The Last Gentleman: A Novel Page 10

  Taking the check from his loin, he read it several times. It seemed to be postdated. He scratched his head. On the other hand, what was today’s date?

  11.

  It was the first hot night. There were signs of summer. Fires had broken out in Harlem. Twice there were gunshots as close as Seventieth or Eightieth Street. Police cars raced north along Central Park West. But the park was quiet. Its public space, paltry by day, was leafed out in secrecy and darkness. Lamps made gold-green spaces in the rustling leaves.

  He strolled about the alp at the pond, hands in pockets and brow furrowed as if he were lost in thought. It was a dangerous place to visit by night, but he paid no attention. He felt irritable and strong and wouldn’t have minded a fist-fight. A few minutes earlier a damp young man had fallen in step on his deaf side.

  “Didn’t we take philosophy together at the Y?” the stranger murmured, skipping nimbly to get in step.

  “What’s that,” said the engineer absently.

  “I thought it unconscionably bad,” murmured the other.

  “Eh?” The engineer cupped his good ear.

  “Are you interested in the Platonic philosophy?” the other asked him.

  “In what?” said the engineer, stopping and swinging around to hear better but also bending upon the other such an intent, yet unfocused gaze that he melted into the night.

  Strong and healthy as he felt, he was, if the truth be known, somewhat dislocated. The sudden full tide of summer sent him spinning. The park swarmed with old déjà vus of summertime. It put him in mind of something, the close privy darkness and the black tannin smell of the bark and the cool surprising vapors of millions of fleshy new leaves. From time to time there seemed to come to him the smell of Alabama girls (no, Mississippi), who bathe and put on cotton dresses and walk uptown on a summer night. He climbed the alp dreamily and stooped over the bench. The cul-de-sac held the same message it had held for days, a quotation from Montaigne. He read it under a lamp:

  Man is certainly stark mad. He can’t make a worm, but he makes gods by the dozens.

  No one had picked it up. Nor was it very interesting, for that matter: when he sniffed it, it smelled not of Montaigne but of a person who might quote Montaigne on such a night as this, an entirely different matter.

  “Wait—” he stopped in a dapple of light and leaves and snapped his fingers softly. That was what his father used to say. He too quoted Montaigne on a summer night but in a greener, denser, more privy darkness than this. The young man in the park snapped his fingers again. He stood a full minute, eyes closed, swaying slightly. He raised a hand tentatively toward the West.

  Yonder was not the alp but the levee, and not the lamp in the trees but the street light at Houston Street and De Ridder. The man walked up and down in the darkness under the water oaks. The boy sat on the porch steps and minded the Philco, which clanked and whirred and plopped down the old 78’s and set the needle hissing and voyaging. Old Brahms went abroad into the summer night. West, atop the levee, couples sat in parked cars. East, up De Ridder, from the heavy humming ham-rich darkness of the cottonseed-oil mill there came now and then the sound of Negro laughter.

  Up and down the man walked and spoke to the boy when he passed the steps. More cars came nosing discreetly up the levee, lights out and appearing to go by paws, first left then right. The man grew angry.

  “The prayer meeting must be over,” said the man ironically.

  Out poured old Brahms, the old spoiled gorgeous low-German music but here at home surely and not in Hamburg.

  “What do they expect,” said the man now, westbound. He took his turn under the street light and came back.

  “Now they,” he went on, nodding to the east. “They fornicate and the one who fornicates best is the preacher.”

  The Great Horn Theme went abroad, the very sound of the ruined gorgeousness of the nineteenth century, the worst of times.

  “But they,” he said to the levee—“they fornicate too and in public and expect them back yonder somehow not to notice. Then they expect their women to be respected.”

  The boy waited for the scratch in the record. He knew when it was coming. The first part of the scratch came and he had time to get up and hold the tone arm just right so the needle wouldn’t jump the groove.

  “Watch them.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You just watch them. You know what’s going to happen?”

  “No sir.”

  “One will pick up the worst of the other and lose the best of himself. Watch. One will learn to fornicate in public and the other will end by pissing in the street. Watch.”

  The man stayed, so the boy said, “Yes sir.”

  “Go to whores if you have to, but always remember the difference. Don’t treat a lady like a whore or a whore like a lady.”

  “No sir, I won’t.”

  The record ended but the eccentric groove did not trip the mechanism. The boy half rose.

  “If you do one, then you’re going to be like them, a fornicator and not caring. If you do the other, you’ll be like them, fornicator and hypocrite.”

  He opened his eyes. Now standing in the civil public darkness of the park, he snapped his fingers softly as if he were trying to remember something.

  Then what happened after that? After he—

  Leaning over, he peered down at the faint dapple on the path. After a long moment he held up his watch to the lamplight. After a look around to get his bearings, he walked straight to the corner of the park and down into the BMT subway.

  Yet he could scarcely have been in his right mind or known exactly where he was, for what he did next was a thing one did at home but never did here. He dropped in. He walked up to Rita’s apartment in the Mews and knocked on the door at eight thirty in the evening.

  Kitty answered the door. Her mouth opened and closed. She could not believe her eyes. He defied the laws of optics.

  “Oh,” she said, fearing either to look at him or to take her eyes from him.

  “Let’s walk up the street,” he said. “It’s a nice night.”

  “Oh, I’d love to,” she cried, “but I can’t. Give me a rain check.” She was managing somehow both to stand aside and to block the doorway.

  “Let’s go ride the ferry to Staten Island.”

  “Oh, I can’t,” she wailed like an actress.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” he said after a moment.

  “What? Oh. Oh.” But instead of standing aside she put her head over coquettishly. Tock, she said, clicking her tongue and eyeing the darkness behind him. They were having a sort of date here in the doorway.

  “There is something I wanted to ask you. It will not take long. Your phone didn’t answer.”

  “It didn’t?” She called something over her shoulder. It seemed that here was the issue: the telephone. If this issue could be settled, it seemed, he would take his leave like a telephone man. But it allowed her to admit him: she stood aside.

  So it was at last that he found himself in the living room standing, in a kind of service capacity. He had come about the telephone. The two women smiled up at him from a low couch covered with Navaho blankets. No, only Kitty smiled. Rita eyed him ironically, her head appearing to turn perpetually away.

  It was not a Barbados cottage after all but an Indian hogan. Rita wore a Chamula huipil (Kitty was explaining nervously) of heavy homespun. Kitty herself had wound a white quezquemetl above her Capri pants. Brilliant quetzals and crude votive offerings painted on tin hung from the walls.

  They were drinking a strong-smelling tea.

  “I’ve been unable to reach you by phone,” he told Kitty.

  The two women looked at him.

  “I may as well state my business,” said the engineer, still more or less at attention, though listing a bit.

  “Good idea,” said Rita, taking a swig of the tea, which smelled like burnt corn. He watched as the muscular movement of her throat sent the liquid strumming along.
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  “Kitty, I want to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Could I speak to you alone?”

  “You’re among friends, ha-ha,” said Kitty laughing loudly.

  “Very well. I wanted to ask you to change your mind about going to Europe and instead go south with Jamie and me.” Until the moment he opened his mouth, he had no idea what he wished to ask her. “Here is your check, Mrs. Vaught. I really appreciate it, but—”

  “Good grief,” said Kitty, jumping to her feet as if she had received an electric shock. “Listen to the man,” she cried to Rita and smacked her thigh in a Jewish gesture.

  Rita shrugged. She ignored the check.

  The engineer advanced and actually took Kitty’s hand. For a second her pupils enlarged and she was as black-eyed as an Alabama girl on a summer night. Then she gaped at her own hand in stupefaction: it could not be so! He was holding her hand! But instead of snatching it away, she pulled him down on the couch.

  “Here. Try some hikuli tea,”

  “No thanks.” As he lay back among the pillows, his eye fell upon a votive painting. It showed a man who had been thrown from a motorcycle and now lay in a ditch. He had apparently suffered internal injuries, for blood spurted from his mouth like a stream from a garden hose.

  “That’s my favorite,” said Kitty. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “I guess so.”

  “He was cured miraculously by the Black Virgin.”

  “Is that right?”

  As Kitty went on, no longer so nervous now but seeming rather to have hit upon a course she might steer between the two of them, he noticed a spot of color in her cheek. There was a liquid light, not a tear, in the corner of her eye.

  “Ree’s been giving me the most fascinating account of the hikuli rite which is practiced by the Huichol Indians. The women are absolved from their sins by tying knots in a palm-leaf string, one knot for each lover. Then they throw the string into Grandfather Fire. Meanwhile the men—Ree was just getting to the men. What do the men do, Ree?”

  “I really couldn’t say,” said Rita, rising abruptly and leaving the room.

  “Tie a knot for me,” said the engineer.

  “What,” cried Kitty, craning her neck and searching the horizon like a sea bird. “Oh.”

  “Let us now—” he began and sought dizzily to hold her charms in his arms.

  “Ah,” said the girl, lying passive, eyes full of light.

  “I’ve reached a decision,” he said and leaned back uncomfortably among the pillows, head in the air.

  “What is that?”

  “Now you know that I need you.”

  “You do?”

  “And that although I will be all right eventually, I still have a nervous condition, and that for some time to come I’ll need you to call upon.”

  “You will?”

  “I’ve loved you ever since I saw you in Central—that is, in Jamie’s room.”

  “Ah.”

  Love, he thought, and all at once the word itself went opaque and curious, a little howling business behind the front teeth. Do I love her? I something her. He felt his nose.

  “Let’s go home, either to your home or mine, and be married.”

  “Married,” said Kitty faintly.

  Dander from the old blankets was beginning to bother his nose. “Would you mind taking this off,” he asked her presently and took hold of her quezquemetl. “Aren’t you hot?”

  “Are you out of your mind,” she whispered fiercely.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” He hadn’t meant to undress her but only to get her out of these prickly homespuns and back into decent Alabama cotton.

  Kitty sat up. Her eyes were fixed in a stare upon a bowl of tiny cactus plants. “The Huichol believe that things change forms, that one thing can become another thing. An hour ago it sounded like nonsense.”

  “Is that right?” He had heard it before, this mythic voice of hers. One of his aunts lived in Cuernavaca.

  “The hikuli plant is the deer. The deer is the corn. Look at that.”

  “What?”

  “That color.”

  He looked down at the blanket between them where forked Navaho lightning clove through an old brown sky, brown as old blood.

  “What about it?”

  “Do you see the depths opening into depths?”

  “No.” He tried to blow his nose but the mucous membranes had swelled against each other like violet eiderdowns. “I think I’ll be going.”

  “Wait,” she called from the doorway as he walked rapidly off into the night, forgetful of summer now, head ducked, shouldering as if he were still bucking the winter gales. He waited.

  “All right,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

  He gazed vaguely about at the shuttered shops and dark brownstones.

  “We can’t go back there,” she said. Her pale face loomed unsteadily in the darkness. He was thinking about the reciprocal ratio of love: was it ever so with the love of women that they held out until the defeat of one’s first fine fervor, not merely until one feigned defeat but rather until one was in truth defeated, had shrugged and turned away and thought of other matters—and now here they came, all melts and sighs, breathing like a furnace. Her lips were parted slightly and her eyes sparkled. His nose was turning to concrete.

  “And we can’t go to the Y.” She had taken his arm. He felt importunate little tugs at his elbow as if he were a blind man and she wanted him to cross the street.

  She pulled him close. “Do you notice anything?”

  “No.”

  “The lampposts.”

  “What about them?”

  “They seem alive and ominous.”

  He was displeased with her. Was it then the case with love that lovers must alternate, forever out of phase with one another? It did not suit her to be fanciful. Was she drunk? She gave him a kiss tasting of burnt corn. He wished she would chew Juicy Fruit like a proper Alabama girl.

  “I do know a place,” he said finally. “But it won’t do at night.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s in the park.”

  “Wait,” she said and flew back to the cottage. He waited, listing at a ten-degree angle. Had he, empathic as ever, got dizzy from her dizziness?

  When she returned, she wore a skirt and blouse instead of pants and quezquemetl. “Take this.” She pressed something into his hand.

  “What’s this for?” It was a small revolver, a police special, with hardly a quarter inch of barrel.

  “For the park. My brother gave it to me as a going-away present when I came to New York.”

  “Sutter?”

  “Yes. He’s a police surgeon.”

  He stuck the pistol into his coat pocket and allowed himself to be nudged toward the subway.

  They walked from the Broadway subway exit to the park. Fifty blocks north there were more fires in Harlem and the sense of faraway soundless tumult. Police sirens kicked out, subsided to a growl.

  He hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  Again the nudge at his elbow. “Don’t worry. They’re all up there.”

  He shrugged and took her into the Ramble, a densely wooded stretch. Holding her behind him, he walked swiftly along a path, stooped and holding the girl’s head down, turned into a thicket of privet whose bitter bark smelled like the dry rain gutters of his own house. Dark as it was, with no more light than a sinking gibbous moon, it didn’t matter. He knew the southwest quadrant of the park as he knew his own back yard. (Though he could not see them, he knew when he passed the Disney statuettes, could have put out a hand and touched Dopey.)

  The place was down a ravine choked with dogbane and whortleberry and over a tumble of rocks into a tiny amphitheater, a covert so densely shaded that its floor was as bare as cave’s dirt. By day it looked very like the sniper’s den on Little Round Top which Brady photographed six weeks after the battle: the sniper was still there! A skeleton in butternut, his rifle pr
opped peaceably against the rocks.

  He set the police special in the dust beside him and drew Kitty down on the other side. They leaned into the curve of a shallow overhang of smooth rock facing the cleft where they entered. There was no sound of traffic or sight of the lighted windows of the apartment houses along Central Park West, or any sign of the city at all except, when he moved his head slightly, a chink of red sky over 110th Street.

  “My Lord,” said Kitty. “How could anybody find us here? I can’t even see you.” Her fingers brushed clumsily across his face.

  He kissed her with an amiable passion, mainly concerned now to bear with her, serve her anticness as gracefully as he could. He aimed to guard her against her own embarrassment. His nose was no better.

  “To answer your question,” she said softly, “Yes.”

  “Fine,” he said, nodding in the dark. What question?

  “Dearest,” she breathed, holding her hand to his cheek with a tenderness that struck dismay to his heart.

  The puzzle is: where does love pitch its tent? in the fine fervor of a summer night, in a jolly dark wood wherein one has a bit o’ fun as the English say? or in this dread tenderness of hers?

  “Don’t go away, darling,” she whispered. “I’ll be right back.”

  “All right.”

  She moved away. As he traced a finger in the dust, drawing the old Northern Pacific yin-yang symbol, he heard the rustling of clothes and the singing of zippers. She returned without a sound. He embraced her and was enveloped in turn by the warm epithelial smell of her nakedness. What a treasure, he thought, his heart beating as rapidly and shallowly as a child’s. What suppleness.

  “Hold me,” whispered Kitty with her dismaying tenderness. “My precious.”

  “Right.” Now holding her charms in his arms at last, he wondered if he had ever really calculated the terrific immediacy of it.

  “Why don’t you—” she said.

  “What? Oh. Pardon,” said the courtly but forgetful engineer and blushed for his own modesty, clad as he was from head to toe in Brooks Brothers’ finest. Making haste to sit up, he began unbutton his shirt.