Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (66 page)

“I brought some quality to your crumby party.”

She was lit already. The Negro pugs embraced Andy and Jacky Minola, and they formed a little circle to talk about the fight game. The circle grew bigger.

Jane Pierce pulled me aside and demanded, “Monte—what about this? What do we do?”

“What about what?”

“This crazy party. There are already ninety-one here by head count, and look at the doorway.”

It was something to think about. They were coming through the door now in almost a steady stream. I recognized two movie stars, a member of “What's My Line?” and the new parks commissioner. The quality was good.

“It's quite a party.”

“If you look on it as a competition, I suppose so. I just hate to think of what the price per minute is at this moment. I didn't have time to go out and shop for bulk liquor or anything like that. It's all hotel rates, and have you ever looked at the catering sheet of this hotel?”

“No.”

“You should. And where do we put them?”

“When it banks up solid, they can't get in. That's all.”

“That's all?”

“Look, Jane, you can't do anything and I can't do anything. That's the way it is. Let it run its course.”

“The thing that puzzles me,” Jane said, “is this. A few hours ago, Andy decided to have a party. Now everyone in the world knows about it. How does that happen?”

“Word of mouth.”

“You're a help.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“Drop dead,” she said pleasantly. “When I think of something else, I'll tell you.”

7

I slipped into Jose's room a little later to see whether I could make a telephone call to the manager and maybe find an adjoining suite to open up, or even a room, or maybe let the overflow into the grand ballroom or something like that; and there was Diva, sprawled on the bed and staring at me.

“Can I use the phone?” I wanted to know.

She nodded silently, and I discovered that the manager was gone for the day and the assistant manager was somewhere in the hotel—probably at the party.

“Hell with them,” Diva said. I couldn't remember when I had heard her say anything else. “Let them crawl all over each other. What do you care?”

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, a few inches from where she lay sprawled out. She reached out an arm and drew me down to her, and I let myself be drawn; and then I kissed her, a wide, hot kiss, with her tongue darting in and out of my mouth like a little snake.

After that, I pulled up and away from her and said, “Whatever you want, Diva, I probably want double, but it's like trying to do it in Grand Central Station. Also, my wife is out there, and she sort of hates me and she'd love an excuse to cut my heart out.”

“You afraid of her?”

I nodded. “Also, I always figured you were Andy's girl.”

“Like hell you did. You are like a stinking little open book, Monte, and I read you good. You always figured me for a dyke, and you figured Jose and me, we diddled each other. Balls. I work for Andy; I'm not his girl, and I don't screw Jose backwards either. As for you, just go to hell.”

“I'll see you later,” I said, and then I went back to the party, leaving the door to the bedroom open, hoping that it might take some pressure off the living room. The living room was packed almost solid, but if you moved slowly and had some patience, you could penetrate. I got caught in a cluster of black men with fezzes and sweeping gowns, and then I saw Andy, who was trying to talk to them in Senegalese or Somali or Bantu or something like that; and he saw me and grinned and boomed:

“What a party, Monte! What a goddamn true, beautiful party!”

I grinned foolishly, and pushed on to Jane Pierce, who was out on the terrace, talking to a thin, worried-looking man in dinner clothes.

“I tried,” I said. “The manager went home. The assistant manager is lost or something.”

“This is the assistant manager, Monte,” she replied. “This is Mr. Bell's friend, Monte Case.”

“Well, are you responsible, Mr. Case?”

“Andrew Bell is a very responsible man.”

“I know that. How does one find him?”

“He's right there in that group of Africans,” I said.

“There are a great many people here,” Jane said, smiling her best smile at him, “but I think it's a very genteel lot, don't you? We have two of the highest dignitaries in the local diocese—I can't remember their names but they are very estimable churchmen. That tall African—you can see his fez over the crowd—is the Prime Minister of Nigeria or Ghana or the Congo. Well, it's that sort of party—”

“Of course, of course. It's just a question of suffocation, simple suffocation. But if you keep the doors to the terrace open—”

“I wouldn't dream of closing them,” Jane said, and she led the manager away, or rather furrowed a path for him, and I went for a drink. That was not easy. The table that had been set up as a bar was practically inaccessible, but I finally got to it. My wife, Liz, was there already and drunk, good and drunk.

“So here's Monte,” she said. “The man's friend. Did all of you know that Monte is the man's friend? I'm Monte's friend too. I got news for you—when you got a friend like Monte, you don't need enemies.”

People around smiled sheepishly, the way people do in such a situation. I had asked for a Scotch on the rocks but I was ready to force my way out of the place without it.

“Don't run away, Monte. I want you to meet my friends. Any friend of Andy's is a friend of mine, and there's no one here tonight but friends of Andy's. Right? Right, Monte?”

I nodded. She put her arm around a slim, blond boy who could not have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four and who was dressed in a double-breasted mod suit of dark purple corduroy with brass buttons and skinfit trousers. “This is David Dorchester. You pronounce it Dorster, don't you lovey?”

“Oh, yes, yes—Dorster.”

“He's just done the very best mod line in England and brought it over here. He's exploded into our stinking reality, haven't you, lovey?”

“Oh—yes, quite.”

“Four pages in
Harper's Bazaar
, and you're a friend of Andy's—aren't you, lovey?”

“I admire him, of course. Read him and all that. Never met him. I would love to, really.”

“See—he would love to, Monte. Monte is his beloved friend.”

“How did you get here?” I asked him, if only to say something.

“Oh, Jerry brought me,” he said, nodding at a small, fat man who stood beside him, nursing a drink and perspiring copiously. “Jerry's bought my line for America. Jerry has the mod field, and we'll all be frightfully rich out of it. That kind of opportunity in America. The old country is very stodgy, you know.”

Jerry smiled and oozed perspiration, and Liz asked him, “And how did you get here, Jerry? Friend of Andy's?”

“Admiration, dear lady.” He took out a handkerchief that was soaking wet and mopped his brow. “Admirer. His publisher is my brother-in-law.”

I got my Scotch on the rocks and broke out of there, and pushed my way through to the terrace, where I stood and shivered. I have been married twenty-four years, if you are curious. No children. I stood and shivered and drank the Scotch. Joe Jacobs joined me there.

“Isn't this one hell of a party,” he said. “You know, part of the cost ought to go on my swindle sheet. I will get three columns out of this and a couple of nights off the prowl. God bless you, Monte.”

“I'm just a guest—same as you.”

“Sure, sure—listen, Monte.” He consulted his little notebook. “Andy and the governor. Governor: ‘What are you writing now, Andy?' Andy: ‘Nothing.' (I imagine he hates that question. It's a stupid question, and I guess every writer hates it.) Governor: ‘Well—I mean what are you planning?' Andy: ‘Nothing. I don't plan writing. You don't plan an act of creation. It explodes inside of you and burns your gut until you rid yourself of it.' Governor: I never experienced quite that.' Andy: ‘You're rich You have lots of things. Why the hell should you want creation? It's pain. People don't search for pain. They're burdened with it.' How about that, Monte?”

“I don't know. I can't say that I really know what he's talking about.”

“Andy?”

“Andy—yes.”

“You're a little fuzzy now.”

“I've had one or two.”

“Sure.
Anyway
, thank Andy, God bless him. I will try to quote him correctly. Tell him that. When I misquote him, he wants to tear me apart.”

“I'll tell him that.”

My glass was empty, and I fought my way back to the bar. Liz was not there; neither was the blond boy with the mod suit. I didn't see either of them again that night, and I hoped that kid would please her and not turn out to be the way he looked.

8

At half past four in the morning, the party was over, and except for Andy's entourage, only the red-headed belly dancer remained. She was stretched out on the couch in the living room, out cold and snoring softly. Somehow you never connect snoring with a big, sexy kid like that: Jane Pierce had kicked her way out of the debris about a half hour before, leaving me with one final look of alcoholic hostility. She had everything that a woman could want—figure, looks, brains and success—but she loved no one. Jose Peretz was beginning to clean up.

“The hell with that,” Andy said. “Let the chambermaids clean up. Get yourself a nightcap and turn in.”

“I am no pig to wallow in litter.”

Andy said something in quick Spanish, and then they both laughed.

“And keep your hands off that kid,” Andy said, nodding at the belly dancer. “She's twenty years old and a silly little bitch, so just let her sleep it off in peace.”

He had been drinking since he opened his eyes the day before; but he wasn't drunk, and his voice was steady and easy, and he didn't appear very tired. I was tired. I was as tired as death itself, and I had the taste of death in my mouth and in my heart. I went out onto the terrace to breathe a little fresh air. Diva was there. Over in Queens, there was a bluish-pink edge in the sky. The smell of the air was clean and damp, the way it is on a New York morning.

“Well?” Diva said to me. “You have a good time at the party, Monte?”

I shrugged, and she said, “What kind of a man are you?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

She spat on the terrace in a very expressive and Spanish gesture. Andy came onto the terrace and told her, “Leave him alone and go to bed, Diva. Haven't you any brains? Haven't you any goddamn brains at all?”

“Just be careful, hey, Andy,” she whispered. “Just be careful and don't ever talk to me like this again.”

Then she swirled off the terrace and we heard the door of her bedroom crash behind her. Andy looked at me and smiled thinly.

“What the hell, Monte.”

I shrugged.

“So we don't do things very good. We don't write so good and we don't hunt so good and maybe we don't love so good either, and what the hell's the difference anyway! It was a hell of a party, wasn't it?”

“It was a good party.”

“But you say hello too much. You give too much. You don't remember what you are—or maybe you never know. I begin to feel small and choked. Then I am lost. I want to sit down and cry. You know?”

“I know.”

“Then why did you do it?” Andy asked me gently. “You didn't have to have her here tonight.”

“I'm a masochist,”

“Leave her, Monte:”

“Then it hurts her and she cries and goes into a depression. I suppose I love her or something like that.”

“Monte—I'm getting out of here. Tomorrow, the next day. I can choke here. Tell you what—I have a standing invitation from the Earl of Dornoch. He had seven thousand acres in the Highlands, high north—north enough so that at this time of the year there is no real night. Black Angus cattle and deer—the old English deer. Over a thousand deer run on his land. Have you ever been to Scotland?”

I shook my head.

“You can't imagine it—a tiny land with the widest vistas in the world. You stand on a mountaintop in the Highlands, and there's a kind of freedom wherever you look, an illusion of vastness. It's an old and wild and empty land, and you hunt there with a sense of others hunting before you, and it's a feeling you don't have anywhere else. It's something valid.”

I shook my head.

“No. I thought not. You never hunted, did you, Monte?”

“No.”

“Never wanted to?”

“No, I never wanted to, Andy.”

“Why not?”

“I don't want to kill.”

“On a moral basis, Monte?”

“I don't know. I never thought about it very much.”

“Everything lives and dies, Monte. That's the definition of life. You're a hunter or the hunted. But in the hunt and in the kill, there is a kind of exultation. It's a moment of passion. How many moments of passion does life give you?”

“I'm just the guy to ask, Andy.”

“I'm sorry. Think about it?”

“I'll think about it.”

“Get some sleep. We'll talk tomorrow.”

9

I walked home through a city of beginning dawn. The night workers were coming home, but the day workers had not yet appeared. Like myself, the night people were drawn and tired. I tried to remember what kind of deer one would find in Scotland. Would they be fallow deer? I seemed to recollect out of my boyhood reading that Robin Hood killed the fallow deer. Or was it the red deer? Was fallow a name of a species or simply a color? Would they be white deer or yellow deer? I made a note of that in the woolly drift of my thoughts and promised myself that I would ask Andy about it the following day.