was choking with fury, the dreadful callow American prep-school words ( “creepy,” “pal,” “buddy-buddy”) I uttered with the hysteric rage of a fifth-former, and, aware of all this even as I shouted at him—aware of how stupidly and impossibly and absurdly young we remain in this land—I thanked God I was leaving Mason and going to Europe, and I felt tears compounded of rheum, of indignation, and of an old weary worn-out pity and love for him brimming up in my eyes. I turned away from him.
“What,
Mason?” I cried, my voice growing loose and incoherent. “Do you think I’m that much of a fool? You’d better get your goddam head looked at!”

Above us at the funnel’s mouth a plume of steam exploded forth, followed by the whistle’s horrendous blast. As it went off, booming thunder around us, I felt his hand on my shoulder and turned, deafened, to see his gray, stricken face and his lips mouthing the contours of words. Around us, people with fingers in their ears moved slowly forward toward the gangways. “—hurts me!” he cried, in a sudden silence that was profound and astounding. “That hurts me, to hear you say stuff like that.” His lips trembled; he looked on the verge of tears. “Stuff like that,” he said bitterly, “stuff like that is—it’s
irremediable.
I mean, to think that you—you of all people—can’t make the subtle distinction between a lie—between an out-and-out third-rate lie meant maliciously—between that, and a jazzy kind of bullshit extravaganza like the one I was telling you, meant with no malice at all, but only with the intent to edify and entertain.” His shoulder was twitching badly now, a wide arching seesawing movement; I could almost hear the ligaments snapping with the strain. “Jesus sake, Peter!” he burst out in a voice that was indeed hurt—hurt and aggrieved. “Don’t you have enough
prescience
to see that I was telling it all to you under the guise of truth only to see your reactions? To see if it would stand up as a play? To see if it was convincing to, say, someone like you whose sympathies I trust and whose aesthetic orientation—”

“And that dear, fantastic wife of yours!” I broke in. “What’s the matter with you? Lay off her! Lay off her, God damn you!” And then I stopped, my mouth agape, rattled by the sudden knowledge that this was the first time I had ever really talked back to Mason—my first outburst, my only reprimand. For a moment I had no words. Then after a breath, I went on more amiably, “Really, Mason, maybe we’re all a bit neurotic and all that, but for heaven’s sake—”

He was not to be deflected. In shaken tones he added: “If I can’t have any faith in your reactions, Peter, then the Lord knows —” But then he made a futile gesture with his hand, turning back toward the rail, and wrenched from his throat a few awkward words that hurt me to the core. “Lord knows I’ve
tried
hard to be decent and sociable enough. But every time I open my mouth it seems I turn into a great pile of …” He paused, lips trembling. It was awful. “I just always end up with everybody using me. Or hating my guts.”

“I don’t hate—” I began, turning, but another blast from the whistle nearly lifted us from the deck. Far off in the lower depths sounded a carillon of jangling bells. “Well, Mason,” I said instead, “it looks like it’s time to break up our party.” I stuck out my hand, feeling like hell. “Many thanks for all the nice presents. Thanks really, Mason.”

He moved toward me with a somber little smile, reaching for my hand. “Bon voyage, old dollbaby,” he said, “don’t get clutched up. Down one for me, will you, every now and then?”

It was the last I heard him say. His shoulder still heaving as if with palsy, he took my hand, turning that simple gesture of farewell into the sorriest act of loneliness, of naked longing, I think I have ever known.

For like that forsaken boy—his face unremembered now, even his name—who lingers dimly in my memory of childhood, the rich little neighbor boy who—so it was long after told to me—warped or crippled or ugly, perhaps all three, when asked one day by his elders why and how and whither all his nickels and his quarters and his dimes had so swiftly vanished, burst out the confession that they had gone, each one, not for candy or toys or Eskimo pies, but to pay for the companionship of other children —five cents for an hour, twenty for an afternoon, a small fistful of nickels for a whole summer day: like this lost child’s, Mason’s gesture was one of recompense and hire, and laden with the anguish of friendlessness. Before I could say another word, or recover my wits long enough to really understand what he had given me, he was gone, swallowed up in the shorebound throng, leaving my hand clutched around a wad of French money he had got from somewhere, all notes of ten thousand francs—enough to buy a solid-gold Swiss watch if I had wanted one, or a suit of Harris tweeds, or bottles of brandy without number. Mortified, I tried to call out after him, but already he was lost from sight—except for one last brief glimpse I had of him at the top of a distant stairway: with his head bent down there seeking the steps he looked curiously clumsy and inept; not the old breezy magician but vulnerable, bumbling and for an instant wildly confused—future’s darling, a man with one foot poised in the thinnest of air.

Then within minutes I felt a throbbing beneath my feet and the boat began to move. Propped against the rail with the money still in my hand—feeling even at this terminal moment that my virtue had been pre-empted, that somehow, irretrievably, I had been bought and procured—I slipped seaward toward Europe with all Manhattan aglitter in my eyes, its cenotaphs and spires exorbitant and heaven-yearning.

With my cabinmates I got along very well: they were really gentle, accommodating fellows—somewhat hard to get next to, maybe, but far less depraved than Mason, it seemed to me, and a lot better adjusted. In Paris I got a letter from Mason, telling me that Celia had gone to Reno. I remember one characteristic phrase, which seemed—as with so much of Mason—to emerge from some insubstantial shadowland unacquainted either with sorrow or joy: “Weep, weep for Mason and Celia, Peter, we’ve gone to Splitsville.” And it was not long after this that Mason faded from my mind. Yet I wish now I could recall the details of that shipboard dream I had, far out in mid-ocean, when I shot erect in my bunk and listened in a sweat to my fellow voyagers snoring in the dark, and smelled the sweet scent of those blossoms, slowly dying, that he had given me, and was touched all over with the somehow-knowledge of Mason’s certain doom.

IV

When Mason, clattering down the hallway in his shower clogs, left me vibrating on that marble bench in Sambuco, I found it hard to get a decent grip on all my emotions. I was furious, God knows. Yet my anger, mixed as it was with a bewildering and indefinable fear of Mason, had the quality of anxiety; flight—from the palace, from Sambuco—seemed essential, and I sat there nursing the insult I felt, and pondered the ways in which I could make a decorous, unseen escape from the whole neighborhood. Two or three minutes must have passed. I was about to get up then, when I heard Mason’s wooden clogs click-clocking slowly back down the hallway. He entered, still walking with his strange bentover hobbled gait, but he stood a bit more erect now and he was looking at me with such grinning, callous good humor that my fear of him instantly vanished. No longer my Polaroid monster, he was himself, desperately plausible from top to toe. “Bet I gave you quite a start,” he said. “How about a drink, Petesy? I haven’t had time to—”

“Go to hell!” I retorted. “Who do you think you are, talking to me like that! We aren’t back at St. Andrew’s, and by God if you think—I’m not just another one of your crummy freeloaders!”

“Petesy, Petesy, Petesy,” he murmured in his old plaintive cajoling voice. He sat down beside me and gave me a slap of palship on the shoulder. “Old Petesy with the tissue-paper skin. Look, I want to tell you—”

“You
look!” I exclaimed, getting briskly to my feet. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on around here, but I can tell you I’ve
had
it! Do you think I’m some lousy
contadino
—some peasant you can push around? You invited me down here as your guest and I’ve felt about as welcome as a case of typhoid! If it hadn’t been for Rosemarie, understand, I wouldn’t even have gotten fed! I think I’ll take a raincheck.
Mille grazie!
Wise guy! Jerk!” I shouted miserably as I began to shuffle off. “Invite me back sometime when I won’t be such a strain on your resources!”

He leaped to his feet and caught my wrist. He was still panting from his recent pursuit, still sweating, and he wore an expression about as close to being shamefaced as he could ever approach. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I didn’t know what I was saying. I was—well, I was
hacked,
upset. Please forgive me, Peter. Please do.”

“Well, I’m going, Mason,” I said faint-heartedly. “See you around the campus.”