Miss Lonelyhearts (6 page)

"We'll go to my place."

"Ought I?"

He did not have to answer, for she
was already on her way. As he followed her up the stairs to his apartment, he
watched the action of her massive hams; they were like two enormous grindstones.

He made some highballs and sat down
beside her on the bed.

"You must know an awful lot
about women from your job," she said with a sigh, putting her hand on his
knee.

He had always been the pursuer, but
now found a strange pleasure in having the roles reversed. He drew back when
she reached for a kiss. She caught his head and kissed him on his mouth. At
first it ticked like a watch,
then
the tick softened
and thickened into a heart throb. It beat louder and more rapidly each second,
until he thought that it was going to explode and pulled away with a rude jerk.

"Don't," she begged.

"Don't what?"

"Oh, darling, turn out the
light."

He smoked a cigarette, standing in
the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped
like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the
wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. I
Her
call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved,
tidal, moon-driven.

Some fifteen minutes later, he
crawled out of bed like an exhausted swimmer leaving the surf, and dropped down
into a large armchair near the window. She went into the bathroom, then came
back and sat in his lap.

"I'm ashamed of myself,"
she said. "You must think I'm u bad woman."

He shook his head no.

"My husband isn't much. He's a
cripple like I wrote you, and much older than me." She laughed. "He's
all dried up. He hasn't been a husband to me for years. You know, Lucy, my kid;
isn't his."

He saw that she expected him to be
astonished and did his best to lift his eyebrows.

"It's a long story," she
said. "It was on account of Lucy that I had to marry him. I'll bet you
must have wondered how it was I came to marry a cripple. It's a long
story."

Her voice was as hypnotic as a
tom-tom, and as monotonous. Already his mind and body were half asleep.

"It's a long, long story, and
that's why I couldn't write it in a letter. I got into trouble when the
Doyles
lived above us on Center Street. I used to be kind
to him and go to the movies with him because he was a cripple, although I was
one of the most popular girls on the block. So when I got into trouble, I
didn't know what to do and asked him for the money for an abortion. But he
didn't have the money, so we got married instead. It all came through my
trusting a dirty
dago
. I thought he was a gent, but
when I asked him to marry me, why he spurned me from the door and wouldn't even
give me money for an abortion. He said if he gave me the money that would mean
it was his fault and I would have something on him. Did you ever hear of such a
skunk?"

"No," he said. The life
out of which she spoke was even heavier than her body. It was as if a gigantic,
living Miss
Lonelyhearts
letter in the shape of a
paper weight had been placed on his brain.

"After the baby was born, I
wrote the skunk, but he never wrote back, and about two years ago, I got to
thinking how unfair it was for Lucy to have to depend on a cripple and not come
into her rights. So I looked his name up in the telephone book and took Lucy to
see him. As I told him then, not that I wanted anything for myself, but just
that I wanted Lucy to get what was coming to her. Well, after keeping us
waiting in the hall over an hour--I was boiling mad, I can tell you, thinking
of the wrong he had done me and my child--we were taken into the parlor by the
butler. Very quiet and lady-like, because money
ain't
everything and he's no more a gent than I'm a lady, the dirty wop--I told him
he ought to do something for Lucy
see'n
' he's her
father. Well, he had the nerve to say that he had never seen me before and that
if I didn't stop bothering him, he'd have me run in. That got me riled and I
lit into the bastard and gave him a piece of my mind. A woman came in while we
were arguing that I figured was his wife, so I hollered, 'He's the father of my
child, he's the father of my child.'
When they went to the
'phone to call a cop, I picked up the kid and beat it.

"And now comes the funniest
part of the whole thing. My husband is a queer guy and he always makes believe
that he is the father of the kid and even talks to me about our child. Well,
when we got home, Lucy kept asking me why I said a strange man was her papa.
She wanted to know if Doyle wasn't really her papa. I must
of
been crazy because I told her that she should remember that her real papa was a
man named Tony
Benelli
and that he had wronged me. I
told her a lot of other crap like that--too much movies I guess. Well, when
Doyle got home the first thing Lucy says to him is that he
ain't
her papa. That got him sore and he wanted to know what I had told her. I didn't
like his high
falutin
' ways and said,
The
truth.' I guess too that I was kinds sick of
see'n
him moon over her. He went for me and hit me one on
the cheek. I wouldn't let
no
man get away with that so
I socked back and he swung at me with his stick but missed and fell on the
floor and started to cry. The kid was on the floor crying too and that set me
off because the next thing I know I'm on the floor bawling too."

She waited for him to comment, but
he remained silent until she nudged him into speech with her elbow. "Your
husband probably loves you and the kid," he said.

"Maybe so, but I was a pretty
girl and could of had my pick. What girl wants to spend her life with a shrimp
of a cripple?"

"You're still pretty," he
said without knowing why, except that he was frightened.

She rewarded him with a kiss,
then
dragged him to the bed.

Soon after Mrs. Doyle left, Miss
Lonelyhearts
became physically sick and was unable to leave
his room. The first two days of his illness were blotted out by sleep, but on
the third day, his imagination began again to work.

He found himself in the window of a
pawnshop full of fur coats, diamond rings, watches, shotguns, fishing tackle,
mandolins
. All these things were the paraphernalia of
suffering. A tortured high light twisted on the blade of a gift knife, a
battered horn grunted with pain.

He sat in the window thinking. Man
has a tropism for order. Keys in one
pocket,
change in
another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for
disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn
to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within
it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth while.

A trumpet, marked to sell for $2.49,
gave the call to battle and Miss
Lonelyhearts
plunged
into the fray. First he formed a phallus of old watches and rubber boots, then
a heart of umbrellas and trout flies, then a diamond of musical instruments and
derby hats, after these a circle, triangle, square, swastika. But nothing
proved definitive and he began to make a gigantic cross. When the cross became
too large for the pawnshop, he moved it to the shore of the ocean. There every
wave added to his stock faster than he could lengthen its arms. His labors were
enormous. He staggered from the last wave line to his work, loaded down with
marine refuse--bottles, shells, chunks of cork, fish heads,
pieces
of net.

Drunk with exhaustion, he finally
fell asleep. When he awoke, he felt very weak, yet calm.

There was a timid knock on the door.
It was open and Betty tiptoed into the room with her arms full of bundles. He
made believe that he was asleep.

"Hello," he said suddenly.

Startled, she turned to explain.
"I heard you were sick, so I brought some hot soup and other stuff."

He was too tired to be annoyed by
her wide-eyed little mother act and let her feed him with a spoon. When he had
finished eating, she opened the window and
freshened
the bed. As soon as the room was in order, she started to leave, but he called
her back.

"Don't go, Betty."

She pulled a chair to the side of
his bed and sat there without speaking.

"I'm sorry about what happened
the other day," he said. "I guess I was sick."

She showed that she accepted his
apology by helping him to excuse himself. "It's the Miss
Lonelyhearts
job. Why don't you give it up?"

"And do what?"

"Work in an advertising agency,
or something."

"You don't understand, Betty, I
can't quit. And even if I were to quit, it wouldn't make any difference. I
wouldn't be able to forget the letters, no matter what I did."

"Maybe I don't
understand," she said, "but I think you're making a fool of
yourself."

"Perhaps I can make you
understand. Let's start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to
the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff
considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column,
and anyway he's tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but
after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the
majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual
advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also
discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his
life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination
shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator."

Although he had spoken soberly, he
saw that Betty still thought him a fool. He closed his eyes.

"You're tired," she said.
"I'll go."

"No, I'm not tired. I'm just
tired of talking, you talk a while."

She told him about her childhood' on
a farm and of her love for animals, about country sounds and country smells and
of how fresh and clean everything in the country is. She said that he ought to
live there and that if he did, he would find that all his troubles were city
troubles.

While she was talking, Shrike burst
into the room. He was drunk and immediately set up a great shout, as though he
believed that Miss
Lonelyhearts
was too near death to
hear distinctly. Betty left without saying good-by.

Shrike had evidently caught some of
her farm talk, for he said: "My friend, I agree with Betty, you're an
escapist. But I do not agree that the soil is the proper method for you to
use."

Miss
Lonelyhearts
turned his face to the wall and pulled up the covers. But Shrike was
unescapable
. He raised his voice and talked through the
blankets into the back of Miss
Lonelyhearts
' head.

"There are other methods, and
for your edification I shall describe them. But first let us do the escape to
the soil, as recommended by Betty:

"You are fed up with the city
and its teeming millions. The ways and means of men, as getting and lending and
spending, you lay waste your inner world, are too much with you. The bus takes
too long, while the subway is always crowded. So what do you do? So you buy a
farm and walk behind your horse's moist behind, no collar or tie, plowing your
broad swift acres. As you turn up the rich black soil, the wind carries the
smell of pine and dung across the fields and the rhythm of an old, old work
enters your soul. To this rhythm, you sow and weep and chivy your
kine
, not kin or kind, between the pregnant rows of corn
and taters. Your step becomes the heavy sexual step of a dance-drunk Indian and
you tread the seed down into the female earth. You plant, not dragon's teeth,
but beans and greens...

"Well, what do you say, my
friend, shall it be the soil?"

Miss
Lonelyhearts
did not answer. He was thinking of how Shrike had accelerated his sickness by
teaching him to handle his one escape, Christ, with a thick glove of words.

"I take your silence to mean
that you have decided against the soil. I agree with you. Such a life is too
dull and laborious. Let us now consider the South Seas:

"You live in a thatch hut with
the daughter of the king, u slim young maiden in whose eyes is an ancient
wisdom. I
Her
breasts are golden speckled pears, her
belly a melon, and her odor is like nothing so much as a jungle fern. In the
evening, on the blue lagoon, under the silvery moon, to your love you croon in
the soft
sylabelew
and
vocabelew
of her
langorour
tongorour
.
Your body is golden brown like hers, and tourists have need of the indignant
finger of the missionary to point you out. They envy you your breech clout and
carefree laugh and little brown bride and fingers instead of forks. But you
don't return their envy, and when a beautiful society girl comes to your hut in
the night, seeking to learn the secret of your happiness, you send her back to
her yacht that hangs on the horizon like a nervous racehorse. And so you dream
away the days, fishing, hunting, dancing, swimming, kissing, and picking
flowers to twine in your hair...