Miss Lonelyhearts (3 page)

He fled to the street, but there
chaos was multiple. Broken groups of people hurried past, forming neither stars
nor squares. The lamp-posts were badly spaced and the flagging was of different
sizes. Nor could he do anything with the harsh clanging sound of street cars
and the raw shouts of hucksters. No repeated group of words would fit their
rhythm and no scale could give them meaning.

He stood quietly against a wall,
trying not to see or hear. Then he remembered Betty. She had often made him
feel that when she straightened his tie, she straightened much more. And he had
once thought that if her world were larger, were the world, she might order it
as finally as the objects on her dressing table.

He gave Betty's address to a cab
driver and told him to hurry. But she lived on the other side of the city and
by the time he got there, his panic had turned to irritation.

She came to the door of her
apartment in a crisp, white linen dressing-robe that yellowed into brown at the
edges. She held out both her hands to him and her arms showed round and smooth
like wood that has been turned by the sea.

With the return of
self-consciousness, he knew that only violence could make him supple. It was
Betty, however, that he criticized. Her world was not the world and could never
include the readers of his column. Her sureness was based on the power to limit
experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, while her
order was not.

He tried to reply to her greeting
and discovered that his tongue had become a fat thumb. To avoid talking, he
awkwardly forced a kiss,
then
found it necessary to
apologize.

"Too much lover's return
business, I know, and I..." he stumbled purposely, so that she would take
his confusion for honest feeling. But the trick failed and she waited for him
to continue:

"Please eat dinner with
me."

"I'm afraid I can't."

Her smile opened into a laugh.

She was laughing at him. On the
defense, he examined her laugh for "bitterness," "sour-grapes,"
"a-broken-heart," "the devil-may-care." But to his
confusion, he found nothing at which to laugh back. Her smile had opened
naturally, not like an umbrella, and while he watched her laugh folded and
became a smile again, a smile that was neither "wry,"
"ironical" nor "mysterious."

As they moved into the living-room,
his irritation increased. She sat down on a studio couch with her bare legs
under and her back straight. Behind her a silver tree flowered in the lemon
wall-paper. He remained standing.

"Betty the Buddha," he
said.
"Betty the Buddha.
You have the smug smile;
all you need is the pot belly."

His voice was so full of hatred that
he himself was surprised. He fidgeted for a while in silence and finally sat
down beside her on the couch to take her hand.

More than two months had passed
since he had sat with her on this same couch and had asked her to marry him.
Then she had accepted him and they had planned their life after marriage, his
job and her gingham apron, his slippers beside the fireplace and her ability to
cook. He had avoided her since. He did not feel guilty; he was merely annoyed
at having been fooled into thinking that such a solution was possible.

He soon grew tired of holding hands
and began to fidget again. He remembered that towards the end of his last visit
he had put his hand inside her clothes. Unable to think of anything else to do,
he now repeated the gesture. She was naked under her robe and he found her
breast.

She made no sign to show that she
was aware of his hand. He would have welcomed a slap, but even when he caught
at her nipple, she remained silent.

"Let me pluck this rose,"
he said, giving a sharp tug. "I want to wear it in my buttonhole."

Betty reached for his brow.
"What's the matter?" she asked. "Are you sick?"

He began to shout at her,
accompanying his shouts with gestures that were too appropriate, like those of
an old-fashioned actor.

"What a kind bitch you are. As
soon as any one acts viciously, you say he's sick. Wife-torturers,
rapers
of small children, according to you they're all
sick. No morality, only medicine. Well, I'm not sick. I don't need any of your
damned aspirin. I've got a Christ complex. Humanity...I'm a humanity lover. All
the broken bastards..." He finished with a short laugh that was like a
bark.

She had left the couch for a red
chair that was swollen with padding and tense with live springs. In the lap of
this leather monster, all trace of the serene Buddha disappeared.

But his anger was not appeased.
"What's the matter, sweetheart?" he asked, patting her shoulder
threateningly. "Didn't you like the performance?"

Instead of answering, she raised her
arm as though to ward off a blow. She was like a kitten whose soft helplessness
makes one ache to hurt it.

"What's the matter?" he
demanded over and over again. "What's the matter? What's the matter?"

Her face took on the expression of
an inexperienced gambler about to venture all on a last throw. He was turning
for his hat, when she spoke.

"I love you."

"You
what?"

The need for repeating flustered
her, yet she managed to keep her manner
undramatic
.

"I love you."

"And I love you," he said.
"You and
your
damned smiling through tears."

"Why don't you let me
alone?" She had begun to cry. "I felt swell before you came, and now
I feel lousy. Go away. Please go away."

In the street again, Miss
Lonelyhearts
wondered what to do next. He was too excited
to eat and afraid to go home. He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a
complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world
without rocking it.

He decided to go to
Delehanty's
for a drink. In the speakeasy, he discovered a
group of his friends at the bar. They greeted him and went on talking. One of
them was complaining about the number of female writers.

"And they've all got three
names," he said. "Mary Roberts Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Catheter, Ford
Mary Rinehart..."

Then some one started a train of
stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape.

"I knew a gal who was regular
until she fell in with a group and went literary. She began writing for the
little magazines about how much Beauty hurt her and ditched the boy friend
who
set up pins in a bowling alley. The guys on the block
got sore and took her into the lots one night.
About eight of
them.
They ganged her proper..."

"That's like the one they tell
about another female writer. When this hard-boiled stuff first came in, she
dropped the trick English accent and went in for scram and lam. She got to
hanging around with a lot of mugs in
a speak
,
gathering material for a novel. Well, the mugs didn't know they were
picturesque and thought she was regular until the barkeep put them wise. They
got her into the back room to teach her a new word and put the boots to her.
They didn't let her out for three days. On the last day they sold tickets to
niggers..."

Miss
Lonelyhearts
stopped listening. His friends would go on telling these stories until they
were too drunk to talk. They were aware of their childishness, but did not know
how else to revenge themselves. At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards,
they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal
expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost
everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.

Miss
Lonelyhearts
drank steadily. He was smiling an innocent, amused smile, the smile of an
anarchist sitting in the movies with a bomb in his pocket. If the people around
him only knew what was in his pocket. In a little while he would leave to kill
the President.

Not until he heard his own name
mentioned did he stop smiling and again begin to listen.

"He's a leper licker. Shrike
says he wants to lick lepers.
Barkeep, a leper for the
gent."

"If you haven't got a leper,
give him a Hungarian."

"Well, that's the trouble with
his approach to God. It's too damn literary--plain song, Latin poetry, medieval
painting, Huysmans, stained-glass windows and crap like that."

"Even if he were to have a
genuine religious experience, it would be personal and so meaningless, except
to a psychologist."

"The trouble with him, the
trouble with all of us, is that we have no outer life, only an inner one, and
that by necessity."

"He's an escapist. He wants to
cultivate his interior garden. But you can't escape, and where is he going to
find a market for the fruits of his personality? The Farm Board is a
failure."

"What I say is, after all one
has to earn a living. We can't all believe in Christ, and what does the farmer
care about art? He takes his shoes off to get the warm feel of the rich earth
between his toes. You can't take your shoes off in church."

Miss
Lonelyhearts
had again begun to smile. Like Shrike, the man they imitated, they were
machines for making jokes. A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the
power used, foot, steam or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating
force, death, love or God, made jokes.

"Was their nonsense the only
barrier?" he asked himself. "Had he been thwarted by such a low
hurdle?"

The whisky was good and he felt warm
and sure. Through the light-blue tobacco smoke, the mahogany bar shone like wet
gold. The glasses and bottles, their high lights exploding, rang like a battery
of little bells when the bartender touched them together. He forgot that his
heart was a bomb to remember an incident of his childhood. One winter evening,
he had been waiting with his little sister for their father to come home from
church. She was eight years old then, and he was twelve. Made sad by the pause
between playing and eating, he had gone to the piano and had begun a piece by
Mozart. It was the first time he had ever voluntarily gone to the piano. His
sister left her picture book to dance to his music. She had never danced
before. She danced gravely and carefully, a simple dance yet formal...As Miss
Lonelyhearts
stood at the bar, swaying slightly to the
remembered music,
he
thought of children dancing.
Square replacing oblong and being replaced by circle. Every child, everywhere;
in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly
dancing.

He stepped away from the bar and
accidentally collided with a man holding a glass of beer. When he turned to beg
the man's pardon, he received a punch in the mouth. Later he found himself at a
table in the back room, playing with a loose tooth. He wondered why his hat did
not fit and discovered a lump on the back of his head. He must have fallen. The
hurdle was higher than he had thought.

His anger swung in large drunken
circles. What in Christ's name was this Christ business?
And
children gravely dancing?
He would ask Shrike to be transferred to the
sports department.

Ned Gates came in to see how he was
getting along and suggested the fresh air: Gates was also very drunk. When they
left the speakeasy together, they found that it was snowing.

Miss
Lonelyhearts
'
anger grew cold and sodden like the snow. He and his companion staggered along
with their heads down, turning corners at random, until they found themselves
in front of the little park. A light was burning in the comfort station and
they went in to warm up.

An old man was sitting on one of the
toilets. The door of his booth was propped open and he was sitting on the
turned-down toilet cover.

Gates hailed him. "Well, well,
smug as a bug in a rug, eh?"

The old man jumped with fright, but
finally managed to speak. "What do you want? Please let me alone." His
voice was like a flute; it did not vibrate.

"If you can't get a woman, get
a clean old man," Gates sang.

The old man looked as if he were
going to cry, but suddenly laughed instead. A terrible cough started under his
laugh, and catching at the bottom of his lungs, it ripped into his throat. He
turned away to wipe his mouth.

Miss
Lonelyhearts
tried to get Gates to leave, but he refused to go without the old man. They
both grabbed him and pulled him out of the stall and through the door of the
comfort station. He went soft in their arms and started to giggle. Miss
Lonelyhearts
fought off a desire to hit him.

The snow had stopped falling and it
had grown very cold. The old man did not have an overcoat, but said that he
found the cold exhilarating. He carried a cane and wore gloves because, as he
said, he detested red hands.