Collected Stories, page 37
II
In California, as elsewhere, alcohol dulls the auricular nerves and leads people to raise their voices. The noise of cocktail parties is the same whether you are honoring the Sitwells in a suite at the Savoy Plaza, or whether you are showing off a refugee pianist on a Los Gatos patio. It sounds very familiar as we park among the Cadillacs and Jaguars and one incredible sleek red Ferrari and the routine Plymouth suburbans and Hillman Minxes of the neighbors. The sound is the same, only the setting is different. But that difference is considerable.
Dazed visitors from the lower, envious fringes of exurbia—and those include the Allstons, or did at first—are likely to come into the Casement cabaña and walk through it as if they have had a solid thump on the head. This cabaña has a complete barbecue kitchen with electrically operated grills thirty feet long. It has a bar nearly that size, a big television screen and a hi-fi layout, a lounge that is sage and gray and tangerine or lobster, I am not decorator enough to tell. It is chaste and hypnotically comfortable and faintly oppressive with money, like an ad for one of the places where you will find Newsweek or see men of distinction.
The whole glass side of the cabaña slides back and the cabaña becomes continuous with a patio that spreads to the edge of the pool, which is the color of one of the glass jars that used to sit in the windows of drugstores in Marshalltown, Iowa, when I was a boy. Across the pool, strung for a long distance along the retaining wall that holds the artificial flat top on to this hill, are the playing fields of Eton. I think I have never toured them all, but I have seen a croquet ground; a putting green; a tennis court and a half-sized paddle-tennis court; a Ping-Pong table; a shuffle-board court of smooth concrete; and out beyond, a football field, full-sized and fully grassed, that was built especially for young Jim Casement and his friends and so far as I have observed is never used. Beyond the retaining wall the hill falls away steeply, so that you look out across it and across the ventilators of the stables below the wall, and into the dusk where lights are beginning to bloom in beds and borders down the enormous garden of the Santa Clara Valley.
A neighborhood couple of modest means—and there are some—contemplate gratefully their admission to these splendors. A standing invitation amounts to a guest card at an exclusive club, and the Casements are generous with invitations. At some stage of their first tour through the layout any neighbor couple is sure to be found standing with their heads together, their eyes gauging and weighing and estimating, and you can hear the IBM machinery working in their heads. Hundred thousand? More than that, a lot more. Hundred and fifty? God knows what’s in the house itself, in which the Casements do not entertain but only live. Couldn’t touch the whole thing for under two hundred thousand, probably. A pool that size wouldn’t have come at less than ten thousand; the cabaña alone would have cost more than our whole house. …
I have been around this neighborhood for more than six months, and in six months the Casements can make you feel like a lifelong friend. And I have not been exactly unfamiliar in my lifetime with conspicuous consumption and the swindle sheet. But I still feel like whistling every time I push open the gate in the fence that is a design by Mondrian in egg crates and plastic screen, and look in upon the pool and the cabaña and the patio. The taste has been purchased, but it is taste. The Casement Club just misses being extravagantly beautiful; all it needs is something broken or incomplete, the way a Persian rug weaver will leave a flaw in his pattern to show that Allah alone is perfect and there is no God but God. This is all muted colors, plain lines, calculated simplicities. As I hold open the gate for Ruth, with the noise of the party already loud in the air, I feel as if I were going aboard a brand new and competitively designed cruise ship, or entering the latest Las Vegas motel.
We have not more than poked our heads in, and seen that the crowd is pretty thick already, before Sue spots us and starts over. She has a high-colored face and a smile that asks to be smiled back at, a very warm good-natured face. You think, the minute you lay eyes on her, What a nice woman. And across clusters of guests I see Bill Casement, just as good-natured, waving an arm, and with the same motion savagely beckoning a white-coated Japanese to intercept us with a tray. It is one of Bill’s beliefs that guests at a Casement party spring into the splendid patio with bent elbows and glasses in their hands. He does not like awkward preliminaries; he perpetuates a fiction that nobody is ahead of anybody else.
“Ah,” Sue says, “it’s wonderful of you to come!” The funny thing is, you can’t look at that wide and delighted smile and think otherwise. You are doing her an enormous favor just to be; to be at her party is to put her forever in your debt.
I scuff my ankles. “It is nothing,” I say. “Where are the people who wanted to meet me?”
Sue giggles, perfectly delighted. “Lined up all around the pool. Including the next-most-important guest. You haven’t met Arnold, have you?”
“I don’t think he has met me,” I say with dignity.
She has us by the elbows, starting us in. I twist and catch up two glasses off the tray that has appeared beside me, and I exchange a face of fellowship with the Japanese. Then the stage set swallows us. Mr. and Mrs. Allston, Ruth and Joe, the Allstons, neighbors, we are repeated every minute or two to polite inattentive people, and we get people thrown at us in turn. Names mean less than nothing, they break like bubbles on the surface of the party’s sound. We are two more walk-ons with glasses in our hands; our voices go up and are lost in the clatter that reminds my bird-conscious ears of a hundred blackbirds in a tree.
Groups open and let us in and hold us a minute and pass us on. My recording apparatus makes note of Mr. Thing, a white-haired and astonishingly benevolent-looking music critic from San Francisco; and of Mr. and Mrs. How-d’ye-do, whose family has supported music in the city since Adah Menken was singing “Sweet Betsy from Pike” to packed houses at the Mechanics’ Hall. We shake the damp glass-chilled hand of Mr. Monsieur, whom we have seen on platforms as the accompanist of a celebrated Negro soprano, and Ruth has her hand kissed by a gentleman whom I distinguish as Mr. Budapest, a gentleman who makes harps, or harpsichords, and who wears a brown velvet jacket and sandals.
Glimpses of Distinguished Guests, filets of conversation au vin, verschiedener kalter Aufschnitt of the neighborhood:
Sam Shields, he of the robust cement mixer and the acres of homemade walks and patios and barbecue pits and incinerators, close neighbor to the Joseph Allstons; home-builder who erected by hand his own house, daring heaven and isostasy, on the lip of the San Andreas fault. With a Navy captain and a Pan Am pilot, both of the neighborhood (the pilot owns the Ferrari) he passes slowly, skinny-smiling, blue-bearded, with warts, ugly as Lincoln, saying: I do not kid you. A zebra. I rise up from fixing that flat tire and I am face to face with a zebra. I am lucky it wasn’t a leopard. Hearst stocked that whole damn duchy with African animals, including giraffes. It wouldn’t surprise me if pygmies hunt warthogs through those hills with blowguns. … And as he passes, the raised glass, the salud: Ah there, Joe!
Four Unknowns, two male and two female, obviously not related by marriage because too animated, but all decorous, one lady with cashmere sweater draped shawl-like over her shoulders, the other winking of diamonds as she lifts her glass; the gentlemen deferential, gray, brushed, double-breasted, bent heads listening: Bumper to bumper, all the way across, and some idiot out of gas on the bridge …
Mrs. Williamson, beagle-breeder extraordinary, Knight of the AKC, leather-faced, hoarse-voiced (Howdy, Neighbor!) last seen on a Sunday morning across the canyon from the Allstons’ house, striding corduroy-skirted under the oaks, blowing her thin whistle, crying in the bar-room voice to a pack of wag-tailed long-coupled hounds, Pfweeeet! Here Esther! come Esther! Here we go a-beagling. Wrists like a horsewoman, maybe from holding thirty couple of questing hounds on leash. Now, from quite a distance, rounding the words on the mouth, with a white smile, brown face, tweed shoulders, healthy-horsy-country woman, confidential across forty feet of lawn: How are the memoirs?
More Unknowns, not of the local race. City or Upper Peninsula, maybe Berkeley, two ladies and a gentleman, dazzled a little by the Casement Club, watchful. Relax and pass, friends. It is no movie set, it was made for hospitality. The animals who come to drink at this jungle ford are not what they seem. No leopards they, nor even zebras. Yon beagle-breeding Amazon is a wheelhorse of the League of Women Voters, those two by the dressing-room doors at the end of the pool spend much of their time and all of their surplus income promoting Civil Liberties and World Government. Half the people here do not work for a living, for one reason or other, but they cannot be called idlers. They all do something, sometimes even good. And you do not need, as on Martha’s Vineyard, to distinguish between East Chop and West Chop. Here we live in a mulligan world, though it is made of prime sirloin. … Ah, how do you do? Yes, isn’t it? Lovely …
Bill Casement, with his golfer’s hide, one eye on the gate for new arrivals—shake of the head, Quite a struggle, boy, stoops abstractedly to listen to a short woman with a floury face. Somebody comes in. Excuse me, please. Short woman looks around for another anchorage—turn away, quick.
And what of the arts? Ah there, again, in a group: Mr. Thing, Mr. Budapest, Mr. and Mrs. How-d’ye-do, surnamed Ackerman, a tight enclave of the cognoscenti, on their fringes an eager young woman, not pretty, perhaps a piano teacher somewhere; this her big moment, probably, thrilled to be asked here, voice shaking and a little too loud as she wedges something into the conversation, But Honegger isn’t really—do you think? He seems to me … And to me, thou poor child. You have not gone to heaven, you do not have to prove angelhood, you are still in the presence of mortals. Listen and you shall hear.
And what of the Great Man? He is coming closer. There is a kind of progress here, though constantly interrupted, like walking the dog around Beekman Place and up to 51st and back down First Avenue. Magnetic fields, iron filings, kaleidoscopic bits of colored glass that snap into pattern and break again.
On around the diving board, on to the lawn, softer and quieter and with a nap like a marvelous thick rug. Something underfoot—whoop! what the hell? Croquet wicket. Half a good drink gone—on Ruth’s dress? No. To the rescue another Japanese, out of the lawn like a mushroom. Thank you, thank you. Big tooth-gleaming grin, impossible to tell what they think. Contempt? Boozing Americans? But what then of all the good nature, the hospitality, the generosity? What of that, my toothy alert impeccable friend? Would you prefer us to be French aristocrats out of Henry James? Absurd. Probably has no such thoughts at all, good waiter, well trained.
“Ah,” Sue says, “there he is!”
It is in her face like a sentence or a theorem: Here is this terrific musician, the best young pianist in the world. And here is this exliterary agent, knows everybody in New York, owns Town Hall, lunches with S. Hurok twice a week. And here I have brought them together, carbide and water, and what will happen? Something will—there will be an explosion, litmus paper will change color, gases will boil and fume, fire will appear, a gleaming little nugget of gold or radium will form in the crucible.
Mr. Kaminski, Mr. and Mrs. Allston. Arnold, Joe and Ruth.
Now hold your breath.
III
My first impression, in the flick of an eye, is What in hell can Sue be thinking of? My second, all but simultaneous with the first, is Bill Casement had better look out.
Taking inventory during the minute or two of introductions and Ruth’s far inland murmur and Sue’s explanations of who we all are, I can’t pick out any obvious reason why Kaminski should instantly bring my hackles up. His appearance is plus-minus. His skin is bad, not pitted by smallpox or chickenpox but roughened and lumpy, the way a face may be left by a bad childhood staphylococcus infection. His head is big for his body, which is both short and slight, and his crew-cut hair, with that skin, makes him look like a second in a curtain-raiser at some third-rate boxing arena: his name somehow ought to be Moishe, pronounced Mushy. But he has an elegant air too, and he has dressed for the occasion in a white dinner jacket. His eyes are large and brown and slightly bulging; some women would probably call them “fine.” They compensate for his mouth, a little purse-slit like the mouth of a Florida rock fish.
The proper caption for the picture in its entirety is “Glandular Genius.” I suppose if you are sentimental about artistic sensibility, or fascinated by the neurotic personality, you might look at a face like Kaminski’s with attention, respect, perhaps sympathy and a shared anguish. He has all the stigmata of the type, and it is a type some people respond to. But if you are old Joe Allston, who has had to deal in his time with a good many petulant G.G.’s, you look upon this face with suspicion if not distaste.
It makes, of course, no difference to me what he is. Nevertheless, Bill Casement had better look out. This pianist is pretty expressionless, but such expression as he permits himself is so far a little shadowy sneer, a kind of controlled disdain. Bill might note not only that expression, but the air of almost contemptuous ownership with which Kaminski wears Sue’s hand on his white sleeve. And it does not seem to me that even Sue can look as delighted and proud as she looks now out of simple good nature. It is true that she is as grateful for a friendly telephone call as if it had cost you fifty dollars to make it, and true that if you notice her and speak to her and joke with her a little she is constitutionally unable to look upon you as less than wonderful. It is a kind of idiotic and appealing humility in her; she is as happy for a smile as Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt. But right now she looks at Kaminski in a way that can only be called radiant; no woman of fifty should look at any young man that way, even if he can play the piano. If she knew how she looks, she would disguise her expression. The whole tableau embarrasses me, because I like Sue and automatically dislike the cool smirk on Kaminski’s face, and I am sorry for Sue’s sake that no chemical wonder is going to take place at our meeting. As for Kaminski, he is not stupid. Within three seconds he is giving me back my dislike as fast as I send it.
Sue stands outside the closed circuit of our hostility like a careless person gossiping over an electric fence.
“People who have as much to give as you two ought to know each other. Though what the rest of us do to deserve you both is more than I know. It’s so good of you to be here! And shall I tell you something, Joe? Do you mind being used? Isn’t that an awful question! But you see, Arnold, Joe was a literary agent for years and years in New York—the best, weren’t you, Joe? For who? Hemingway? John Marquand? Oh, James Hilton and James M. Cain and all sorts of people. And we know he couldn’t be what he was without having a lot of influence in the other arts too. So we’re going to use you, unscrupulously. Or I am. Because it’s so difficult to make a career as a concert pianist. It’s as if there were a conspiracy. …”
She is holding a glass, but does not seem to have drunk from it. Her hand is on Kaminski’s arm, and her face shines with such goodness that I am ready to grind my teeth.
It is Ruth’s belief that I take instant and senseless dislikes to people and that when I do I go out of my way to pick quarrels. Nothing, in fact, could be more unjust. Right now I am aching to harpoon this Kaminski and take the smirk off his face, or at least make him say something dishonestly modest, but what do I say? I say, “I’m afraid you’re wrong about my having any influence where it would count. But we’re looking forward to hearing you play.” I could not have bespoke him more fair. He drops his arrogant head a little to acknowledge that I live.
“It’s a wonder you haven’t heard him clear over on your hill,” Sue says. “All he does all day and night is sit down in the cottage and practice and practice and practice—terribly difficult things. He doesn’t even remember meals half the time; I have to send them down on a tray.” She gives his arm a slap—you naughty boy. “And he’s got such power,” she cries. “Look at his hands!”
She turns over his hand, which is the hand of a man half again as big as he is, a big thick meaty paw like a butcher’s. The little contemptuous shadow of his expression turns towards her. “If I make too much noise?” he says. These are the first actual words we have heard him say.
I am not a Glandular Genius. I am not even an Artist, and hence I am not Sensitive. But I can recognize a challenge when I hear one, especially when there is an edge of insult in it. Poor Sue takes his remarks, apparently, as some sort of apology.
“Too much noise nothing! If the neighbors hear you, that’s their good luck. And when you break down and play Chopin—which is never often enough—then they’re double lucky. You know what we did the other night, Ruth—Joe? We heard Arnold playing Chopin down below, to relax after all the terribly difficult things, and we all just pulled up chairs on the patio and had a marvelous concert for over an hour. Even Jimmy, and if you can make him listen! Really, nobody plays Chopin the way Arnold does.”
Arnold’s expression says that he concurs in this opinion, though generally opinions from this source are uninformed.
He stands there aloofly, not contaminating his art by brushing too close to Conspicuous Consumption. I am reminded irritably of my exclient Murthi, who would have been astonished by nothing in this whole evening; he would have recognized it as the American Way from old Bob Montgomery movies. He would have recognized Kaminski too: the Artist (imported, of course—the technological jungle could only borrow, not create) captive to the purse and whim of the Nizam-rich, the self-indulgent plutocracy. Murthi would have welcomed in Kaminski a fellow devotee of the Spirit.
