In which things are not so amusing

 I

 The party had begun late, with a core of only a dozen Sick. Evening was hot  and not likely to get any cooler. They all sweated. The loft itself was part  of an old warehouse and not a legal residence; buildings in this area of the  city had been condemned years ago. Someday there would be cranes, dump  trucks, payloaders, bulldozers to come and level the neighborhood; but in  the meantime, nobody - city or landlords - saw any objection in turning a  minor profit.

There hung therefore about Raoul, Slab and Melvin's pad a climate of  impermanence, as if the sand-sculptures, unfinished canvases, thousands of  paperback books suspended in tiers of cement blocks and warped planks, even  the great marble toilet stolen from a mansion in the east 70's (since  replaced by a glass and aluminum apartment building) were all part of the  set to an experimental play which its cabal of faceless angels could cause  to be struck at any moment without having to give their reasons.

People would arrive, come the late hours. Raoul, Slab and Melvin's  refrigerator was already half filled with a ruby construction of wine  bottles; gallon of Vino Paisano slightly above center, left, off-balancing  two 25-cent bottles of Gallo Grenache Rose, and one of Chilean Riesling,  lower right, and so on. The icebox door was left open so people could admire, could dig. Why not? Accidental art had great vogue that year.

 

Winsome wasn't there when the party began and didn't show up at all that  night. Nor any night after that. He'd had another fight with Mafia in the  afternoon, over playing tapes of McClintic Sphere's group in the parlor  while she was trying to create in the bedroom.

"If you ever tried to create," she yelled, "instead of live off what other  people create, you'd understand."

"Who creates," Winsome said. "Your editor, publisher? Without them, girl,  you would be nowhere."

"Anywhere you are, old sweet, is nowhere." Winsome gave it up and left her  to scream at Fang. He had to step over three sleeping bodies on the way out.  Which one was Pig Bodine? They were all covered by blankets. Like the old  pea-and-nutshell dodge. Did it make any difference? She'd have company.

He headed downtown and after a while had wandered by the V-Note. Inside were  stacked tables and the bartender watching a ball game on TV. Two fat Siamese  kittens played on the piano, one outside chasing up and down the keyboard,  one inside, clawing at the strings. It didn't sound like much.

"Roon."

"Man, I need a change of luck, no racial slur intended."

"Get a divorce." McClintic appeared in a foul mood. "Roon, let's go to  Lenox. I can't last the weekend. Don't tell me any woman trouble. I got  enough for both of us."

"Why not. Out to the boondocks. Green hills. Well people."

"Come on. There is a little girl I have to get out of this town before she  flips from the heat. Or whatever it is."

It took them a while. They drank beer till sunset and then headed up to  Winsome's where they swapped the Triumph for a black Buick. "It looks like a  staff car for the Mafia," said McClintic. "Whoops."

"Ha, ha," replied Winsome. They continued uptown along the nighttime Hudson,  veering finally right into Harlem. And there began working their way in to  Matilda Winthrop's, bar by bar.

Not long after they were arguing like undergraduates over who was the most  juiced, gathering hostile stares which had less to do with color than with  an inherent quality of conservatism which neighborhood bars possess and bars  where how much you can drink is a test of manhood do not.

They arrived at Matilda's well past midnight. The old lady, hearing  Winsome's rebel accent, talked only to McClintic. Ruby came downstairs and  McClintic introduced them.

Crash, shrieks, deep-chested laughter from topside. Matilda ran out of the  room screaming.

"Sylvia, Ruby's friend, is busy tonight," McClintic said.

Winsome was charming. "You young folks just take it easy," he said. "Old  Uncle Roony will drive you anywhere you want, won't look in the rear view  mirror, won't be anything but the kindly old chauffeur he is."

Which cheered McClintic up. There being a certain strained politeness in the  way Ruby held his arm. Winsome could see how McClintic was daft to get out  in the country.

More noise from upstairs, louder this time. "McClintic," Matilda yelled.

"I must go play bouncer," he told Roony. "Back in five."

Which left only Roony and Ruby in the parlor.

"I know a girl I can take along, said he, "I suppose, her name is Rachel  Owlglass, who lives on 112th."

Ruby fiddled with the catches on her overnight bag. "Your wife wouldn't like  that too much. Why don't McClintic and I just go up in the Triumph. You  shouldn't go to that trouble."

"My wife," angry all at once, "is a fucking Fascist, I think you should know  that."

"But if you brought along -"

"All I want to do is go now somewhere out of town, away from New York, away  to where things you expect to happen do happen. Didn't they ever use to?  You're still young enough. It's still that way for kids, isn't it?"

"I'm not that young," she whispered. "Please Roony, be easy."

"Girl, if it isn't Lenox it will be someplace. Further east, Walden Pond, ha  ha. No. No, that's public beach now where slobs from Boston who'd be at  Revere Beach except for too many other slobs like themselves already there  crowding them out, these slobs sit on the rocks around Walden Pond belching,  drinking beer they've cleverly smuggled in past the guards, checking the  young stuff, hating their wives, their evil-smelling kids who urinate in the  water on the sly . . . Where? Where in Massachusetts. Where in the country."

"Stay home."

"No. If only to see how bad Lenox is."

"Baby, baby," she sang soft, absent: "Have you heard,/ Did you know/ There  ain't no dope in Lenox."

"How did you do it."

"Burnt cork, she told him. "Like a minstrel show."

"No," he started across the room away from her. "You didn't use anything.  Didn't have to. No makeup. Mafia, you know, thinks you're German. I thought  you were Puerto Rican before Rachel told me. Is that what you are, something  we can look at and see whatever we want? Protective coloration?"

"I have read books," said Paola, "and listen, Roony, nobody knows what a  Maltese is. The Maltese think they're a pure race and the Europeans think  they're Semitic, Hamitic, crossbred with North Africans, Turks and God knows  what all. But for McClintic, for anybody else round here I am a Negro girl  named Ruby -" he snorted - "and don't tell them, him, please man."

"I'll never tell, Paola." Then McClintic was back. "You two wait till I find  a friend."

"Rach," beamed McClintic. "Good show." Paola looked upset.

"I think us four, out in the country -" his words were for Paola, he was  drunk, he was messing it up - "we could make it, it would be a fresh thing,  clean, a beginning."

"Maybe I should drive," McClintic said. It would give him something to  concentrate on till things got easier, out of the city. And Roony looked  drunk. More than that, maybe.

"You drive," Winsome agreed, weary. God, let her be there. All the way down  to 112th (and McClintic gunned it) he wondered what he'd do if she wasn't  there.

She wasn't there. The door was open, noteless. She usually left some word.  She usually locked doors. Winsome went inside. Two or three lights were on.  Nobody was there.

Only her slip tossed awry on the bed. He picked it up, black and slippery.  Slippery slip, he thought and kissed it by the left breast. The phone rang.  He let it ring. Finally:

"Where is Esther?" She sounded out of breath.

"You wear nice lingerie," Winsome said.

"Thank you. She hasn't come in?"

"Beware of girls with black underwear."

"Roony, not now. She has really gone and got her ass in a sling. Could you  look and see if there's a note."

"Come with me to Lenox, Massachusetts."

Patient sigh.

"There's no note. No nothing."

"Would you look anyway. I'm in the subway."

 Come with me to Lenox [Roony sang],  It's August in Nueva York Ciudad;  You've told so many good men nix;  Please don't put me down with a dark, "see you Dad" . . .

Refrain [beguine tempo]:

   Come out where the wind is cool and the streets are colonial lanes.

   Though the ghosts of a million Puritans pace in our phony old brains,

   I still get an erection when I hear the reed section of the Boston Pops,

   Come and leave this Bohemia, life's really dreamy away from the JDs and cops.

   Lenox is grand, are you digging me, Rachel,

   Broadening a's by the width of an h'll

   Be something we've never tried . . .

   Up in the country of Alden and Walden,

   Country to glow sentimental and bald in

   With you by my side,

   How can it go wrong?

   Hey, Rachel [snap, snap-on one and three]: you coming along . . .

She'd hung up halfway through. Winsome sat by the phone, holding the slip.  Just sat.

 

II

 Esther had indeed got her ass in a sling. Her emotional ass, anyway. Rachel  had found her earlier that afternoon crying down in the laundry room.

"Wha," Rachel said. Esther only bawled louder.

"Girl," gently. "Tell Rach."

"Get off my back." So they chased each other around the washers and  centrifuges and in and out of the flapping sheets, rag rugs and brassieres  of the drying room.

"Look, I want to help you, is all." Esther had got tangled in a sheet.  Rachel stood helpless in the dark laundry room, yelling at her. Washing  machine in the next room ran all at once amok; a cascade of soapy water came  funneling through the doorway, bearing down on them. Rachel with a foul  expression kicked off her Capezios, hiked her skirt up and headed for a mop.

She hadn't been swabbing five minutes when Pig Bodine stuck his head around  the door. "You are doing that wrong. Where did you ever learn to handle a  swab."

"Here," she said. "You want a swab? I got your swab." She ran at him,  spinning the mop. Pig retreated.

"What's wrong with Esther. I wrapped into her on the way down." Rachel  wished she knew. By the time she'd dried the floor and run up the fire  escape and in the window to their apartment Esther was, of course, gone.

"Slab," Rachel figured. Slab was on the phone after half a ring.

"I'll let you know if she shows."

"But Slab -"

"Wha," said Slab.

Wha. Oh, well. She hung up.

Pig was sitting in the transom. Automatically she turned on the radio for  him. Little Willie John came on singing Fever.

"What's wrong with Esther," she said, for something to say.

"I asked you that," said Pig. "I bet she's knocked up."

"You would." Rachel had a headache. She headed for the bathroom to meditate.

Fever was touching them all.

 

Pig, evil-minded Pig, inferred right for once. Esther showed up at Slab's  looking like any traditional mill hand, seamstress or shop girl Done Wrong:  dull hair, puffy face, looking heavier already in the breasts and abdomen.

Five minutes and she had Slab railing. He stood before Cheese Danish # 56, a  cockeyed specimen covering an entire wall, dwarfing him in his shadowy  clothes as he waved arms, tossed his forelock.

"Don't tell me. Schoenmaker won't give you a dime. I know that already. You  want to put a small bet on this? I say it'll come out with a big hook nose."

That shut her up. Kindly Slab was of the shock-treatment school.

"Look," he grabbed a pencil. "It is no time of year to go to Cuba. Hotter  than Nueva York, no doubt, off season. But for all his Fascist tendencies,  Battista has one golden virtue: abortion he maintains is legal. Which means  you get an M.D. who knows what he's about, not some fumbling amateur. It's  clean, it's safe, it's legal, above all, it's cheap."

"It's murder."

"You've turned R. C. Good show. For some reason it always becomes  fashionable during a Decadence."

"You know what I am," she whispered.

"We'll leave that go. I wish I did." He stopped a minute because he felt  himself going sentimental. He finagled around with figures on a scrap of  vellum. "For 300," he said, "we can get you there and back. Including meals  if you feel like eating."

"We."

"The Whole Sick Crew. You can do it inside a week, down to Havana and back.  You'll be yo-yo champion."

"No."

So they talked metaphysics while the afternoon waned. Neither felt he was  defending or trying to prove anything important. It was like playing one-up  at a party, or Botticelli. They quoted to each other from Liguorian tracts,  Galen, Aristotle, David Riesman, T. S. Eliot.

"How can you say there's a soul there. How can you tell when the soul enters  the flesh. Or whether you even have a soul?"

"It's murdering your own child, is what it is."

"Child, schmild. A complex protein molecule, is all."

"I guess on the rare occasions you bathe you wouldn't mind using Nazi soap  made from one of those six million Jews."

"All right -" he was mad - "show me the difference."

After that it ceased being logical and phony and became emotional and phony.  They were like a drunk with dry heaves: having brought up and expelled all  manner of old words which had always, somehow, sat wrong, they then  proceeded to fill the loft with futile yelling trying to heave up their own  living tissue, organs which had no business anywhere but where they were.

As the sun went dawn she broke out of a point-by-point condemnation of  Slab's moral code to assault Cheese Danish # 56, charging at it with  windmilling nails.

"Go ahead," Slab said, "it will help the texture." He was on the phone.  "Winsome's not home." He jittered the receiver, dialed information. "Where  can I get 300 bills," he said. "No, the banks are closed . . . I am against  usury." He quoted to the phone operator from Ezra Pound's Cantos.

"How come," he wondered, "all you phone operators talk through your nose."  Laughter. "Fine, we'll try it sometime." Esther yelped, having just broken a  fingernail. Slab hung up. "It fights back," he said. "Baby, we need 300.  Somebody must have it." He decided to call all his friends who had savings  accounts. A minute later this list was exhausted and he was no closer to  financing Esther's trip south. Esther was tramping around looking for a  bandage. She finally had to settle for a wad of toilet paper and a rubber  band.

"I'll think of something," he said. "Stick by Slab, babe. Who is a  humanitarian." They both knew she would. To whom else? She was the sticking  sort.

So Slab sat thinking and Esther waved the paper ball at the end of her  finger to a private tune, maybe an old love song. Though neither would admit  it they also waited for Raoul and Melvin and the Crew to arrive for the  party; while all the time the colors in the wall-size painting were  shifting, reflecting new wavelengths to compensate for the wasting sun.

 

Rachel, out looking for Esther, didn't arrive at the party till late. Coming  up the seven flights to the loft she passed at each landing, like frontier  guards, nuzzling couples, hopelessly drunken boys, brooding types who read  out of and scrawled cryptic notes in paper books stolen from Raoul, Slab and  Melvin's library; all of whom informed her how she had missed all the fun.  What this fun was she found out before she'd fairly wedged her way into the  kitchen where all the Good People were.

Melvin was holding forth on his guitar, in an improvised folk song, about  how humanitarian a cove his roommate Slab was; crediting him with being (a)  a neo-Wobbly and reincarnation of Joe Hill, (b) the world's leading  pacifist, (c) a rebel with taproots in the American Tradition, (d) in  militant opposition to Fascism, private capital, the Republican  administration and Westbrook Pegler.

While Melvin sang Raoul provided Rachel with a kind of marginal gloss on the  sources of Melvin's present adulation.

It seemed earlier Slab had waited till the room was jammed to capacity, then  mounted the marble toilet and called for silence.

"Esther here is pregnant," he announced, "and needs 300 bucks to go to Cuba  and have an abortion." Cheering, warmhearted, grinning ear to ear, juiced,  the Whole Sick Crew dug deep into their pockets and the wellsprings of a  common humanity to come up with loose change, worn bills, and a few subway  tokens, all of which Slab collected in an old pith helmet with Greek letters  on it, left over from somebody's fraternity weekend years ago.

Surprisingly it came to $295 and some change. Slab with a flourish produced  a ten he'd borrowed fifteen minutes before his speech from Fergus  Mixolydian, who had just received a Ford Foundation grant and was having  more than wistful thoughts about Buenos Aires, from which there is no  extradition.

If Esther objected verbally to the proceedings, no record of it exists,  there being too much noise in the room, for one thing. After the collection  Slab banded her the pith helmet and she was helped up on the toilet, where  she made a brief but moving acceptance speech. Amid the ensuing applause  Slab roared "Off to Idlewild," or something, and they were both lifted  bodily and carried out of the loft and down the stairs. The only gauche note  to the evening was struck by one of their bearers, an undergraduate and  recent arrival on the Sick Scene, who suggested they could save all the  trouble of a trip to Cuba and use the money for another party if they  induced a miscarriage by dropping Esther down the stairwell. He was quickly  silenced.

"Dear God," said Rachel. She had never seen so many red faces, the linoleum  wet with so much spilled alcohol, vomit, wine.

"I need a car," she told Raoul.

"Wheels," Raoul screamed. "Four wheels for Rach." But the Crew's generosity  had been exhausted. Nobody listened. Maybe from her lack of enthusiasm  they'd deduced she was about to roar off to Idlewild and try to stop Esther.  They weren't having any.

It was only at that point, early in the morning, that Rachel thought of  Profane. He would be off shift now. Dear Profane. An adjective which hung  unvoiced in the party's shivaree, hung in her most secret cortex to bloom -  she helpless against it - only far enough to surround her 4' 10" with an  envelope of peace. Knowing all the time Profane too was wheelless.

"So," she said. All it was was no wheels on Profane, the boy a born  pedestrian. Under his own power which was also power over her. Then what was  she doing: declaring herself a dependent? As if here were the heart's  authentic income-tax form, tortuous enough, mucked up with enough  polysyllabic words to take her all of twenty-two years to figure out. At  least that long: for surely it was complicated, being a duty you could  rightfully avoid with none of fancy's Feds ever to worry about tracking you  down on it, but. That "but." If you did take the trouble, even any first  step, it meant stacking income against output; and who knew what  embarrassments, exposes of self that might drag you into?

Strange the places these things can happen in. Stranger that they ever do  happen. She heade............