Very Old Bones (23 page)

“Brenda looks naked, doesn’t she?” I said. “More fraudulence: She never lets herself be naked. She’s wearing an all-but-invisible G-string she puts on with
adhesive. It covers her opening, and has a bit of hair that matches her own. She provides the illusion of nudity while she retains the protective integrity of the larger G-string, and so the
customers never see the complete Brenda. I find a fascination in this betrayal of the public trust, don’t you? Most of the time in this life when you see a naked pussy you assume it truly is
a naked pussy. Since we all live in the great whorehouse, and since we all give a fuck whenever we can, no matter what the cost, the discovery that even the most openhanded lewdness is only another
act of cynicism seems just right, admirable even. Dr. Tannen used to chide me for my quest for innocence, or at least that’s how he described it. He said my time underground, or in the sewer
as you put it, was really a search for something that didn’t exist in the world, not now, not ever. How far back in darkness do you want to go to find that innocence? he asked. The womb?
Amniotic innocence? Do you really think the womb was such an innocent place? Maybe you’d like to go back beyond the womb to the soul’s descent
into
the womb, or back even to the
soul’s creation. Personally, he said, I don’t think you can get there from here.”

Giselle put her hand on the right side of my head and held it. “Do you still get the headaches?” she asked.

“Once in a while,” I said.

“How often do you see the doctor?”

“We’re quits. I can’t afford him. But I understand. He doesn’t run a free lunch counter.”

“It was beautiful, what you did for me,” Giselle said.

“I’m glad you liked it,” I said. “I’ll pay your friend back when I get the advance on the Meriwether book.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take it out of my paycheck.”

“You are a generous woman, Giselle.”

“You’re a loving husband, Orson.”

“Yes. That’s true. Isn’t it a pity.”

Giselle dropped her hand from my head, took my hand in hers, and was smiling her smile of rue when the shooting began in the street. One shot broke the window in the club’s door, and Eddie
the barman yelled, “Get down, folks, they’re shootin’ out there.”

I could see someone huddled in the doorway until the lights went out, heard a pistol fired twice, three times, four, heard a volley of return shots, and then the doorway went silent. Eddie
switched the lights back on and when he opened the door a man in a light-gray overcoat rolled down from the two steps where he’d been huddling. Two uniformed policemen with drawn pistols
stood on the sidewalk observing the situation. Both holstered their pistols and one went elsewhere.

“Who is he?” Eddie asked the policeman.

“He just held up the joint next door.”

The interview took place on the threshold of The Candy Box, a Manhattan nightclub on 52nd Street, a crosstown artery that is home to two dozen jazz bars and exotic dance clubs
along its neon way. The corpse was male, reasonably well dressed, without a necktie, but wearing a shirt with starched collar, double-breasted dark gray suit, gray overcoat, and a gray fedora that
had fallen off when the man was shot. Two policemen had come upon him almost as soon as he emerged, gun in hand, from an adjacent nightclub, where he had stolen an unspecified amount of money.

The door of The Candy Box remained open throughout the interview at the suggestion of police, who were awaiting the homicide photographer. A woman customer in The Candy Box was actually the
first to photograph the corpse, using a Leica thirty-five-millimeter and natural light. This dramatic photo received wide currency, appearing in
Life
magazine six days after the
shooting.

The corpse lay on its right side during the interview, bullet holes in its head, neck, chest, and other parts of the upper torso. The eyes were open, and the expression on the face (which was
free of blood) was one of inquiry, as if the man had died asking a question. This was the first interview the owner of the corpse had ever given, either in life or in death.

I decided that not only was I an eschatophiliac, but also an eschatophile. It seemed to be the healthiest of all possible conditions: In this most illuminating darkness of the city’s night
I could distinguish the last weakened light of end times, could see, with my heightened vision, that in The Candy Box’s sign the ionized neon had grown sooty in its finality, a soiled and
fading flickering of the city’s last artificial light. Above my head the sky had turned increasingly frigid and black in a sunless world, and I knew that death was on the prowl. Could
judgment, heaven, or hell be far behind? Even scavengers cringe in light such as this, for it destroys even the
appetite
to survive. Only solitude, and the contemplation of the ease of
existence in the face of futility, are viable now. Suicide is pointless, for the entertainment value of terminal events exceeds that of the vapid flight to oblivion.

I now realized how much I loved to lose. Acquisition had invariably brought with it the anxiety of loss, and the settling in of that anxiety had always proved to be a prelude to harsh reality
for me. This was how I had lived. I created the highs and lows of my life. I accumulated the Giselles and Les Montrachets of my days, and then I lost them. I would never again enumerate all that
had been taken from me, and I blamed no one for this recurring phenomenon. I was beyond blame and had come to understand that this was the natural curve of life, especially for the Phelans. This
knowledge elevated my spirit, for I knew I would live under no more delusions. I would be prepared for the worst that life could offer. Solitude, contemplation, and waiting for the finale: these
were the meaningful pursuits. And also, oh yes, the elimination of the past. I would throw out all that I had written, all my letters (including those from Giselle; especially those from Giselle).
I would throw out all books that did not enhance solitude. I would throw out memory. I would throw out the memory of Miss Nelson, in whose home I roomed when I first went to Albany to live. Demure,
old, white-haired Miss Nelson, retired schoolteacher, had lost her connection to significance long ago. Where had it gone? There, under her canopy bed, I saw one day the bright light of
yesterday’s loss shining on forty empty bourbon bottles. Goodbye, memory of Miss Nelson. I would also throw out the memories of Quinn. That would take time, there were so many. I would begin
with the night at the Grand View Lake House when I was with Joanie Mac in the boat house, my hand down at Joanie’s place, when we saw Wanda, the new waitress, come back to the hotel’s
servants’ quarters with Liver Mason, back from the movies in Saratoga. Let me kiss you, Liver said, and as he threw his arms around her, Wanda peck-pecked his liverly lips and pushed him
away. Tomorrow again? pleaded Liver. Tomorrow maybe, said Wanda, and she ran up the stairs to bed. Getting some air, Quinn came out the back door of the hotel bar, whistling, searching in life for
the elusive meaning of his solitude, and Wanda, after less than eight bars of the whistling, bounded down the stairs, took Quinn’s arm, and—just as if it were planned—they came
into the boat house, his hand already up at Wanda’s, and he said later he never expected it to happen, didn’t know she was there, hadn’t been following her and Liver, was
surprised out of his socks, was just out for a walk, and other genuinely true lies he told himself. Quinner the sinner. Quinner the winner. Goodbye, Quinner at the boat house. Goodbye, Quinner in
Europe with Giselle. And I felt lightened already. It would be a pleasant thing to unmemorize my life. It would prove I was no longer afraid of time. I would sit in my window and watch the
garbageman take away the evidence that Orson Purcell had ever existed.

And so I moved on, ever deeper, into the lovely, lovely darkness, thrilled by it all as only a true eschatophile can be.

In the early spring of 1953, and with blinding illumination on through the fall of 1954, Peter Phelan came to perceive this: that individuals, families, or societies that
willfully suppress their history will face a season of reckoning, one certain to arrive obliquely, in a dark place, and at a hostile hour, with consequences for the innocent as well as for the
conspirators. Peter saw this first in my collapse, and then in the rolling boil of divine vengeance visited upon his brothers and sisters in these years.

In much the way that he had left Colonie Street in 1913 to escape what he saw as the shallow morality of his mother, only to discover that a tissue of other reasons had contributed to his move
(and her behavior), so in November, 1954, did he return home to cope yet again with the Phelan family shallows, again pushed to doing so by ancillary reasons: the death and departure of so many
friends from his changing Greenwich Village neighborhood and his near isolation as a result of this, his diminishing bank account, deficient income, and the appealing prospect of free rent in
Albany, his growing problem with arthritic hips, which prevented him from standing at his easel and had sat him prematurely in the novice invalid’s chair, his unflagging love for his brothers
and sisters, and, not least, his distance from me, about whom he had begun to fret in unreasonably paternal ways.