Plexus (41 page)

She (cutting him short): “Everything would be different if I married you, is that what you mean to say?”

He: “Not exactly. Christ knows, it wouldn't be a bed of roses. But at least I could provide for you. I could put an end to this begging and borrowing.”

She: “If you really wanted to free me you wouldn't put a price on it.”

He: “It's just like you to put it that way. You never suppose for an instant.…”

She: “That we could lead separate lives?”

The waiter arrives with the champagne cocktail.

He: “Better fix another one—the lady is thirsty.”

She: “Do we have to go through this farce every time we meet? Don't you think it's a bit boring?”

He: “To me it isn't. I haven't any illusions left. But it's a way of talking to you. I prefer this subject to hospitals and invalids.”

She: “You don't believe my stories, is that it?”

He: “I believe every word you tell me—because I want to believe. I have to believe in something, if it's only you.”

She:
“Only me?”

He: “Come, you know what I mean.”

She: “You mean that I treat you like a sucker.”

He: “I couldn't express it more accurately myself. Thank you.”

She: “What time is it now, please?”

Rothermel looks at his watch. He lies: “It's three-twenty exactly.” Then, with an air of consternation: “You got to have another drink. I told him to fix one for you.”

She: “You drink it, I won't have time.”

He (frantically): “Hey, waiter, where's that cocktail I ordered an hour ago?” He forgets himself and attempts to rise from his seat. Stumbles and sinks back again, as if exhausted. “Damn that leg! I'd be better off with a wooden stump. Damn the bloody, fucking war! Excuse me, I'm forgetting myself.…”

To humor him Mona takes a sip of the cocktail, then rises abruptly. “I must be going,” she says. She starts walking towards the door.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” shouts Rothermel. “I'll call a taxi for you.” He pockets his wallet and hobbles after her.

In the taxi he puts the wallet in her hand. “Help yourself,” he says. “You know I was only joking before.”

Mona coolly helps herself to a few bills and stuffs the wallet in his side pocket.

“When will I see you again?”

“When I need more money, no doubt.”

“Don't you ever need anything but money?”

Silence. They ride through the crazy streets of Weehawken which is the New World, according to the atlas, but which might just as well be a wart on the planet Uranus. There are cities one never visits except in moments of desperation—or at the turn of the moon when the whole endocrine system goes haywire. There are cities which were planned aeons ago by men of the antediluvian world who had the consolation of knowing they would never inhabit them. Nothing is amiss in this anachronistic scheme of things except the fauna and flora of a lost geological age. Everything is familiar yet strange. At every corner one is disoriented. Every street spells
micmac
.

Rothermel, sunk in despair, is dreaming of the variegated life of the trenches. He remains a lawyer even though he has but one leg. He not only hates the Boches who took his leg away, he hates his own countrymen equally. Above all, he hates the town he was born in. He hates himself for drinking like a sot. He hates all mankind as well as birds, animals, trees and sunlight. All he has left of an empty past is money. He hates that too. He rises each day from a sodden sleep to pass into a world of quicksilver. He deals in crime as if it were a commodity, like barley, wheat, oats. Where once he gamboled, caroling like a lark, now he hobbles furtively, coughing, groaning, wheezing. On the morning of the fatal battle he was young, virile, jubilant. He had cleaned out a nest of Boches with his machine gun, wiped out two lieutenants of his own brigade, and was about to rifle the canteen. That same evening he was lying in his own blood and sobbing like a child.—The world of two-legged men had passed him by; he would never be able to rejoin them. In vain he howled like a beast. In vain he prayed. In vain he called for his mother. The war was over for him—he was one of its relics.

When he saw Weehawken again he wanted to crawl into his mother's bed and die. He asked to see the room where he played as a child. He looked at the garden from the window upstairs and in utter despair he spat into it He
shut the door on his old friends and took to the bottle. Ages pass during which he shuttles back and forth on the loom of memory. He has only one security—his wealth. It is like telling a blind man he may have a white cane.

And then one evening, seated alone at a table in a Village dive, a woman approaches and hands him a
Mezzotint
to read. He invites her to sit down. He orders a meal for her. He listens to her stories. He forgets that he has an artificial limb, forgets that there ever was a war. He knows suddenly that he loves this woman. She does not need to love him, she needs only to be. If she will consent to see him occasionally, for just a few minutes, life will have meaning again.

Thus Rothermel dreams. He forgets all the heartrending scenes which have sullied this beautiful picture. He would do anything for her, even now.

And now let us leave Rothermel for a while. Let him dream in his taxicab as the ferryboat gently cradles him on the bosom of the Hudson. We will meet him again, on the shores of Manhattan.

At Forty-Second Street Mona dives into the subway to emerge in a few minutes at Sheridan Square. Here her course becomes truly erratic. Sophie, if she were still on her heels, would indeed have difficulty following her. The Village is a network of labyrinths modeled upon the corrugated reveries of the early Dutch settlers. One is constantly coming face to face with himself at the end of a tortuous street. There are alleys, lanes, cellars and garrets, squares, triangles, courts, everything anomalous, incongruous and bewildering: all that lacks are the bridges of Milwaukee. Certain doll's houses, squeezed between somber tenements and morbid factories, have been dozing in a vacuum of time which could be described only in terms of decades. The dreamy, somnolent past exudes from the façades, from the curious names of the streets, from the miniature scale imparted by the Dutch. The present announces itself in the strident cries of the street urchins, in
the muffled roar of traffic which shakes not only the chandeliers but the very foundations of the underground. Dominating everything is the confusion of races, tongues, habits. The Americans who have muscled in are off-center, whether they be bankers, politicians, magistrates, Bohemians, or genuine artists. Everything is cheap, tawdry, vulgar and phoney. Minnie Douchebag is on the same level as the prison warden round the corner. The fraternization, such as it is, takes place at the bottom of the melting pot. Everyone is trying to pretend that it is the most interesting locale in the city. It is the quarter full of characters; they collide like protons and electrons, always in a five-dimensional world whose fundament is chaos.

It is in a world like this that Mona is at home and thoroughly herself. Every few paces she runs into someone she knows. These encounters resemble to a remarkable degree the collisions of ants in the throes of work. Conversation is conducted through antennae which are manipulated frenetically. Has some devastating upheaval just occurred which vitally concerns the entire anthill? The running up and down stairs, the salutations, the handshaking, the rubbing of noses, the phantom gesticulations, the
pourparlers
, the gurgitations and regurgitations, the aerial transmissions, the dressing and undressing, the whispering, the warnings, the threats, the entreaties, the masquerades—all goes on in insect fashion and with a speed such as only insects seem capable of mustering. Even when snow-bound the Village is in constant commotion and effervescence. Yet nothing of the slightest importance ever ensues. In the morning there are headaches, that is all.

Sometimes, however, in one of those houses which one notices only in dream, there lives a pale, timid creature, usually of dubious sex, who belongs to the world of du Maurier, Chekhov or Alain Fournier. The name may be Alma, Frederika, Ursula, Malvina, a name consonant with the auburn tresses, the pre-Raphaelite figure, the Gaelic
eyes. A creature who rarely stirs from the house, and then only in the wee hours of the morning.

Towards such types Mona is fatally drawn. A secret friendship veils all their intercourse in mystery. Those breathless errands which drive her through the runneled streets may have for objective nothing more than the purchase of a dozen white goose eggs. No other eggs will do.
En passant
she may take it into her head to surprise her seraphic friend by buying her an old-fashioned cameo smothered in violets, or a rocking chair from the hills of Dakota, or a snuffbox scented with sandalwood. The gift first and then a few bills fresh from the mint. She arrives breathlessly and departs breathlessly, as if between thunderclaps. Even Rothermel would be powerless to suspect how quickly and for what ends his money goes. All we know, who greet her at the end of a feverish day, is that she had managed to buy a few groceries and can dispense a little cash. On the Brooklyn side we talk in terms of coppers, which in China is “cash.” Like children we play with nickels, dimes and pennies. The dollar is an abstract conception employed only in high finance.…

Only once during our stay with the Poles did Stanley and I venture abroad together. It was to see a Western picture in which there were some extraordinary wild horses. Stanley, reminded of his days in the cavalry, became so excited that he decided not to go to work that evening. All through the meal he told yarns, with each yarn growing more tender, more sympathetic, more romantic. Suddenly he recalled the voluminous correspondence which we had exchanged when we were in our teens.

It all began the day after I saw him coming down “the street of early sorrows,” seated atop the hearse beside the driver. (After his uncle's death Stanley's aunt had married an undertaker, a Pole again. Stanley always had to accompany him on the burial expeditions.)

I was in the middle of the street, playing cat, when the funeral procession came along. I was certain it was Stanley
who had waved to me, yet I could not believe my eyes. Had it not been a funeral procession I would have trotted alongside the vehicle and exchanged greetings. As it was, I stood rooted to the spot, watching the cortege slowly disappear round the corner.

It was the first time I had seen Stanley in six years. It made an impression on me. The following day I sat down and wrote him a letter—to the old address.

Stanley now brought out that first letter—and all the others which had followed. I was ashamed to tell him that I had long since lost his. But I could still remember the flavor of them, all written on long sheets of yellow paper, in pencil, with a flourishing hand. The hand of an autocrat. I recalled the perennial salutation he employed: “My charming fellow!” This to a boy in short pants! They were letters, to speak of style, such as Théophile Gautier might have written to an unknown sycophant. Doped with literary borrowings. But they put me in a fever, always.

What my own letters were like I had never once thought of. They belonged to a distant past, a forgotten past. Now I held them in my hand, and my hand trembled as I read. So this was me in my teens? What a pity no one had made a movie of us! Droll figures we were. Little jackanapes, bantams, cocks-o'-the-walk. Discussing such ponderous things as death and eternity, reincarnation, metempsychosis, libertinism, suicide. Pretending that the books we read were nothing to the ones we would write ourselves one day. Talking of life as if we had experienced it to the core.

But even in these pretentious exercises of youth I detected to my amazement the seeds of an imaginative faculty which was to ripen with time. Even in these flyblown missives there were those abrupt breaks and rushes which indicate the presence of hidden fires, of unsuspected conflicts. I was moved to observe that even at this period I could lose myself, I who was hardly aware that I had a self. Stanley, I recalled, never lost himself. He had a style and in it he was fixed, as if constricted by a corset. I remember
that at that period I thought of him as being so much more mature, so much more sophisticated. He would be the brilliant writer; I would be the plodding ink-slinger. As a Pole he had an illustrious heritage; I was merely an American, with an ancestry which was vague and dubious. Stanley wrote as if he had stepped off the boat only the day before. I wrote as if I had learned to use the language, my real language being the language of the street, which was no language at all. Back of Stanley I always visualized a line of warriors, diplomats, poets, musicians. Myself, I had no ancestry whatever. I had to invent one.

Curious, but any feelings of lineage or of ephemeral connections with the past which might arise in me were usually evoked by one of three curiously disparate phenomena: one, narrow, olden streets with miniature houses; two, certain unreal types of human beings, generally dreamers or fanatics; three, photographs of Tibet, of the Tibetan landscape particularly. I could be disoriented in a jiffy, and was then marvelously at home, one with the world and with myself. Only in such rare moments did I know or pretend to understand myself. My connections were, so to speak, with man and not with men. Only when I was shunted back to the grand trunk line did I become aware of my real rhythm, my real being. Individuality expressed itself for me as a life with roots. Efflorescence meant culture—in short, the world of cyclical development. In my eyes the great figures were always identified with the trunk of the tree, not with the boughs and leaves. And the great figures were capable of losing their identity easily: they were all variations of the one man, Adam Cadmus, or whatever he be called. My lineage stemmed from him, not from my ancestors. When I became aware I was superconscious; I could make the leap back at one bound.