The Abyss of Human Illusion (9 page)

— XLVII —

THE PARK

D
onnie had gone in to San Antonio with two other soldiers from his advanced training company in Fort Sam Houston’s Medical Field Service School. After hours of drinking in one dump after another, and the boisterous, aimless wandering in search of shabby adventure that is the soldier’s substitute for leisure, he somehow lost his companions, or they him. He wandered around in the vicinity of the Alamo, and then “found himself,” almost literally, on a bench in the middle of a little park, broke and stupid drunk. He hoped that an M.P. or A.P. patrol wouldn’t find him, for he was their perfect catch; and he knew, too, that a city cop would be all too happy to arrest him, one of the flood of vermin that daily spoiled the city. His “civilian” clothes of khakis, low-quarters, and a hideously figured shirt—an AWOL shirt, as it was known—would fool nobody: he was most clearly a soldier and a drunken bum. So he sat, breathing deeply, and looking around nervously and fatalistically: he was drunk and broke in the middle of the San Antonio night; what else was there to say? He thought, absurdly, that if he could manage to walk without staggering, he might be able to get to the bus depot, which was, he was certain, not too far; there, he could look like any other dumb soldier waiting to get back to Fort Sam. He had no money, but the main thing now was for him to get off the street.

A man, perhaps five years older than he, was quite suddenly standing in front of him, and he waited to hear the cold command, “Stand up, soldier,” but instead heard the man saying that the M.P.’s were due on their rounds through the park any minute and he’d be pinched for sure. Did he have any place to go for the night? He had no place to go, no; no place to go.

THE HOTEL

The man lived or was staying in a room at the Cactus Hotel, an old frame building of three floors on the edge of the West Side, the Mexican district. The place was bleak but clean, as was the room that they entered on the top floor. The mended sheets looked as if they’d been changed recently, and two paper-thin towels on door hooks were not noticeably soiled. There was a bathroom in the hall that served the three or four guests, so to speak, who lived on the floor. He stripped to his briefs and T-shirt in the bathroom, washed with a cake of Lifebuoy that the man had given him, and dried himself with one of the towels, which had a faint aroma of Aqua Velva. When he got back to the room, the man was in bed and apparently asleep. Sitting at the side of the bed was a small fat man with thick-lensed glasses, wearing a dirty, wrinkled suit and a gray fedora with a ridiculously wide brim. He was talking, rather urgently, to the man in the bed about a movie that, he remembered, had to do with a gangster who had a recurring nightmare about being lost in a rainstorm, a
white
rainstorm, yeah, he was crazy. The man in the bed made no reply. “Do you remember Kay Francis?” he said to Donnie. “She had a little lisp.
There’s
a woman whose ass I’d like to fuck.” Donnie smiled faintly and got into bed and the fat man asked to look at his feet, and Donnie, although he had no idea why, stuck his legs out. The man examined each toe, then carefully and lovingly licked his soles. Donnie lay there, oddly pleased, amused even, and then the fat man got up and as he turned to leave, said “Kay Francis,” and stroked his crotch. The whole scene seemed absolutely natural and even banal. This was the sort of thing that
happened
at the Cactus Hotel, certainly. Donnie got under the sheet and turned out the shadeless lamp at the side of the bed, then lay, staring awake, after a time realizing, although he didn’t want to realize it, that he was sexually aroused, that he wanted the man next to him to turn and reach over and touch him, kiss him, do whatever he wanted. What was the matter with him? Two weeks earlier he had fucked three whores in Nuevo Laredo, he certainly wasn’t a fag! But he wanted the man to reach over and touch him,
touch
him, and ask him to do things with him. He turned on his side, his face burning with shame and lust. He knew the man was awake and aware of his desires, and knew, too, that all he had to do was make the first move. He lay rigid, astonished and revolted by his erection.

THE MORNING

The man bought them both chili with beans, flour tortillas, and a couple of cold Carta Blancas the next morning in a little Mexican hole in the wall, said he had to get to work, and they shook hands. Donnie felt ill at ease, in the knowledge that the man had surely known of his aberrant desire of the night before, but nothing, of course, was said by either of them, and the little fat man’s visit or appearance was as if it had never occurred; it existed as a vague invention.

Donnie walked, losing his way three or four times, to the bus depot and as he got to the entrance a Sergeant First Class with an I Corps patch came out and Donnie asked him if maybe he could spare a buck toward a ticket back to Fort Sam. The sergeant laughed at him: “Walk, you sorry fuck,” he said.

Donnie spent the next six hours panhandling while avoiding M.P.’s until he finally had enough money to buy a ticket back to the fort. He got to his barracks about 4:00 p.m.; a couple of semi-drunks were playing rummy on top of a foot locker, drinking Lone Star and eating hot cherry peppers; otherwise the almost silent barracks had that sad, chaotic Sunday look. One of them looked up, and smiled. “Hey, daddy cool—you get you some hot Meskin ass?” Donnie smirked and pumped his fist. “Fuckin’ A.”

— XLVIII —

F
ive years before the crash of October 1929, Guy Bonney—the name an Americanization of Gaetano Bonifacio—married Charlotte Briczewicz, a girl of Polish extraction. He’d met her at a “good clean dance” in Saint Rocco’s basement, and they began keeping company, as they used to say, soon after. Her family was bitterly unhappy, fearing, perhaps, that the pure Polish blood of their ancient Tarnowski line would be forever tainted. Guy was a Catholic, but … On the other hand, Guy’s family was accepting of Charlotte, the marriage, and even what they considered to be her strange moralistic family—it’s fine to be Catholic, but the Briczewiczes seemed, well, a little crazy? As Mr. Bonifacio said after a visit “All the saintsa pitcha all over the house-a! Madonn’!” They were aware, too, of the slightly disguised bigotry of Charlotte’s family toward “Eyetalians,” but, perhaps because of their roiled Mediterranean ancestry, figured that since we are all mongrels that it doesn’t much matter who marries anybody.

Guy began to do well in the small home-contracting and remodeling business he’d begun with an older brother, Angelo, and soon a son was born to the couple, who were living in a small frame house in Gerritsen Beach. They were happy, more or less, but Charlotte, swayed by her parents and their unrelenting campaign, had begun to feel superior to Guy, and to find many occasions on which to suggest to him that he was, ah, lacking in some of those things that made America a great country for
real Americans.
His father, my God, she often noted as if in passing, could hardly speak English, and even Guy, even Guy had a
faint
accent, not much, but a little. It was sometimes a little embarrassing when they stepped out for the evening with another “nice” couple (“nice” may be read as “refined” Americans). Guy wondered why his supposed accent had never been mentioned before they were married. Well, she was a pretty good wife, despite her growing oddities.

Guy’s business had, of course, suffered because of the deepening Depression, but with ingenuity, a little luck, and some contacts he’d made, he got a city contract here, some NRA work there, and so on, and they seemed to be doing just fine. This, it may come as no surprise, annoyed the Briczewicz family, and, for that matter, Charlotte herself, even though she had a new bedroom suite, an electric refrigerator—a Frigidaire!—and a gray Persian lamb coat. The story, which emerged, sluglike, from the muck of her family’s gossip, was that Guy—Guytanno!—was some kind of a gangster or something, or that he was mixed up with gangsters;
something
was going on. Wasn’t his office on Wolcott Street in Red Hook, where all the Black Hand guineas lived and figured out ways to steal from decent Americans? Them and the kikes? The atmosphere between Guy and his in-laws was not exactly poisonous, but he was made to understand that he’d better “be good” to Charlotte and her little Stanley, even though the poor baby, so they thought, was sadly corrupted; thank God that he was at least blond. It was the Novena that Mrs. Briczewicz had made to the Infant Jesus of Prague that gave them
that
small gift. Well, God had his reasons, but they could be hard to understand.

Guy tried to pay as little heed to this blanket malice as possible, and, in what was a misplaced attempt to persuade his in-laws to warm to him, to convince them that he was a good solid American husband and father, he regularly invited them to dinner with him and Charlotte and the baby. They dined, always, in a restaurant on Forty-forth Street just west of Eighth Avenue, the Milano, to which, it should be said, he drove them in a new Packard that his excellent credit had made it possible for him to buy: they looked wisely at each other as they settled into its rear seat. His “mom” and “dad” always accepted these invitations, for Charlotte had made it clear to them that they needn’t worry that the Eyetalian family would accompany them:
she
had to suffer their loud hospitality once a month at their house in Bath Beach, and she’d let Guy know,
indeed,
that that was enough! His in-laws despised the fact of the Milano almost as much as they despised the fact of the Packard, but most of all, they were angry that Guy had the money to pay for these dinners! Where did he
get
this money? Nonetheless, they packed the food in, from the antipasto through the cannoli and espresso with anisette, complaining that this “spicy Eyetalian food” would, as always, give them terrible heartburn. “It’s just like all Eyetalian food,” Mrs. Briczewicz said, with wondrous regularity. “You’d think that after being in this country all these years they’d learn how to cook the right way.” She would shake her head at such barbarian intransigence.

Charlotte’s family—and Charlotte as well—refused to pronounce the name of the restaurant correctly, even though they had heard Guy, as well as various waiters and the owner, say the word many times. They called it the MY-LANNO, seeming to savor the disappointed look on Guy’s face. He’d corrected them the first few weeks, and then realized what was being done: this was a subversive marginalization of him. MY-LANNO was an
American
word, or should be. Period. And so Guy, without calling attention to it, began to say “MY-LANNO” as well, and was aware of the smug contempt of Charlotte and her parents in their easy victory.

Now he had lost, one might say, virtually everything but his business, and had become just another dim, wayward American—or so he perhaps regretfully thought. But Charlotte was still his, still blond and blue-eyed, still nice to look at. It wasn’t really important to be what he had once been. Was it? “Are you and Sophie free for dinner Sunday at the MY-LANNO?” he’d ask his father-in-law. Who would pause to think about his answer, oh yes, pause to think about it.

— XLIX —

B
illy and his wife, Audrey, were vegetarians, and, like many people who embrace what they consider to be salutary and superior modes of behavior, they, in their perfection, slowly yet relentlessly marginalized all those friends who were not of their dietary persuasion. In this, they were, perhaps, much like cultists, whose happily demented myths make them smugly exclusionary. As the years passed, and up to their elbows in brown rice and tofu, they made many new friends of their ilk, of course.

When one first met Billy, who was a routing clerk for UPS, it seemed, for some reason, that he “did” something interesting: something artistic, perhaps; or excitingly political—shadowy, vague, radical. He wore a long, well-trimmed beard, round wire-rim glasses, and smoked a lot of marijuana, which he was candid but not too candid about—as if it wasn’t really worth hiding, yet just lawless enough to keep from the unanointed, the squares. To be enlightened as to his smoking habits was to feel—or at least, many people felt themselves to be—intimate adepts. After knowing Billy a little while, however, it became clear that what he “did” was work as a routing clerk for UPS and stay half-stoned at all times. Still, his rickety “mystique” (such were the times) somehow prevailed, amid the smoke and the perfected ravings of the Stones, the Dead, the Airplane, and other assorted multimillionaire rebels. He was a UPS routing clerk, yes, and nothing else, but he was so perfectly hip that it still
seemed
as if there was something secret and darkly interesting about his life, though it was, metaphorically speaking, a life that possessed the quality of a paper bag.

Audrey was a large, hefty, yet rawboned woman of a startling homeliness: she wasn’t ugly or deformed; her features were regular, as they say, but there was a blank neutrality to her face, a kind of dumb look, and her body, oddly enough, seemed to be dumb as well, if that makes any sense. Those who know Audrey will understand this. She deferred to Billy in all things, and was given to small, consciously half-suppressed smiles when some fringe idea—political, artistic, sexual—was mentioned over the broccoli-rutabaga casserole, as if the mysterious Billy knew all about such things, was involved in such things, had, perhaps, thought up such things. She contributed to Billy’s phantom panache by herself pretending that he “did” something. For all I know, she may well have thought that Billy
had
a secret, romantic life that he kept from her so as to protect her and their snug domesticity. Where he got the time to lead this life, she would not explore, for when he was not at the UPS job, he was usually at home, cannabis-paralyzed, his ears wide open to the music on their stereo. Rock on, man!

Audrey began attending a macramé class at a nearby community college (Macramé: Fun and Function), and began a small friendship with a woman, some fifteen years her junior, who expressed fascination and delight at the fact that Audrey was a vegetarian, and mentioned, more than once, that she had long considered abandoning meat. Things went along, and Audrey invited her to dinner a few weeks later, at which she and Billy seemed to get along very well. She
loved
the dinner—eggplant, tomatoes, fresh corn, and yellow squash made into a kind of pedestrian ratatouille, salad, carrot cake—one of Audrey’s specialties—and herb tea. Billy suggested that he “did”—oh, it’s not, he hinted, important—this and that, and Akina, the new friend, was deeply impressed by the reticence of the really interesting Billy. Audrey, of course, helped the scene along, as always: smiles, silences, the works.

They began seeing a lot of Akina, a small, dark woman who wore, more often than not, a strained, worried expression, as if she were about to be interrogated, and whose light-coffee complexion appeared to be—how to put this?—manufactured. Perhaps it was. It was summer now, and when the three went to the beach, Akina, who couldn’t swim, seemed either unaware or uncaring that a profusion of her black pubic hair flourished wildly at either side of her bathing suit’s crotch. This sight may have maddened Billy, for soon he and Akina were committing adultery with, as they say, abandon, and soon Billy moved out, leaving Audrey hurt and bewildered.

Billy left his job at UPS, at Akina’s urging, so that he could “do” all the things that he was capable of; she had realized, of course, that Billy could do nothing at all, but she thought that with his—with his what?—he would make a really great life for them both. Billy had some money, slyly saved in a bank account unknown to Audrey, and they lived off that and the few dollars Akina made working in a boutique on St. Mark’s Place, just then beginning its ascent into the diligently fake disreputability it would soon attain. He ignored Audrey’s pleas for financial help, smoked more “dynamite weed” than ever, and, with Akina’s urging, began to eat meat again: vegetarianism was for dumb fucks—like Audrey! They did a lot of laughing over their lamb chops.

Audrey knew that Billy would tire of Akina, re-embrace his lost, mysteriously vacant life, and return home to her. She suggested that this sort of thing had happened before and that she was, always, to blame for Billy’s sexual escapades, and that they had been mutually planned. She smiled Billy’s secret smile, his I-can’t-talk-about-it smile, and lighted a cigarette made of some sort of rank legume. “Billy,” she said, “well … Billy.” Then she changed the subject; she, and it, obscured in a cloud of smoke that smelled very like a burning barn.