Reuben, Reuben, page 39
It was toward one o’clock, when the party was boiling noisily toward its climax, that Dumbrowski gave him what he took to be casus belli, and on what could not have been more cleancut grounds.
He found himself standing behind Dumbrowski and a dapper but gloomy-looking man from Greenwich, whose name he hadn’t caught. As he paused there, it was borne in on Mopworth that they were discussing Geneva, whom they were watching as she chatted away to several people in the vicinity. Her naked shoulders caught the lamplight, and her bosom heaved with laughter under the deep-cut dress. The two men nodded and smiled appreciatively. Then Dumbrowski said something Mopworth caught only fragmentarily but that, under the din, seemed to have something to do with someone’s being “picked up without any trouble.”
Mopworth took a long pull on his drink and pushed his way over just as the other man made off. “All right, Dumbrowski,” he said, “I heard that.”
“Heard what? What? Heard what?”
“What you just said. Shall we step outside?”
Dumbrowski coughed in a rather flustered fashion, and looked down at Mopworth’s glass. “Don’t you think you’ve had about enough, old boy?” he asked.
“More than enough. Just slip out through the terrace, shall we? Don’t want to create a scene in here, you know.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about.”
“I think you know what I’m talking about, Dumbrowski.”
Dumbrowski paused and returned the other’s narrowed gaze. “You hate my guts, don’t you?”
“I would if you had any. You get ‘em, I’ll hate ‘em.”
“Why you—” Dumbrowski’s fists opened and shut at his sides, and he spoke through clenched teeth. He managed to control himself. “Look, I’ve got guests to think about, and besides you’re too drunk for the code to let a guy haul off on you. But you come back here tomorrow any time you wish, and by God—”
“How’s first thing in the morning?”
“That’s fine with me.”
“I’ll be here with bells on,” Mopworth said. “That’s a promise.”
twenty-nine
MOPWORTH AWOKE the next day, Sunday, about eleven o’clock. His head felt like a rock, as though in the intervening hours of sleep all organic matter had been adroitly extracted from his skull and replaced with cement. His mouth had a taste both metallic and ashen. When he moved his eyes, the contents of the room became like the objects in a cinema film being run at slow speed.
This condition cleared after a time, and he began to raise himself, joint by joint, onto his elbows. From below came a steady low murmur of voices, suggesting by their tone something of the snug camaraderie of two women exchanging confidences. They seemed to be in the kitchen. Once he thought he caught the word “him,” and another time “basically.” He dropped back on the pillow again.
He lapsed into a troubled doze in which he dreamed that he was alone in a telephone booth on a remote stretch of highway, fumbling for a coin to fit one of the three slots on the box. There was the sense of having to be put through to someone whose identity was not clear but over whose whereabouts there hovered the vague need of transatlantic connections. He awoke abruptly, as though by volition and out of the sense of urgent requirement remaining from his dream, and sat up. He reminded himself that the best way out of a hangover was to fight one’s way out of it. He climbed slowly out of bed and picked his way to the bathroom, where he put first his hands, then his head, under the cold water tap.
After this calculatedly administered shock he felt better. He combed his wet locks, modifying by a good half the caricature that confronted him in the glass. Sunshine was pouring in the window. Glancing out, he saw the trim figure of Pussy Beauseigneur on one of her walks. In her wake capered a small dog, and judging by the short tweed coat that sufficed her it had not turned bitterly cold. Behind the Beattys’ house their Angora cat was rolling on its back on the dead grass. Were the treetops swaying or was he? The confused fragments of last night had by now reassembled themselves into a coherent, though uninviting, whole, and he recalled the key to the episode which had climaxed his own part in it: “Fists at dawn.” It was by now, of course, closer to noon.
He dressed before joining the ladies. He found them in the kitchen as expected, smoking cigarettes over dishes littered with the stubs of predecessors. The companionate murmur came to a halt at his approach, and as he entered they turned to take him in.
“Good morning,” he said.
“What’s morning about it?” Geneva said.
Smiling, the boy fell dead. Smiling, the two women watched him proceed to the electric percolator plugged in at the sideboard. “Anybody want any more?”
“Yes, I’d like some,” Nectar said. They were both in dressing gowns, Nectar’s a watered blue silk, Geneva’s a multicolored Paisley that he had bought her, half-zipped the way he liked to see it in the morning. Any other morning, that is, but this. Now it reminded him of the state of war in which he operated. They had, in view of his drunken incapacity to do so, not discussed the ruckus at the party on their return home last night. He expected to be quizzed about it now, but he had no more stomach than they for the post-mortems.
“What was all that about between you and Jack?” Geneva asked when he had poured coffee for all of them.
“You’d be surprised,” he said, glancing down at her open throat. His relish easily converted itself into censure.
“No, I mean go on, what was it all about?”
“Nothing.” He took his coffee and a cinnamon bun into the living room, carrying the bun in his mouth, like a dog. He sat there eating and listening to the silence in the kitchen.
“Was it about the accident you had during the reading?” Geneva called. “What was that funny noise you made?”
“It arose out of that,” he answered through the wall. “You might say that the mood it created between us was not exactly conducive to, oh, the hell with it. Some other time.”
The women set down their cups on well imaginable exchanges of warning signs, and rose and went upstairs to the nursery. It was now from that end of the house that the conspiratorial murmurs floated down to him. He forgot them presently in the need to reappraise his own position and decide on a course of action.
The tangle of considerations in which he was enmeshed was complex. It was ostensibly in the cause of chivalry that he had taken exception to what he had heard—that he had enacted the casual modern-day equivalent of handing someone your card. Yet the woman whose honor he was defending had invited the innuendo which had provoked him, thereby proving herself no less at fault than the offender; he might have made the same or a similar remark himself had it been another man’s wife he was looking at. He was for all that even madder than he might have been had the issue been clear-cut—pique with the woman who extenuated the offender’s offense increasing the steam he could only blow off by punching the offender in the nose. In conclusion, he could not let the woman know it was for her he was behaving like a ruffian. It would be a breach of the very code he was upholding. God!
“Code.” Hadn’t Dumbrowski used that word? Yes. He had forborne punching Mopworth’s nose then and there because Mopworth had been three sheets to the wind and in no condition to defend himself. Therefore honor required that for Dumbrowski’s sake also he must proceed under the “Fists at dawn” flag, because Dumbrowski had coming to him the chance to sock Mopworth in the nose, too. The demands of honor had got shifted around.
After a glass of orange juice and two more cups of coffee he buttoned his coat and slipped quietly out the front door. He stood on the step a moment, letting the cool air brace him further. The Dumbrowskis’ house looked blank and silent. There was probably no one stirring there, on second thought. He would make it later. He was about to turn around and go back inside when the draperies across the way flew apart and Minnie, also in a dressing gown, sprang into view. She gave a start of surprise at the sight of him, then waved. He crossed the street and went over.
She was holding the door open for him when he arrived.
“Hello, Alvin.”
“Good morning, Minnie.” He extended the Sunday paper, which he had picked up off the mat. “That was quite a party. I didn’t have a chance to thank you properly. I’m afraid I left under . . .”
“That’s all right. Come in and have some coffee. You look like the wrath of God.”
She closed the door as he walked on into the parlor. The room had all the hideous disorder of the morning after. Heaped ashtrays spilled over onto tables stained with food and drink, dirty napkins lay everywhere. He began to pick a few of them up off the floor.
“I won’t have any coffee, Minnie, thanks. I’ve come on some other matter.”
“What?”
“Is Jack up?”
“Not yet.” She threw a worried glance up the staircase, then at him. “Who’s apologizing to whom this time?”
“Well, we more or less arranged to meet this morning. You’ll see. I’ll wait for him to come down—say fifteen minutes or so—and while I’m doing it I’ll just help you tidy up.”
“Oh, never mind all that now. I’ll do it later.” She stood unhappily in her green wrapper, beneath the hem of which two crimson pajama legs protruded. “You and Jack had words.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see why anybody goes to these parties. There must be some sacrificial, or ritualistic—” She groped for the right explanatory bit of jargon which she might somewhere in the past have heard or read, and which might shed some light on this particular aspect of the human puzzle, but could not recall it. And just at that moment she was cut off by a sound on the stair.
There was a scuffle of footsteps and Dumbrowski’s head, his face mangled with sleep and an icebag on his rumpled red hair, appeared above the newel post on the landing turn. “Whah’s sa ma?” he muttered thickly (like one of his own characters).
Mopworth stepped over and presented himself in clear view on the living room floor.
“Hello, Jack. We had a little sort of date for this morning. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I can come back later, of course, if now isn’t convenient. No hurry.”
“No, that’s all right. Get it over with,” Dumbrowski mumbled, and shuffled back upstairs, settling the icebag on his head.
“I’ll give you time to freshen up, and one thing and another.”
When Dumbrowski had disappeared, Mopworth turned to see Minnie sitting in the chair in which he had noticed her last night, the hand overturned in her lap again, looking as woebegone as ever. “You going to have a fight?”
“That’s the general idea, I’m afraid, Minniehaha.”
“What about?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say. It’s between us.”
She raised her eyes from the floor. “He used to do a little boxing,” she warned him.
“So have I. Still do as a matter of fact.”
“I suppose there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“I’m afraid not.”
She sighed and rose. “Well, I’m going into the kitchen and have that coffee, if you’ll excuse me. You’ll find magazines and things there.”
“Right.”
He sat near the window where the sun was streaming in, paging through a popular women’s magazine. Unable to concentrate on any of the articles, he glanced at the photographs and illustrations accompanying them, and at some of the captions and titles. He was aware of rattled kitchenware, and muffled sounds overhead. Once Minnie marched through carrying a steaming cup of coffee and a doughnut on a plate. “He can run a mile without stopping,” she said, pausing. “You’ve seen him trotting by on the road.”
“Many, many times indeed.”
She continued on up.
For the third time that morning he heard suggestive murmurs in distant rooms. The conversation was low but urgent, rising to a volume that once or twice almost enabled him to make out a word, but not quite. Minnie came down and returned silently to the kitchen.
Ten minutes or so later, Dumbrowski descended in a black turtleneck sweater and denim slacks. Above the trim and pugilistic aspect of his body, however, his face looked as though he had been pulled through a hedge backwards, resembling Mopworth in this respect, of course. Setting the magazine aside, Mopworth repeated his offer to let this go until some other time.
“No, let’s get it over with,” Dumbrowski said doggedly.
He led the way through the kitchen, where Minnie did not glance up from her coffee, and around to a spot behind the garage where they were concealed from view. Mopworth took off his coat, under which he had a heavy flannel shirt. They squared away on a width of lawn screened from the house by a clump of birches, from which the ground they stood on fell away to a small pond in which the Dumbrowskis had once kept goldfish.
They circled one another for a minute or two, their guards up, edging about for the advantage. There was no doubt what that consisted in on that steep incline: it consisted in remaining above one’s opponent. It was for that reason that the alternating shifts in their arrangement found them presently very nearly among the birches. It was essential that something be done to break the ice.
“This has been brewing for a long time,” Mopworth said as they sparred.
“It was bound to come to a head,” Dumbrowski agreed. He cocked his forearm—the right—a bit, and Mopworth stiffened his own guard, at the same time thrusting out his chest to give that impression of pectoral strength that is always suggested in photographs of prizefighters. He thought of Stramaglia, the dying protagonist of last night’s fictional work.
“We don’t cotton to one another, you and I,” he said. “And there you have it.”
“What’s the use pretending otherwise? You don’t like my stuff. I know that.”
“It’s not my dish of tea.”
“I hate that expression,” Dumbrowski replied with unexpected violence. “So mincing and, oh, I don’t know—la-de-da. So—”
“Finicky?” Mopworth suggested, helpfully.
“That’s not strong enough. The word I’m looking for—” The intention to heap further obloquy on the other was interrupted when Dumbrowski stumbled on a stone, very nearly losing his balance. He recovered it and said, “Why don’t you come right out and say what you think? Not that I don’t know what your dish of tea is. All that English lot! Bowen and Firbank and what’s his name—Compton Burnett.” He continued to reel off a string of contemporary British novelists who did, with uncanny accuracy, reflect Mopworth’s private reading preferences, though to the best of his knowledge he had never discussed them with Dumbrowski. Having his taste thus impugned made Mopworth bristle, and he nearly said, forgetting the circumstances, “Care to step outside and repeat that?” “Lint pickers! Eyebrow combers!” Dumbrowski exclaimed in a sudden burst of spirit. “All those hemidemisemiquavers!”
Mopworth recognized well enough the rage of the popular hack whom critical approval has bypassed. Dumbrowski was one of those authors read by hundreds of thousands, but of whom no one has ever heard. Oh, he knew what was in Dumbrowski’s craw all right! But that did not spare him the comparable sting of having his goût as a reader under attack. Now he felt the urgent need to strike a blow.
“It’s better than burly realism,” he retorted hotly. “And all that sex you chaps slather on to prove nothing more than that you’ve got hair on your prose. And all that ‘somewhere’ crud, and that ‘as if in a dream’ routine. Yes, indeed, make mine English!”
That did it. Dumbrowski stood like an animal stunned by a surprise blow. Then, his head lowered, he came at his adversary with a bellow of mingled rage and pain.
“Bellow of mingled rage and pain.” Hmm, where had that—?
Mopworth met this first charge by adroitly stepping aside, letting his adversary go by as bullfighters let bulls go by them, in certain passes. The result was that, deprived of his target, Dumbrowski stumbled on in his plunge and really lost his balance, sprawling headlong among the birches. He got to his feet and came for Mopworth again. Mopworth at the same moment lunged forward to meet him, and they came together, their arms flailing. Neither used what boxing skill he had, perhaps because their physical condition dulled the will to fight and left them reluctant for anything but the series of clinches into which their exertions flung them. Presently Mopworth tripped on a stone, stumbling against Dumbrowski, and, interlocked, they danced down the incline toward the goldfish pond. They fetched up short of it only because, at the climax of their career down the grass, they clumsily pulled one another down in a jumble of arms and legs. This had the effect of converting the encounter into a wrestling match, and by an accident of the terrain in Mopworth’s favor he landed on top, but so near the water that any attempt to improve their positions might have spelled disaster for both of them. So he sat there on Dumbrowski’s chest for a bit.
“This will teach you to speak lightly of a woman’s name,” Mopworth panted.
“’Diculous.” Dumbrowski brought the word out between gasps of his own. “Never understood this—fussing over a—compliment paid a—woman.”
“Compliment?”
Dumbrowski nodded. “Only told Feversham be—sure go talk to her if he wanted picking up.”
“You mean—?” Mopworth said.
Dumbrowski nodded again. “Feversham was depressed. So I told him to go talk to Geneva. She picks you right up. Has that pizzazz. Always thought so. Great fun. At least appreciate your taste in that.”
Mopworth climbed off of him. He turned away and dropped leadenly to the grass, in a sitting position. He knew well enough now what was happening, and he offered no resistance. He was helpless against what was dawning on him. Behind him he could hear Dumbrowski’s heavy breathing. Somewhere a car backfired, shattering the Sabbath midday stillness. As if in a dream, he gave his head a shake and said, “It was all a ghastly mistake.”
