Miss Lonelyhearts (10 page)

He said that he was too tired to
dance. After doing a few obscene steps in front of him, she sat down in his
lap. He tried to fend her off, but she kept pressing her open mouth against his
and when he turned away, she nuzzled his cheek. He felt like an empty bottle
that is being slowly filled with warm, dirty water.

When she opened the neck of her
dress and tried to force his head between her breasts, he parted his knees with
a quick jerk that spilled her to the floor. She tried to pull him down on top
of her. He struck out blindly and hit her in the face. She screamed and he hit
her again and again. He kept hitting her until she stopped trying to hold him,
then he ran out of the house.

Miss
Lonelyhearts
had gone to bed again. This time his bed was surely taking him somewhere, and
with great speed. He had only to ride it quietly. He had already been riding
for three days.

Before climbing aboard, he had
prepared for the journey by jamming the telephone bell and purchasing several
enormous cans of crackers. He now lay on the bed, eating crackers,
drinking
water and smoking cigarettes.

He thought of how calm he was. His
calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.
In three days he had gone very far. It grew dark in the room. He got out of
bed, washed his teeth, urinated, then turned out the light and went to sleep.
He fell asleep without even a sigh and slept the sleep of the wise and the
innocent. Without dreaming, he was aware of fireflies and the slop of oceans.

Later a train rolled into a station
where he was a reclining statue holding a stopped clock, a coach rumbled into
the yard of an inn where he was sitting over a guitar, cap in hand, shedding
the rain with his hump.

He awoke. The noise of both arrivals
had combined to become a knocking on the door. He climbed out of bed. Although
he was completely naked, he went to the door without covering himself. Five
people rushed in, two of whom were women. The women shrieked when they saw him
and jumped back into the hall.

The three men held their ground.
Miss
Lonelyhearts
recognized Shrike among them and
saw that he, as well as the others, was very drunk. Shrike said that one of the
women was his wife and wanted to fight Miss Lonely-hearts for insulting her.

Miss
Lonelyhearts
stood quietly in the center of the room. Shrike dashed against him, but fell
back, as a wave that dashes against an ancient rock, smooth with experience,
falls back. There was no second wave.

Instead Shrike became jovial. He
slapped Miss Lonely-hearts on the back. "Put on a pair of pants, my
friend," he said, "we're going to a party."

Miss
Lonelyhearts
picked up a can of crackers.

"Come on, my son," Shrike
urged. "It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards."

Miss
Lonelyhearts
carefully examined each cracker before popping it into his mouth.

"Don't be a spoil-sport,"
Shrike said with a great deal of irritation. He was a gull trying to lay an egg
in the smooth flank of a rock, a screaming, clumsy gull. "There's a game
we want to play and we need you to play
it
.--Everyman
his own Miss
Lonelyhearts
.' I invented it, and we
can't play without you."

Shrike pulled a large batch of
letters out of his pockets and waved them in front of Miss
Lonelyhearts
.
He recognized them; they were from his office file.

The rock remained calm and solid.
Although Miss
Lonelyhearts
did not doubt that it
could withstand any test, he was willing to have it tried. He began to dress.

They went downstairs, and all six of
them piled into one cab. Mary Shrike sat on his lap, but despite her drunken
wriggling the rock remained perfect.

The party was in Shrike's apartment.
A roar went up when Miss
Lonelyhearts
entered and the
crowd surged forward. He stood firm and they slipped back in a futile curl. He
smiled. He had turned more than a dozen drunkards. He had turned them without
effort or thought. As he stood smiling, a little wave crept up out of the
general welter and splashed at his feet for attention. It was Betty.

"What's the matter with
you?" she asked. "Are you sick again?"

He did not answer.

When every one was seated, Shrike
prepared to start the game. He distributed paper and pencils, then led Miss
Lonelyhearts
to the center of the room and began his spiel.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he
said, imitating the voice and gestures of a circus barker. "We have with
us to-night a man whom you all know and admire.
Miss
Lonelyhearts
, he of the singing heart--a still more swollen
Mussolini of the soul.

"He has come here to-night to
help you with your moral and spiritual problems, to provide you with a slogan,
a cause, an absolute value and a raison
d'ętre
.

"Some of you, perhaps, consider
yourself too far gone for help. You are afraid that even Miss
Lonelyhearts
, no matter how fierce his torch, will be
unable to set you on fire. You are afraid that even when exposed to his bright
flame, you will only smolder and give off a bad smell. Be of good heart, for I
know that you will burst into flame. Miss
Lonelyhearts
is sure to prevail."

Shrike pulled out the batch of
letters and waved them above his head.

"We will proceed
systematically," he said. "First, each of you will do his best to
answer one of these letters, then, from your
answers,
Miss
Lonelyhearts
will diagnose your moral ills.
Afterwards he will lead you in the way of attainment."

Shrike went among his guests and
distributed the letters as a magician does cards. He talked continuously and
read a part of each letter before giving it away.

"Here's one from an old woman
whose son died last week. She is seventy years old and sells pencils for a
living. She has no stockings and wears heavy boots on her torn and bleeding
feet. She has rheum in her eyes. Have you room in your heart for her?

"This one is a jim-dandy. A
young boy wants a violin. It looks simple; all you have to do is get the kid
one. But then you discover that he has dictated the letter to his little
sister. He is paralyzed and can't even feed himself. He has a toy violin and
hugs it to his chest, imitating the sound of playing with his mouth. How
pathetic! However, one can learn much from this parable. Label the boy Labor,
the violin Capital, and so on..."

Miss
Lonelyhearts
stood it with the utmost serenity; he was not even interested. What goes on in the
sea is of no interest to the rock.

When all the letters had been
distributed, Shrike gave one to Miss
Lonelyhearts
. He
took it, but after holding it for a while, he dropped it to the floor without
reading it.

Shrike was not quiet for a second.

"You are plunging into a world
of misery and suffering, peopled by creatures who are strangers to everything
but disease and policemen. Harried by one, they are hurried by the other...

"Pain, pain,
pain, the dull, sordid, gnawing, chronic pain of heart and brain.
The
pain that only a great spiritual liniment can relieve..."

When Miss
Lonelyhearts
saw Betty get up to go, he followed her out of the apartment. She too should
see the rock he had become.

Shrike did not miss him until he
discovered the letter on the floor. He picked it up, tried to find Miss
Lonelyhearts
, then addressed the gathering again.

"The master has
disappeared," he announced, "but do not despair. I am still with you.
I am his disciple and I shall lead you in the way of attainment. First let me
read you this letter which is addressed directly to the master."

He took the letter out of its
envelope, as though he had not read it previously, and began: "'What kind
of a dirty skunk are you? When I got home with the gin, I found my wife crying
on the floor and the house full of neighbors. She said that you tried to rape
her you dirty skunk and they wanted to get the police but I said that I'd do
the job myself you...'

"My, oh my, I really can't
bring myself to utter such vile language. I'll skip the swearing and go on. 'So
that's what all your fine speeches come to, you bastard, you ought to have your
brains blown out.' It's signed, 'Doyle.'

"Well, well, so the master is
another Rasputin. How this shakes one's faith! But I can't believe it. I won't
believe it. The master can do no wrong. My faith is unshaken. This is only one
more attempt against him by the devil. He has spent his life struggling with
the arch fiend for our sakes, and he shall triumph. I mean Miss
Lonelyhearts
, not the devil.

"The gospel
according to Shrike.
Let me tell you about his life. It unrolls before
me like a scroll. First, in the dawn of childhood, radiant with pure innocence,
like a rain-washed star, he wends his weary way to the University of Hard
Knocks.
Next, a youth, he dashes into the night from the bed
of his first whore.
And then, the man, the man Miss
Lonelyhearts
--struggling
valiantly to realize a high ideal, his course shaped by a proud aim. But, alas!
cold
and scornful, the world heaps obstacle after
obstacle in his path; deems he the goal at hand, a voice of thunder bids him
'Halt!' 'Let each hindrance be thy ladder,' thinks he. 'Higher, even higher,
mount!' And so he climbs, rung by weary rung, and so he urges himself on,
breathless with hallowed fire. And so..."

When Miss
Lonelyhearts
left Shrike's apartment, he found Betty in the hall waiting for the elevator.
She had on a light-blue dress that was very much a party dress. She dressed for
things, he realized.

Even the rock was touched by this
realization. No; it was not the rock that was touched. The rock was still
perfect. It was his mind that was touched, the instrument with which he knew
the rock.

He approached Betty with a smile,
for his mind was free and clear. The things that muddied it had precipitated
out into the rock.

But she did not smile back
"What are you grinning at?" she snapped.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said.
"I didn't mean anything."

They entered the elevator together.
When they reached the street, he took her arm although she tried to jerk away.

"Won't you have a soda,
please?" he begged. The party dress had given his simplified mind its cue
and he delighted in the boy-and-girl argument that followed.

"No; I'm going home."

"Oh, come on," he said,
pulling her towards a soda fountain. As she went, she unconsciously exaggerated
her little-girl-in-a-party-dress air.

They both had strawberry sodas. They
sucked the pink drops up through straws, she pouting at his smile, neither one
of them conscious of being cute.

"Why are you mad at me, Betty?
I didn't do anything. It was Shrike's idea and he did all the talking."

"Because you
are a fool."

"I've quit the Miss
Lonelyhearts
job. I haven't been in the office for almost a
week."

"What are you going to
do?"

"I'm going to look for a job in
an advertising agency."

He was not deliberately lying. He
was only trying to say what she wanted to hear. The party dress was so gay and
charming, light blue with a frothy lace collar flecked with pink, like the
collar of her soda.

"You ought to see Bill
Wheelright
about a job. He owns an agency--he's a swell
guy...He's in love with me." "I couldn't work for a rival."

She screwed up her nose and they
both laughed.

He was still laughing when he
noticed that something had gone wrong with her laugh. She was crying.

He felt for the rock. It was still
there; neither laughter nor tears could affect the rock. It was oblivious to
wind or rain.

"Oh..." she sobbed
. "
I'm a fool." She ran out of the store.

He followed and caught her. But her
sobs grew worse and he hailed a taxi and forced her to get in.

She began to talk under her sobs.
She was pregnant. She was going to have a baby.

He put the rock forward and waited
with complete poise for her to stop crying. When she was quiet, he asked her to
marry him.

"No," she said. "I'm
going to have an abortion."

"Please marry me." He
pleaded just as he had pleaded with her to have a soda.

He begged the party dress to marry
him, saying all the things it expected to hear, all the things that went with
strawberry sodas and farms in Connecticut. He was just what the party dress
wanted him to be: simple and sweet, whimsical and poetic, a trifle collegiate
yet very masculine.