Ask the Dust Page 8

  “I want to see the pastor,” I said.

  The woman had a square jaw and a hostile pair of sharp grey eyes. “Father Abbot is busy,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “I have to see him,” I said.

  “I tell you he’s busy.”

  The priest came to the door. He was stocky, powerful, smoking a cigar, a man in his fifties. “What is it?” he asked.

  I told him I wanted to see him alone. I had some trouble on my mind. The woman sniffed contemptuously and disappeared through a hall. The priest opened the door and led me to his study. It was a small room crammed with books and magazines. My eyes bulged. There in one corner was a huge stack of Hackmuth’s magazine. I walked to it at once and pulled out the issue containing The Little Dog Laughed. The priest had seated himself. “This is a great magazine,” I said. “The greatest of them all.”

  The priest crossed his legs, shifted his cigar.

  “It’s rotten,” he said. “Rotten to the core.”

  “I disagree,” I said. “I happen to be one of its leading contributors.”

  “You?” the priest asked. “And what did you contribute?”

  I spread The Little Dog Laughed before him on the desk. He glanced at it, pushed it aside. “I read that story,” he said. “It’s a piece of hogwash. And your reference to the Blessed Sacrament was a vile and contemptible lie. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  Leaning back in his chair, he made it very plain that he didn’t like me, his angry eyes centered on my forehead, his cigar rolling from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “Now,” he said. “What is it you wish to see me about?”

  I didn’t sit down. He made it very clear in his own way that I wasn’t to use any of the furniture in the room. “It’s about a girl,” I said.

  “What have you done to her?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. But I could speak no more. He had plucked out my heart. Hogwash! All those nuances, that superb dialogue, that brilliant lyricism—and he had called it hogwash. Better to close my ears and go away to some far off place where no words were spoken. Hogwash!

  “I changed my mind,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  He stood up and walked toward the door.

  “Very well,” he said. “Good day.”

  I walked out, the hot sun blinding me. The finest short story in American Literature, and this person, this priest, had called it hogwash. Maybe that business about the Blessed Sacrament wasn’t exactly true; maybe it didn’t really happen. But my God, what psychological values! What prose! What sheer beauty!

  As soon as I got to my room I sat down before my typewriter and planned my revenge. An article, a scathing attack upon the stupidity of the Church. I pecked out the title: The Catholic Church Is Doomed. I hammered it out furiously, one page after another, until there were six. Then I paused to read it. The stuff was awful, ludicrous. I tore it up and threw myself on the bed. I still hadn’t written a poem to Camilla. As I lay there, inspiration came. I wrote it out from memory:

  I have forgot much, Camilla! gone with the wind,

  Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

  Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

  But I was desolate and sick with an old passion,

  Yes, all the time, because the dance was long;

  I have been faithful to thee, Camilla, in my fashion.

  Arturo Bandini.

  I sent it by telegraph, proud of it, watched the telegraph clerk read it, beautiful poem, my poem to Camilla, a bit of immortality from Arturo to Camilla, and I paid the telegraph man and walked down to my place in the dark doorway, and there I waited. The same boy floated by on his bicycle. I watched him deliver it, watched Camilla read it in the middle of the floor, watched her shrug and rip it to pieces, saw the pieces floating to the sawdust on the floor. I shook my head and walked away. Even the poetry of Ernest Dowson had no effect upon her, not even Dowson.

  Ah well, the hell with you Camilla. I can forget you. I have money. These streets are full of things you cannot give me. So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her smile. Her name was Jean, she was thin and tubercular, but she was hard too, so anxious to get my money, her languid mouth for my lips, her long fingers at my trousers, her sickly lovely eyes watching every dollar bill.

  “So your name is Jean,” I said. “Well, well, well, a pretty name.” We’ll dance, Jean. We’ll swing around, and you don’t know it, you beauty in a blue gown, but you’re dancing with a freak, an outcast from the world of man, neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. And we drank and we danced and we drank again. Good fellow Bandini, so Jean called the boss. “This is Mr. Bandini. This is Mr. Schwartz.” Very good, shake hands. “Nice place you got, Schwartz, nice girls.”

  One drink, two drinks, three drinks. What’s that you’re drinking Jean? I tasted it, that brownish stuff, looked like whiskey, must have been whiskey, such a face she made, her sweet face so contorted. But it wasn’t whiskey, it was tea, plain tea, forty cents a slug. Jean, a little liar, trying to fool a great author. Don’t fool me, Jean. Not Bandini, lover of man and beast alike. So take this, five dollars, put it away, don’t drink Jean, just sit here, only sit and let my eyes search your face because your hair is blonde and not dark, you are not like her, you are sick and you are from down there in Texas and you have a crippled mother to support, and you don’t make very much money, only twenty cents a drink, you’ve only made ten dollars from Arturo Bandini tonight, you poor little girl, poor little starving girl with the sweet eyes of a baby and the soul of a thief. Go to your sailor boys, honey. They don’t have the ten dollars but they’ve got what I haven’t got, me, Bandini, neither fish, fowl nor good red herring, goodnight Jean, goodnight.

  And here was another place and another girl. Oh, how lonely she was, from away back in Minnesota. A good family too. Sure, honey. Tell my tired ears about your good family. They owned a lot of property, and then the depression came. Well, how sad, how tragic. And now you work down here in a Fifth Street dive, and your name is Evelyn, poor Evelyn, and the folks are out here too, and you have the cutest sister, not like the tramps you meet down here, a swell girl, and you ask me if I want to meet your sister. Why not? She got her sister. Innocent little Evelyn went across the room and dragged poor little sister Vivian away from those lousy sailors and brought her to our table. Hello Vivian, this is Arturo. Hello Arturo, this is Vivian. But what happened to your mouth, Vivian, who dug it out with a knife? And what happened to your bloodshot eyes, and your sweet breath smelling like a sewer, poor kids, all the way from glorious Minnesota. Oh no, they’re not Swedish, where did I get that idea? Their last name was Mortensen, but it wasn’t Swedish, why their family had been Americans for generations. To be sure. Just a couple of home girls.

  Do you know something?—Evelyn talking—Poor little Vivian had worked down here for almost six months and not once had any of these bastards ever ordered her a bottle of champagne, and I there, Bandini, I looked like such a swell guy, and wasn’t Vivian cute, and wasn’t it a shame, she so innocent, and would I buy her a bottle of champagne? Dear little Vivian, all the way from the clean fields of Minnesota, and not a Swede either, and almost a virgin too, just a few men short of being a virgin. Who could resist this tribute? So bring on the champagne, cheap champagne, just a pint size, we can all drink it, only eight dollars a bottle, and gee wasn’t wine cheap out here? Why back in Duluth the champagne was twelve bucks a bottle.

  Ah, Evelyn and Vivian, I love you both, I love you for your sad lives, the empty misery of your coming home at dawn. You too are alone, but you are not like Arturo Bandini, who is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring. So have your champagne, because I love you both, and you, too Vivian, even if your mouth looks like it had been dug out with raw fingernails and your old child’s eyes swim in blood written like mad sonnets.

&n
bsp; Chapter Eleven

  But this was expensive. Take it easy, Arturo; have you forgotten those oranges? I counted what was left. It was twenty dollars and some cents. I was scared. I racked my brains over figures, added everything I had spent. Twenty dollars left—impossible! I had been robbed, I had misplaced the money, there was a mistake somewhere. I looked all over the room, burrowed into pockets and drawers, but that was all, and I was scared and worried and determined to go to work, write another one quick, something written so fast it had to be good. I sat before my typewriter and the great awful void descended, and I beat my head with my fists, put a pillow under my aching buttocks and made little noises of agony. It was useless. I had to see her, and I didn’t care how I did it.

  I waited for her in the parking lot. At eleven she came around the corner, and Sammy the bartender was with her. They both saw me from the distance and she lowered her voice, and when she got to the car Sammy said, “Hi there,” but she said, “What do you want?”

  “I want to see you,” I said.

  “I can’t see you tonight,” she said.

  “Make it later on tonight.”

  “I can’t. I’m busy.”

  “You’re not that busy. You can see me.”

  She opened the car door for me to get out, but I did not move, and she said, “Please get out.”

  “Nothing doing,” I said.

  Sammy smiled. Her face flared.

  “Get out, goddamnit!”

  “I’m staying,” I said.

  “Come on, Camilla,” Sammy said.

  She tried to pull me out of the car, seized my sweater and jerked and tugged. “Why do you act like this?” she said. “Why can’t you see I don’t want to have anything to do with you?”

  “I’m staying,” I said.

  “You fool!” she said.

  Sammy had walked toward the street. She caught up with him and they walked away, and I was there alone, horrified, and smiling weakly at what I had done. As soon as they were out of sight I got out and walked up the stairs of the Flight and down to my room. I couldn’t understand why I had done that. I sat on the bed and tried to push the episode out of my mind.

  Then I heard a knock on my door. I didn’t get a chance to say come in, because the door opened then and I turned around and there was a woman standing in the doorway, looking at me with a peculiar smile. She was not a large woman and she was not beautiful, but she seemed attractive and mature, and she had nervous black eyes. They were brilliant, the sort of eyes a woman gets from too much bourbon, very bright and glassy and extremely insolent. She stood in the door without moving or speaking. She was dressed intelligently: black coat with a furpiece, black shoes, black skirt, a white blouse and a small purse.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Just sitting here.”

  I was scared. The sight and nearness of that woman rather paralyzed me; maybe it was the shock of seeing her so suddenly, maybe it was my own misery at that moment, but the nearness of her and that crazy, glassy glitter of her eyes made me want to jump up and beat her, and I had to steady myself. The feeling lasted for only a moment, and then it was gone. She started across the room with those dark eyes insolently watching me, and I turned my face toward the window, not worried by her insolence but about that feeling which had gone through me like a bullet. Now there was the scent of perfume in the room, the perfume that floats after women in luxurious hotel lobbies, and the whole thing made me nervous and uncertain.

  When she got close to me I didn’t get up but sat still, took a long breath, and finally looked at her again. Her nose was pudgy at the end but it was not ugly and she had rather heavy lips without rouge, so that they were pinkish; but what got me were her eyes: their brilliance, their animalism and their recklessness.

  She walked over to my desk and pulled a page out of the typewriter. I didn’t know what was happening. I still said nothing, but I could smell liquor on her breath, and then the very peculiar but distinctive odor of decay, sweetish and cloying, the odor of oldness, the odor of this woman in the process of growing old.

  She merely glanced at the script; it annoyed her and she flipped it over her shoulder and it zigzagged to the floor.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “You can’t write. You can’t write at all.”

  “Thanks very much,” I said.

  I started to ask her what she wanted, but she did not seem the kind who accepts questions. I jumped off the bed and offered her the only chair in the room. She didn’t want it. She looked at the chair and then at me, thoughtfully, smiling her disinterestedness in merely sitting down. Then she went around the room reading some stuff I had pasted on the walls. They were some excerpts I had typed from Mencken and from Emerson and Whitman. She sneered at them all. Poof, poof, poof! Making gestures with her fingers, curling her lips. She sat on the bed, pulled off her coat jacket to the elbows, and put her hands on her hips and looked at me with insufferable contempt.

  Slowly and dramatically she began to recite:

  What should I be but a prophet and a liar,

  Whose mother was a leprechuan, whose father was a friar?

  Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water,

  What should I be but the fiend’s god-daughter?

  It was Millay, I recognized it at once, and she went on and on; she knew more Millay than Millay herself, and when she finally finished she lifted her face and looked at me and said, “That’s literature! You don’t know anything about literature. You’re a fool!” I had fallen into the spirit of the lines and when she broke off so suddenly to denounce me I was at sea again.

  I tried to answer but she interrupted and went off in a Barrymore manner, speaking deeply and tragically; murmuring of the pity of it all, the stupidity of it all, the absurdity of a hopelessly bad writer like myself buried in a cheap hotel in Los Angeles, California, of all places, writing banal things the world would never read and never get a chance to forget.

  She lay back, laced her fingers under her head, and spoke dreamily to the ceiling: “You will love me tonight, you fool of a writer; yes, tonight you will love me.”

  I said, “Say, what is this, anyway?”

  She smiled.

  “Does it matter? You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love.”

  The scent of her was pretty strong now, impregnating the whole room so that the room seemed to be hers and not mine, and I was a stranger in it, and I thought we had better go outside so she could get some of the night air. I asked her if she would like to walk around the block.

  She sat up quickly. “Look! I have money, money! We will go somewhere and drink!”

  “Sure thing!” I said. “A good idea.”

  I pulled on my sweater. When I turned around she was standing beside me, and she put the tips of her fingers on my mouth. That mysterious saccharine odor was so strong on her fingers that I walked toward the door and held it open and waited for her to pass through.

  We walked upstairs and through the lobby. When we reached the front desk I was glad the landlady was gone to bed; there was no reason for it, but I didn’t want Mrs. Hargraves to see me with this woman. I told her to tiptoe across the lobby, and she did it; she enjoyed it terribly, like an adventure in little things; it thrilled her and she tightened her fingers around my arm.

  It was foggy on Bunker Hill, but not downtown. The streets were deserted, and the sound of her heels on the sidewalk echoed among the old buildings. She tugged my arm and I bent down to hear what she wanted to whisper.

  “You’re going to be so marvelous!” she said. “So wonderful!”

  I said, “Let’s forget it now. Let’s just walk.”

  She wanted a drink. She insisted upon it. She opened her purse and waved a ten dollar bill. “Look. Money! I have lots of money!”

  We walked down to Solomon’s Bar on the corner, where I played the pin games. Nobody was there but Solomon, who stood with hi
s chin in his hands, worried about business. We walked to a booth facing the front window, and I waited for her to sit down, but she insisted I get in first. Solomon walked over for our order.

  “Whiskey!” she said. “Lots of whiskey.”

  Solomon frowned.

  “A short beer for me,” I said.

  Solomon was watching her sternly, searchingly, his bald spot crinkling from a frown. I could sense the consanguinity, and I knew then that she was Jewish too. Solomon went back for the drinks and she sat there with her eyes blazing, her hands folded on the table, her fingers twining and untwining. I sat trying to think of some way of dodging her.

  “A drink’ll fix you up fine,” I said.

  Before I knew it she was at my throat, but not roughly, her long fingernails and short fingers against my flesh as she talked about my mouth, my wonderful mouth; oh god, what a mouth I had.

  “Kiss me!” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s have a drink first.”

  She clenched her teeth.

  “Then you too know about me!” she said. “You’re like the rest of them. You know about my wounds, and that’s why you won’t kiss me. Because I disgust you!”

  I thought, she is crazy; I’ve got to get out of here. She kissed me, her mouth tasting of liverwurst on rye. She sat back, breathing with relief. I took out my handkerchief and wiped the sweat from my forehead. Solomon returned with the drinks. I reached for some money, but she paid quickly. Solomon went back for the change, but I called him back and handed him a bill. She fussed and protested, pounding her heels and fists. Solomon lifted his hands in a gesture of hopelessness and took her money. The moment his back was turned I said, “Lady, this is your party. I’ve got to go.” She pulled me down and her arms went around me and we fought until I thought it was absurd. I sat back and tried to think of another escape.

  Solomon brought back the change. I took a nickel from it and told her I’d like to play the pin game. Without a word she let me pass and I got up and walked over to the machine. She watched me like a prize dog, and Solomon watched her like a criminal. Then I won on the machine, and I called Solomon to come over and check the score.