The Troubled Air (36 page)

Vic leaned forward, playing the game, holding Jane’s hand in both his. “Tell me,” he said. “Repeat every word accurately.”

“I will not,” Jane said. “Nancy’d never forgive me. But they were absolutely prostrated when they heard you were married.”

Sexual play, Archer thought heavily, that’s what they call it in all those heavy books they sell on Sixth Avenue.

The waiter opened the first bottle and they all toasted Jane and she blushed and for a moment looked childish and flustered. But the first few sips of the wine made her eyes glitter and her cheeks flush redder than ever. Everyone talked animatedly, going over the evening, keeping Jane’s triumph alive for another hour. Archer made a conscientious effort to like everybody at the table and joined in the conversation, trying not to be censorious as he noticed Jane ignoring Bruce more and more for Barbante. Bruce gulped his wine gloomily and swiftly, suffering under the burden of his youth and his unprivileged position. His eyes soon became glazed and he laughed stiffly and mechanically at moments when he remembered that he intended to look as though he was a debonair gentleman accustomed to good restaurants, fine wines and frivolous women.

No help there, Archer thought, staring coldly at the boy. Not for another ten years.

“It’s a nice little play,
The Male Animal,”
Archer heard Barbante saying, his rich, low, condescending voice carrying through the little conversations around him at the table. “But it’s a lie.”

The word made the others stop talking and they all looked at the writer. Barbante was leaning nonchalantly back in his chair, his deft, dark hands playing with the swizzle stick on the cloth in front of him. He smiled, using his eyelashes, conscious that the audience was now his.

“All comedy is a lie,” Barbante went on easily. “For one good reason. What’s the definition of a comedy? A play with a happy ending. The hero prospers. He marries the girl of his choice. Virtue triumphs. The audience goes out of the theatre with a false, Utopian sense that the world is better than it really is. In a completely moral society, where the promulgation of truth was mandatory, comedies would be barred from the stage. The authors would be accused of spreading false doctrine and be locked away in jail or beheaded, depending upon the degree of enthusiasm with which the society attempted to keep itself pure. In life, where do we find the happy ending? Who gets the girl of his choice? And having gotten her, how does it turn out? Which one of us sitting at this table believes that the world is arranged for the triumph of virtue? Comedy depends upon the assumption that most human beings are good at heart. Well, who can look around him today and say, with a straight face, that he believes in that now? Everywhere we see predatory animals, leaping upon each other, tearing each other, dabbling in blood. And, what’s more important—
enjoying
it. Death is our most profound amusement. The hunt is the one true symbol of existence—the despair of the victim is the necessary titillation to the joy of the victor. Pity is a pious afterthought to carnage.”

Archer looked around him uneasily, wondering if any of the chattering people at the nearby tables were listening. Was it wise, he thought, for a man whose phone was tapped by the Government to be observed listening to doctrine like this?

“Where is the place for comedy among these ferocious truths?” Barbante demanded. “We put happy endings on the fairy tales we tell children to prepare them for bed, but both we and the children know that we are engaged in fantasy for a sedative purpose. As an adult, I reject that as a function of art. Even if I wanted to accept it, the evidence all around me would prevent it. That play tonight, for example …” He smiled at Jane. “So persuasively performed. What do you think really would happen if a professor lined himself up so boldly against the established powers? The trustees would demand his scalp, the newspapers would crucify him, his superiors would defend him half-heartedly, then give in to the practical considerations of their own survival. He would be hounded out of his profession, and wind up his life broken and poverty-stricken.”

“Oh, Dominic,” Vic said lightly, “what a grim fellow you are!”

“Not at all,” Barbante said. “I laugh a good deal of the time. That’s one of the reasons I never try to write anything more permanent than radio scripts. I’m not properly equipped. I’m too frivolous. I am not in despair, and the only writing that’s worth anything must come from the most profound despair. From pain, sickness, hatred, violence, suspicion, loss of hope. It is only the victim who can report the hunt truthfully and I’m too modest to put myself in that enormous role.”

“As a father,” Archer said, trying to keep his tone light and conversational, “I can’t sit at the table and permit my daughter to be exposed to this black religion without saying a word or two on the other side.” Jane slowly turned in his direction and watched him, soberly. Neither Nancy nor Kitty, he could tell, were taking the discussion very seriously, merely regarding it as just one more example of the wandering and casuistic theorizing with which men unaccountably amuse themselves late at night after drink. “The idea of comedy,” he said, “comes from something that’s just as real as despair—the conception that men are fundamentally good—or at least that some men are fundamentally good—that they wish to do good to their neighbors, that over the years they can advance from the jungle philosophy of the victor and the victim—that, in fact, they
have
advanced …”

Barbante nodded genially. “I knew you could be depended upon to say something like that, Clem,” he said pleasantly. “It does credit to your heart even if it does less credit to your intelligence and powers of observation. Look around you today, Clem … Can you honestly say that you feel we’ve advanced, say, from the period of the Pharaohs or the tribal times before that?”

“Yes,” Archer said.

“When we send a thousand planes over a city to drop bombs on women and children,” Barbante asked, “are we better than the warrior who raided the next village for a wife? When we let loose an atomic bomb and kill a hundred thousand people in a moment, are we better, say, than the Aztec priests who ceremonially slit the throats of human victims on their altars and tore open the breasts of the victims to rip out the still-pumping hearts and offer them up as sacrifices to their gods? Are those highly civilized people, the Germans, who cremated millions of human beings in their furnaces, better than their ancestors who wore horns on their helmets and ambushed each other along the trails of the Black Forest? Would you say that the Russians, with their torture chambers and Siberian concentration camps and their state labor forces, are better than the Arab slave dealers supplying eleven-year-old eunuchs to the markets of Constantinople? Where are the fundamentally good people you spoke of? On what continent do they operate? Or do you see some obscure intention to do good to your neighbor in dropping a bomb on him or putting him in a furnace? Or is goodness a quality that exists by itself, in a pure state, with no necessity to be reflected in action? Or are we better than the jungle merely because we kill at a distance, impersonally, from thirty thousand feet, or with a state regulation, rather than with our own teeth and claws? Are we less bloodthirsty because we kill more expertly and we are too far away from our victims in their last moments to hear their cries? Are we more holy because we offer up our living sacrifices not to a stone god, but to the State? Do we pretend that we do not feel the hunter’s pleasure when we read in our newspapers that our forces have destroyed another ten thousand of the enemy the day before? No,” Barbante said, smiling curiously, speaking so smoothly that Archer was confident he had worked out this argument many times before and had claimed the attention of many gatherings again and again with its horrors, “no, I don’t believe we’re any worse. We’re the same. We’re human beings, just as they were, with all our airplanes and automobiles and vacuum tubes. We kill because we take pleasure in it. We’re vindictive, crafty and violent, and we like the taste of blood, whether we wipe it off a stone knife or the front page of the latest edition of the New York
Daily News.
If I were asked to put down, in as few words as possible, my reaction to the human race, I’d merely write, ‘Beware us.’ ”

“Beware. Beware.” It was Bruce. He was struggling to his feet, his eyes thick, his face flushed. He had been drinking steadily and he teetered, holding onto the back of his chair. “Beware. He’s right, I don’t like him, but he’s right.” Bruce turned inaccurately toward Jane. “You’re terrible,” he said, as though Barbante’s diatribe had given him new insight into the characters of the people around him. “You’re a terrible girl.”

Jane looked up at him puzzledly for a moment. Then she laughed. “You’re a funny boy, Bruce,” she said. “You’d better go home.”

Bruce bowed, stiffly, a little to one side. “The victim and the victor,” he said loudly and ambiguously. Then he bowed again to the company at large. “How was I supposed to know I was expected to send flowers?” he demanded. He shook his head slowly and sadly. “I’m a funny boy,” he said. “I’d better go home. Thank you very much. Thank you one and all.”

He walked out through the crowded restaurant, holding his head carefully straight on his shoulders, containing his anguish and his loneliness. Archer watched him, half-amused, half-pitying. Jane ought to go after him and say good night, he thought. He looked at his daughter. She wasn’t even watching Bruce. Her eyes were on Barbante again and her face looked hard and excited and older than when she had come into the restaurant less than an hour before. Somehow, Archer realized, Barbante had captured her imagination with what he had said, perhaps because by saying it in front of her, and in fact directing it almost completely to her, she had been flattered and made to feel grownup. And perhaps she had felt that there was something wickedly passionate, lawlessly cruel and strong in his soft-voiced nihilism, something that awoke forces in her that her protected, easygoing schoolgirl life had never touched until now. Archer hated the expression on his daughter’s face.

“Clement, darling,” Kitty said, “I think Bruce had the right idea. I think it’s about time we were all getting home. I’m awfully tired …”

“Yep,” Vic said, “I’m going to go home and practice up on my despair and start writing
The Brothers Karamazov
tomorrow.”

They all laughed and Jane finished her champagne while Barbante insisted upon taking the check and Archer helped Kitty on with her coat. Standing outside, on the windy street, with all the other lights extinguished and the taxis ranked along the curb, Jane looked up to the faint stars above the glow of the city in the sky. She stretched her arms and said, “I can’t. I just can’t go home and try to sleep tonight.”

“Why try?” Barbante asked. He looked at his watch. “It’s early yet. Everything’s open but the museums. Why don’t we all just keep going?”

“Not me,” Vic said. “Thank you very much. My sons wake me at six-thirty every morning. Come on, Nancy.” He took his wife’s arm. “The old folks’re going to retire and leave the new generation to their revels.”

Archer waited for Kitty to say something, order Jane, as tactfully as possible, to come home with them. I’ve acted the policeman enough tonight, he thought resentfully, let her take on some of the responsibility now.

But Kitty, who was half-asleep, standing up and leaning against his arm, merely tried to hide a yawn. “All right, darling. Have a nice time. Just don’t come home too late …”

Archer set his face. Coldly, he said good night to Barbante and to his daughter. He could tell that Jane knew he was angry and he hoped that that realization would drive her home after a half hour or so in a night club or wherever Barbante was taking her.

He got into a cab with Kitty, leaving Barbante and Jane standing on the sidewalk, debating where they wanted to go. Kitty fell asleep immediately against his shoulder as the cab rattled downtown through the dark streets.

At home, Kitty went to bed like a sleepy infant, hardly conscious as Archer helped her undress and tucked her in. Drowsily, she reached up her arms and pulled his head down for a kiss. She smelt warm and soapy and her hair was tumbled around her because she had been too tired to put it up. “Wasn’t it nice?” she murmured. “Champagne. Wasn’t that boy silly?” She giggled drowsily. “Wasn’t Jane beautiful?”

She dropped her arms and closed her eyes. Archer stood up and put out the lamp. He wasn’t sleepy. He went downstairs and into his study. The evening papers were there, but they looked stale. All the news, he thought, happened a long time ago. Since then new editions have come out and everything is different.

The telephone reflected the light of the desk lamp blackly. He looked at it curiously. Somewhere, in a bright room, connected to the line, there was a wakeful instrument, ready to note down each inflection of his voice, each word, to be assayed and put in an obscure future balance. He felt a crazy desire to communicate with the man who finally would listen to what he said over the phone. The blank invading presence lurking behind the instrument should be addressed, questioned, exhorted. “This is the suspect speaking. This is Clement Archer. What am I suspected of? What do you expect me to say? What do you want me to do? What information can I give about myself? I’m forty-five years old and I’m tired. My life is complicated and I’m worried about age, love, money, work, the health of my wife, the virtue of my daughter, the end of the world. As far as I know, I have committed no crimes, but perhaps you have a secret list of actions which have not yet been revealed as crimes but which will be in good time. How do you avoid committing crimes of whose existence you are ignorant? How do you purge yourself of sins which could only exist in the future? I contemplate nothing. I contemplate merely living. From a loftier point of view that is perhaps the grossest sin of all, but I doubt you were linked to my phone to convict me of that. What are
your
sins? The man who listens to the intricate private conversations of another man necessarily sits in judgment. What standards do you judge by, where are the books of law you use, what is your rectitude, what judgment do you record? Will I ever be told? What are the penalties? Or is the only penalty the knowledge that every time I pick up the instrument to call a shop or tell my daughter I love her, I am overheard? What do you think of me, having heard me speak so often and so candidly, not knowing before this that you were listening? Do you think I am sinful? Do you believe I am guilty—and if so, of what? Have you been moved to pity? Have you chuckled from time to time over the easy jokes I’ve exchanged with my friends? Do you approve of my wit? Do you sometimes feel like warning me when you discover that I am going to be involved in a business venture that you feel will turn out badly or that I have accepted an invitation to a dinner that you are sure will be boring? Do you hate me? Do you have any feeling or is it requisite to your particular craft to divorce yourself absolutely from all feeling? Have you learned anything from me? Have you passed me in the street and said to yourself, ‘Why, he looks surprisingly decent.’ Is it possible that after listening for a certain length of time, to record after record of unconsidered conversation, you will finally report to your superiors, ‘I find the suspect to be an admirable and charming man and fully intend to make his acquaintance and invite him to my home for a drink. He likes Martinis and beer on tap.’ Or is it never possible to come to a benevolent conclusion in your field of work? We were talking about hunting this evening, unfortunately out of earshot from you, and one of the gentlemen at the table pointed out that the pleasure of the hunter is only fulfilled with the pain of the hunted. Now, certainly, you are hunting me. Can you only be fulfilled at the price of my pain? Or are you engaged in a particular and curious kind of hunting in which gratification can be gained from the escape of the prey through innocence? On the subject of innocence, what can I say? It is a subject which I have not studied exhaustively as yet, since I have only known that my innocence was at question since 6 o’clock last evening. As far as I know, as I have said, I am innocent, but I must confess that I am no good judge of the matter, since I am committed to using rules and standards that have been made public and are no doubt obsolete. You, sitting in your secret room, wherever it is, have modernized guilt and innocence and operate only under the most up-to-date regulations, which, of course, cannot be revealed. Naturally, my first reaction was one of anger when I discovered that you were observing me. I had two childish and complementary impulses. ‘Well,’ I thought, like an unfairly punished child who resolves to commit the deed after the punishment in a blind approximation of justice, ‘well, if that’s what they think of me, I’ll show them. I’ll give them something
really
to worry about. If they believe I am disloyal, I
will
be disloyal.’ But, then, what could I do? Go out into the streets and call for the overthrow of the Government? I do not believe in the overthrow of the Government, regardless of what the agents of the Government believe about me. Caught in my own reasonableness I am frozen in inaction. My other impulse was to leave. Abdicate. Go to another country, since my own country had shown its mistrust of me. But, even overlooking the hardships and impracticality of this self-exile, I had to reject it. I am part of the nation. I have profited in it; I have had my fair chance to influence its actions. Feeling grandiloquent, I remember Socrates, who, when he had the opportunity, refused to leave the prison in which he was awaiting the poison, because of his attachment to the state which had doomed him. The laws are my laws—you, sitting in the room listening to the circling wax on which my voice, unknown to me, may already have convicted me—you, as the politicians put it, are my servant, my employee, the extension of my will. In other matters, I rely upon you implicitly. I rely upon you to protect the peace of my home, to defend me against kidnappers, counterfeiters, fraud through the mails, corrupt business practices, domestic riot and political murder, against the peddlers of narcotics, the infringers of copyrights, the adulterers of foods and drugs; a good part of my life is based on the almost unexamined assumption that you are busy and competent. Now when I find that in the course of what I must consider your proper business I am under your scrutiny, can I fairly say that you are my enemy and that I reject you? If it were in my power to abolish your office, could I, believing that I am an honest man and a responsible citizen, could I properly bring myself to force you to halt, your activities?