Town Burning (14 page)

Mrs. Randolf stood on tiptoe at the high, darkly gleaming sideboard, reaching for glasses. The sideboard stood on simple, gracefully carved legs, its strap hinges just slightly darker than the old wood of the doors. She put the wineglasses on a small table, then bent gruntingly at a low cupboard and brought out a gallon of white wine.

“I’ve got some beer in the car,” John said.

“Why, John Cotter! I’d love some beer!”

“Good God, Phoebe! Are you going to mix?” Minetta said.

John went to get the beer. As he opened the car door a tall figure appeared beside him.

“Who is it?” The voice was loud and angry at first, then plaintive. “Well, who the hell wit?”

“John Cotter.”

“Well, well, if it ain’t! John Cotter come up to see us reecluses.”

“Ayuh,” John said.

“What? What? Beer?” Howard took the case out of John’s hands. “I’ll carry it! Ah, yes! You’ve just come back from France, and Phoebe’s wine? Agh! The memory of the Beaujolais! No, her poison is now white—kerosene laced with grape juice, one dollar and four cents a gallon!”

Howard was really quite angry. John was not always able to tell, when Howard was angry, just what he was angry about. This time he felt that Howard resented his bringing the beer. And yet there was no doubt he was glad John had come.

As they came into the room and the lamplight, Howard’s thin muscles were like taut snakes on his forearms. He was a big-jointed man, all bone and wire; very strong. His dark face seemed to be muscled, too, and resembled an anatomy chart of the facial articulations. His blue eyes gleamed out of dark hollows, rolling easily, protuberant and yet deep behind his brow, as if they were attached to his head by the optic nerves alone.

Minetta opened bottles. Mrs. Randolf decided to stick to the white wine. Howard said: “Phoebe, this lucky young fellow has been in France. Do you remember?”

“Do I remember?” she said, sipping wine and banging a package of cigarettes on the table at the same time, “Do I remember? God damn these cigarettes,” she said mildly, a dreamy, reminiscent look on her face.

Minetta had carefully seated herself across the room from him again, and John had to look at her while trying to be unobtrusive about it. He suddenly realized how much he would hate, even fear, to have Howard Randolf discover his thoughts concerning Minetta, even though she must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight.

The Randolfs reminisced. John soon found that they were not interested in his more recent impressions of Europe, and that his little lecture, the property of all returned travelers, would remain unspoken. He listened instead to the Randolfs’ sentimental journey into a time when such names as Ezra, Gertrude, and Tristan Tzara were fresh and meaningful. Their faces lighted up; they hugged themselves and chuckled delightedly. They lived in Montparnasse, sat at the Dome, the Rotonde, the Closerie des Lilas. He didn’t tell them what he had seen on his ceremonial visit to the place, with the now homeless whores so thick, so desperately grabby, and the flaccid, sodden faces of the American dreamers like cold moons above the round tables.

In spite of a beginning feeling of disappointment because they were not interested in what he had to say (after all, what could a local yokel like John Cotter have to say?), in their self-confident, stagy voices he found again, as he had in high school, a pretense to intellectualism he would never find in Leah. Even though he recognized the pretense, the show-off part of the Randolfs, he apologized for it by asking himself who in Leah was at all concerned with such exciting stuff? No matter that they vied with each other for the floor, cut in on each other’s stories, became shrill and childish while trying to be knowing and wise—and all the time he wondered why one didn’t haul off and hit the other in his eagerness for the center of attention—he listened and caught some of their sadness for time past.

John’s attention began to wander. He sneaked occasional looks at Minetta’s legs—she had crossed them and he found himself mentally putting one hand between the soft flesh above her knees, perhaps to lift a leg up and set it back down on the floor. A sudden silence startled him, and he remembered the last few words of a question.

“…do you think?”

He hadn’t any idea what the question had been, and tried to appear to think about it.

Minetta smiled. She knew why he hadn’t been listening. Almost imperceptibly she shook her head.

“I think it’s asinine,” John guessed.

“Well, so do I!” Howard said, seeming to be amazed that they agreed. He continued, his sentences just slightly surer and more balanced, as if they had once been written. John thought that he recognized Howard’s style:

“A book is like a tree: its vitality is determined by growth and by propagation. A tree rotten at the core may bear for a time beautiful fruit, but its future is certain, and its future is not the glorification of trees.…”

Howard recited on. John drank his beer and watched the lamplight’s glow on Minetta’s flesh. Then Howard stopped again, his eyes glittering, and drank his beer in one swallow. He brought the bottle down on the table, for emphasis, a little too hard. His wife, her face sagging below smooth and surprisingly shiny little cheeks, reached over and rubbed the dent in the table with the heel of her hand. Howard gave her a disgusted glance, as if to say that his argument was more important than a dent in the table. John was afraid he might say this to his wife, who was getting rather drunk and in no condition to bear it calmly.

“You mean a book should glorify the human race? And a tree glorifies trees?” John asked quickly.

“Now wait a minute!” Howard shouted. “Let’s not get our goddam trees mixed up with our goddam books! That metaphor was accurate as far as it went….” He raised his empty bottle, lipped off the last drop, and motioned in Minetta’s direction. She went out to the kitchen to get more beer.

Mrs. Randolf took the opportunity to speak, her voice starting high and running down the scale to reach a shaky level after the first few words: “Nothing shakes them. If they are trapped into explaining what they do, which is seldom, they first describe themselves physically and then say that they are promoting the understanding of mankind!” She threw her head back and laughed. Her belly rumbled, her breasts fell into her armpits and seemed to knot themselves into fists, as if they were another pair of hands. It occurred to John that Minetta had come out of this thing, and that something of her mother’s ugliness waited in Minetta.

“I don’t mean just the queers!” Howard said. “They never amount to much anyway—come and go like a recurring disease. I mean these goddam crybabies who hate the whole bloody human race and still write books about it.
Long
books about it! Christ! I just finished one—three days it took me—and I got so disgusted I threw it across the room twice a day. Once I threw it out the door and it fell through a hole in the porch and I had to crawl under the goddam porch after it. I said by God I’d finish the damned thing if it killed me and it damn’ near did. I’d rather read the Monkey-Ward catalogue. At least they know what they mean!” He stood up and turned convulsively, walked to a bookcase and violently jerked a large book out and into his hands, where it opened raggedly, looking like a dead white chicken with its feathers mussed. He turned pages by handfuls as he came back into the lamplight.

“
Listen
to this!
‘He could see it in his mind, crawling from the greasy tumbrils, a reptile garland of dead hair, seaweed hair,
writhing amid the warty excrescences of its bull shoulders
—
and the teeth; jagged, coin-colored, ripping, tearing (Oh, God! his mother
saying, You’ll be home by nine-sharp, won’t you, Jolly Jimmy?).
So sweet, so pure
—
and guilt; agony in a pretty afghan settled, sullied
his eyes and made his brain turn in its white cave like lava and he smelled the lubricous oil of that dark hell in his dry nostrils along with lavender sachet…. A subway roared in its hole and passed….’”

“He sounds like he’s in bad shape,” John said.

Howard threw the book out into the porch, where it slid across the gritty boards and thumped against the railing. “Bad
shape!
There’s five hundred pages of that! Five hundred solid pages of it! You can start that book from the back and it’s just as clear—one solid supersaturated colloidal suspension. You know how much time passes? About five hours! The rest is flashbacks of flashbacks of flashbacks, and in each flashback of a bloody flashback there’s a poor, mean, carping, sniveling, loaded-pantsed, rotten-souled rat of a human being doing that kind of interior stinking. And that book”—he raged silently for a moment, his arms twitching as he raised them—”that so-called novel is generally felt to be
important! Important!
Ad puke!”

Howard drank thirstily, coughed, drank some more, then went on: “I met one of these fellows in New York this spring. I asked him why he hated humanity—you know there wasn’t a real man in any of his books, just mean little creeps and sadists. Anyway, I asked him what the hell good was it if man was such a shit? I said why the hell do you write? Or even go on living? He said he had to beat the hours. That’s all:
Beat the hours.
I said you’re not beating the hours, you’re just beating your meat. You can write, but you’ll have to get to be a man before you have anything to say. I said you’re just mad, pouting mad because people have been nasty to you. He said I was naive and outdated. I told him I went through and remembered his present attitude when I was ten years old and lost all my marbles, and if catching up to him meant I’d have to regress that far I guess I’d wait this cycle out.”

Howard finished his bottle. Mrs. Randolf had fallen asleep during his diatribe, and now she sat back, her eyes open but slightly glazed. Minetta kept bringing in the beer, and John counted bottles. Howard had been hitting the beer pretty hard, in spite of his talking. Now he began again, his hands flailing, his eyes bloodshot. John found himself watching Howard with much interest, but not hearing the words at all. How sad, he thought as he watched Howard’s passionate gestures. How sad and lonesome not to be heard! To be kind to Howard, to sympathize, would be to disagree, to get angry and argumentative himself. But here he was, watching and sometimes listening, but giving nothing at all.

The kerosene lamps were streaming. A fine tissue of smoke curled over the glass chimney of one and slowly deposited carbon on the scalloped edge. The beer bottles reflected amber light. Across the room Minetta’s urgent thigh rounded into amber and into darkness.

More words from Howard: “Man is no longer the subject and the theme. Instead of the really great insights into the nature of man we have the cruel use of humanity to illustrate some sterile intellectual syllogism. Man isn’t the subject; he’s a kind of puppet!” He banged his empty bottle on the table and roused his wife. She stood up and said, “Come on Howard. We’re going to bed.”

He looked at her angrily. “You finish the goddam wine?”

She didn’t answer, but pulled him out of his chair. He came up slowly, suddenly weak, willing to be guided.

“Say good night and thank John for the beer,” she said. “Minetta, dear, will you clean up and take care of the lamps when you come to bed?”

Howard said nothing, but let himself be pulled toward the stairs.

“You’re all upset and nervous and you drank too fast,” his wife said. They climbed the stairs together, helping each other.

John and Minetta stared at each other over the beer bottles.

“He gets very tired when he talks like that. He’ll be tired for days,” Minetta said, and then she added as if she were talking to herself, “They insist upon calling his books that—‘naïve and outdated.’ ”

Then she spoke to him again, “There are a few bottles left, I think.”

“We might as well finish the case,” he said, and watched her as she passed him and went toward the kitchen, her hips swaying slightly, graceful in an overripe way. He thought of a ripe, yellow plum—an overripe plum, and the image of the plum dropped and squashed in his mind with an exciting plop. He walked unsteadily to the front porch and took a leak into a lilac bush.

Minetta waited for him in the living room. “It’s so hot,” she said. As she handed him the bottle their fingers touched. But that didn’t mean anything. She had always done little things like that. She looked at him as if she were the seducer and he the reluctant virgin. She squeezed his arm above the elbow and led him out into the black shadows of the pines. White moonlight shafted down between the solid, bulky branches. At the car he turned and put his arms around her, feeling her narrow waist with one hand, his bottle in the other, her wide hips against his legs. Her arms came around him, but it seemed automatic. Nothing happened. She was a big, beautiful rubber statue. He took a drink over her shoulder, then kissed her. She was soft, pliable, but she seemed to be full of nothing but air—until he tried to get her down onto the ground. Then she was surprisingly strong; so strong he would have to use a serious wrestling hold on her. He tried it tentatively, but knew he would have to hurt her and gave it up. What did it matter?

“I hope I didn’t break your back,” he said. Some beer had sloshed out of the bottle, and he could feel it sticky under his wrist watch. Then he realized that she had been whispering.

“Not here, not here.” Her black hair was a cloud across his eyes, and he began to shake. She moved quickly against him, then pulled him across the road into the moonlight and down a little slope into tall hay. She stood up straight and looked around, as if she were measuring the little field. They seemed to be in the exact center of it. Evidently satisfied, she undid her halter and let it drop. Her breasts were satellites of the moon, glaringly white against her tanned body, or great eyes, black-irised. She pulled off her tight trunks and stood with her arms down, letting the moonlight wash over her.

“Take off your clothes,” she ordered.

Under her eyes and the moon’s cold light, as his clothes dropped off he felt as if he were plunging into cool water—water full of the light touch of hands. She came against him and they rolled easily, almost in slow motion, onto the springy stems of the bent hay.