Collected Stories, page 38
Nothing gives me a quicker pain than that sort of arrogance, whether it is Asian, European, or homegrown. I suppose I am guilty of impatience. Our neighbor Mrs. Shields, who does a good deal of promoting of International Understanding among foreign and native students at Stanford, ropes us in now and then for receptions and such. Generally we stand around making polite international noises at one another, but sometimes we really get a good conversation going. It seems to me that invariably, when I get into the middle of a bunch of thoroughly sensible Indians and Siamese and West Germans and Italians and Japanese and Guamanians, and we begin to get very interested in what the other one thinks, there is sure to come up someone in the crowd with a seed in his teeth about American materialism. This sets my spirituality on edge, and we’re off.
It will not do for me to be too close to Kaminski tonight. He has hardly said a word, but I can see the Spirit sticking out all over him.
The Japanese passes with a tray. “Arnold?” Sue says. He makes a gesture of rejection with his meaty hand. He is above a drink. But I am pleased to see that when Ruth engages him in one of her conspiratorial conversations he is as vulnerable as other mortals. He listens with his head bent and a pucker between his eyes, not hearing one damned word, but forced to listen.
Well out of it, I stand back and watch, and remember nights when my ten percent involvement in artists didn’t permit me to stand back, such a night as the Book-of-the-Month party when the Time-Life boy got high and insulted his publisher’s wife, and punches flew, and in the melee someone—I swear it was a Herald Tribune reviewer—bit a chunk out of the lady’s arm. She got blood poisoning and nearly died. A critic’s bite is as deadly as a camel’s, apparently. None of that for me, ever again. Let Art pursue its unquiet way, be content to be a birdwatcher of Los Gatos.
I hear Sue say lightly, “You’re so dressed up, Arnold. You’re the dressiest person at your party.”
And wouldn’t that be true, too; wouldn’t Caliban, in this crowd where nothing is conventional except the thinking, just have to be correct as a haberdasher’s clerk? Oh, a beauty. I bury my nose in a third highball, feeling ready and alert and full of conversational sass, but not wanting to get involved with Kaminski, and having no one else handy. Sue and her pianist are listening intently to Ruth’s whisper. Teetering on my toes, I catch fragments of talk from people passing by, and think of Sam Shields and his zebra, and of Murthi again, and of how zebras roaming the California hills would not surprise Murthi at all. He would have seen them in some movie. Spiritually empty Americans are always importing zebras or leopards or crocodiles for pets. Part of the acquisitive and sensational itch. Roman decadence.
The whole subject irritates me. How in hell do zebras get into an intelligent conversation?
Some god, somewhere, says Let there be light, and a radiance like moonlight dawns over the patio and the clusters of guests. A blue underwater beam awakes in the pool; the water smokes like a hot spring. Sue’s eyes are on the velvet-coated man, who is describing something with gestures to the music-patronizing Ackermans. One of the neighbors, in a loud plaid tweed, stands aside watching the musicians as he would watch little animals digging a hole. I have a feeling that I have failed Sue; Kaminski and I have already practically dropped one another’s acquaintance. Her eyes wander around to me. She looks slightly puzzled, a little tired. She rounds her eyes to indicate how pleasantly difficult all this is, and bursts into laughter.
“Everybody here?” I ask.
“Almost, I think. At least the ice seems to be getting broken. Honestly, I don’t know half the people here myself. Isn’t that a giveaway? This is the first stock I ever bought in musical society.”
“Very pretty party,” I say. It is. From across the pool it is strikingly staged: light and shade, composition of heads and shoulders, moving faces, glints of glass and bright cloth. For a moment it has the swirl and flash of a Degas ballet, and I say so to Sue. I hear Bill Casement’s big laugh; white coats dart around; the Mondrian gate opens to spill four late arrivals into the patio.
“Excuse me,” Sue says. “I must go greet somebody. But I particularly wanted Arnold to meet the Ackermans, so I’m going to steal him now. Arnold, will you come …”
He stands with his fish mouth flattened; he breathes through his nose; he does not trouble to keep his voice down. He says, “For God’s sake, how long is this going to go on?”
Sue’s eyes jump to his; her lips waver in an imbecilic smile. Her glance swerves secretly to me, then to Ruth, and back to Kaminski. “Well, you know how people are,” she says. “They don’t warm up without a …”
“Good God!” says Kaminski, in a sudden, improbable rage, gobbling as if his throat were full of phlegm. “I am supposed to play for pigs who swill drinks and drinks and drinks until they are falling-down drunk and then will stuff themselves and sleep in their chairs? These are not people to listen to music. I can’t play for such people. They are the wrong people. It is the wrong kind of party, nothing but drinks.”
Ruth is already trying to pull me away, and I am pretending to go with her while at the same time holding back for dear life; I wouldn’t for a fat fee miss hearing what this monster will say next. Sue swings him lightly around, steers him away from us, and I hear her: “Oh, please, Arnold! There’s no harm done. We talked about it, remember? We thought, break the ice a little first. Never mind. I’m sorry if it’s wrong. We can serve any time now, they’ll be ready to listen as soon as …”
I am dragged out of earshot, and wind up beside Ruth, over against the dressing rooms under a cascade of clematis. Ruth looks like someone who has just put salt in her coffee by mistake. With her white hair and black eyebrows, she has a lot of lady-comedian expressions, but she doesn’t seem to know which one to use this time. Our backs against the dressing-room wall, we sneak a cautious look back where we have just casually drifted from. Sue’s Roman-striped cotton and Kaminski’s white coat are still posed there at the far edge of the illumination. Then he jerks his arm free and walks off.
Ruth and I look at each other and make a glum mouth. There goes the attempt of a good-natured indiscreet well-meaning culture-craving woman to mother an artistic lush. Horrible social bust, tiptoes, hush-hush among her friends. Painful but inevitable. She looks forlorn at the edge of the artificial moonlight of her patio. A performance is going on, but not the one she planned. The audience is there, but it will have no recital to attend, and will not see the real show, which is already over.
Now don’t be stupid and go after him, I say to Sue in my mind, but I have hardly had the thought before she does just that. What an utter fool.
That is the moment when the white coats line up in front of the cabaña, and one steps out ahead of the others. He raises his hands with the dramatics of an assistant tympani player whose moment comes only once, and knocks a golden note from a dinner gong.
An arm falls across my shoulders, another sweeps Ruth in. “Come on,” says Bill Casement’s gun-club golf-course dressing-room voice. “Haven’t had a word with you all night. By God, it’s a pleasure to see a familiar face. How’s it going? O.K.? Good, let’s get us some food.”
IV
Assembly line along a reach of stainless steel; the noisy, dutiful, expectant shuffling of feet, the lift of faces sniffing, turning to comment or laugh, craning to look ahead. Mnnnnnnnnn! Trenchers as big as cafeteria trays, each hand-turned from a different exotic wood. Behind the counter white coats, alert eyes, ready tongs, spoons, spatulas. A state fair exhibit of salads—red lettuce crinkly-edged, endive, romaine, tomatoes like flowers, hearts of artichokes marinée, little green scallions, caveat emptor. Aspic rings all in a row. A marvelous molded crab with pimento eyes afloat in a tidepool of mayonnaise. Some of that … that … that.
Refugees from Manhattan. Load these folks up, they haven’t had a square meal since 1929.
A landslide, an avalanche: slabs of breast from barbecued turkeys, gobs of oyster dressing, candied yams dripping like honeycomb. A man with a knife as long as a sword and as limber as a razorblade whips off paper-thin slices from a ham, leafs them on to trenchers. Another releases by some sleight of hand one after another of a slowly revolving line of spits from a Rube Goldberg grill. Shishkebab. Tray already dangerous, but still pickles, olives, celery frizzled in crushed ice, a smörgasbord of smoked salmon, smoked eel, smoked herring, cheeses. Ovens in the opulent barbecue yield corn fingers, garlic bread.
No more, not another inch of room—but as we turn away we eye three dessert carts burdened with ice-cream confections shaped like apples, pears, pineapples, all fuming in dry ice. Also pastries, petits fours, napoleons, éclairs. Also batteries of coffee flasks streaming bright bubbles. Also two great bowls in which cherries and fat black berries and chunks of pineapple founder in wine-colored juice. Among the smokes of broiling, freshness of scallions, stink of camembert, roquefort, liederkranz, opulence of garlic butter, vinegar-bite of dressings, sniff that bouquet of cointreau and kirsch in which the fruits are soaked. Lucullus, Trimalchio, adsum.
But hardly Trimalchio. Instead, this Bill Casement, tall and brown, a maker and a spender loaded with money from lumber mills in the redwood country; no sybarite, but only a man with an urgent will to be hospitable and an indulgent attitude towards his wife’s whims. He herds us to a table, looks around. “Where the hell’s Sue?” A man behind the counter flashes him some signal. “Excuse me, back in a second. Any of these musical characters tries to sit down here, say it’s saved, uh?” Down-mouthed, with his head ducked, he tiptoes away laughing to show that this party is none of his doing, he only works here.
The lawn where Sue and Kaminski have been standing until just a few minutes ago stretches empty and faultless in the dusk. No hostess, no guest of honor. “Quite an evening,” I say.
Ruth smiles in a way she has. “Still oppressed with birdsong?”
“Why don’t you save that tongue to slice ham with?” I reply crossly. “I’m oppressed all right. Aren’t you?”
“If she weren’t so nice it would be almost funny.”
“But she is so nice.”
“Yes,” she says. “Poor Sue.”
As I circle my nose above the heaped and delectable trencher, the thought of Kaminski’s bald scorn of food and drink boils over in my insides. Is he opposed to nourishment? “A pituitary monster,” I say, “straight out of Dostoevsky.”
“Your distaste was a little obvious.”
“I can’t help it. He curdled my adrenal glands.”
“You make everything so endocrine,” she says. “He wasn’t that bad. In fact, he had a point. It is a little alcoholic for a musicale.”
“It’s the only kind of party they know how to give.”
“But it still isn’t quite the best way to show off a pianist.”
“All right,” I say. “Suppose you’re right. Is it his proper place to act as if he’d been captured and dragged here? He’s the beneficiary, after all.”
“I expect he has to humiliate her,” Ruth says.
Sometimes she can surprise me. I remark that without an M.D. she is not entitled to practice psychiatry. So maybe he does have to humiliate her. That is exactly one of the seven thousand two hundred and fourteen things in him that irritate the hell out of me.
“But it’ll be ghastly,” says Ruth in her whisper, “if she can’t manage to get him to play.”
I address myself to the trencher. “This is getting cold. Do we have to wait for Bill?” When I fill my mouth with turkey and garlic bread, my dyspeptic stomach purrs and lies down. But Ruth’s remark of a minute before continues to go around in me like an auger, and I burst out again: “Humiliate her, uh? How to achieve power. How to recover from a depressing sense of obligation. How to stand out in every gathering though a son of a bitch. Did it ever strike you how much attention a difficult cross-grained bastard gets, just by being difficult?”
“It strikes me all the time,” Ruth murmurs. “Hasn’t it ever struck you before?”
“You suppose she’s infatuated with him?”
“No.”
“Then why would she put up with being humiliated?”
Her face with its black brows and white hair is as clever as a raccoon’s. But as I watch it for an answer I see it flatten out into the pleasant look of social intercourse, and here is Bill, his hand whacking me lightly on the back. “Haven’t been waiting for me, have you? Fall to, fall to! We’re supposed to be cleared away by nine-thirty. I got my orders.”
Our talk is of barbecuing. Do we know there are eighteen different electric motors in that grill? Cook anything on it. The boys got it down to a science now. Some mix-ups at first, though. Right after we got it, tried a suckling pig, really a shambles. Everybody standing around watching Jerry and me get this thing on the spit, and somebody bound to say how much he looks like a little pink scrubbed baby. Does, too. Round he goes, round and round over the coals with an apple in his mouth and his dimples showing, and as his skin begins to shrink and get crisp, damn if his eyes don’t open. By God! First a little slit, then wide open. Every time he comes round he gives us a sad look with these baby blue eyes, and the grease fries out of him and sizzles in the fire like tears. If you’d squeezed him he’d’ve said mama. He really clears the premises, believe me. Two or three women are really sick. …
Big Bill Casement, happy with food and bourbon, looks upon us in friendship and laughs his big laugh. “Pigs and all, barbecuing is more in my line than this music business. About the most musical I ever get is listening to Cottonseed Clark on the radio, and Sue rides me off the ranch every time she catches me.” He rears back and looks around, his forehead wrinkles clear into his bristly widow’s peak. “Where d’you suppose she went to, anyway?”
Ruth gives him one of her patent murmurs. It might as well be the Lord’s Prayer for all he hears of it, but it comforts him anyway. Sue and Kaminski are nowhere to be seen—having a long confab somewhere. Thinking of what is probably being said at that meeting, I blurt out, “What about the performer? Who is he? Where’d Sue find him?”
“Well,” Bill says, “he’s a Pole. Polish Jew,” he adds apologetically, as if the word were forbidden. “Grew up in Egypt, went back to Poland before the war, just in time to get grabbed by the Polish army and then by the Nazis. His mother went into an incinerator, I guess. He never knew for sure. I get all this from Sue.”
His animation is gone. I am damned if he doesn’t peek sideways and bat his eyes in a sheepish way around the patio pretending to be very disinterested and casual. He seems set to start back to attention at any slightest word with “What? Who? Me?”
“Very bright guy,” he says with about the heartiness of a postscript sending love to the family. “Speaks half a dozen languages—German, Polish, French, Italian, Arabic, God knows what. Sue found him down here in this artist’s colony, What’s-its-name. He was having a hell of a time. The rest of the artists were about ready to lynch him—they didn’t get along with him at all for some reason. Sue’s been on the board of this place, that’s how she was down there. She can see he’s this terrific prospect, and not much luck so far except a little concert here and there, schools and so on. So she offers him the use of the cottage, and he’s been here three weeks.”
I watch his hand rubbing on the creased brown skin of cheek and jaw. The hand is manicured. I can imagine him kidding the manicurist in his favorite barbershop. He is a man the barbers all know and snap out their cloths for. He brings a big grin to the shoeshine boy. The manicurist, working on his big clean paw, has wistful furtive dreams.
“You met him yet?” Bill asks.
“We talked for a little while.”
“Very talented,” Bill says. “I guess. Make a piano talk. You’d know better than I would—artists are more in your line. I’m just a big damn lumberjack out of the tall timber.”
In that, at least, he speaks with authority and conviction. Right now he would be a lot more at home up to his neck in a leaky barrel in some duck marsh than where he is.
Now I see Sue coming down along the fence from the projecting wing of the main house. She is alone. She stops at a table, and in the artificial moonlight I can see her rosy hostess’s smile. “Here comes your lady now,” I say.
Bill looks. “About time. I was beginning to … Say, I wonder if that means I should be … Where’s Kaminski? Seen him?”
“Over across the pool,” Ruth whispers, and sure enough there he is, walking pensively among the croquet wickets with his hands behind his white back. The Artist gathering his powers. I cock my ear to the sounds of the party, but all is decorous. All’s well, then.
“Maybe I better push the chow line along, I guess,” Bill says. He raises an arm and a white coat springs from beside the cabaña wall. In a minute we are confronted by a pastry cart full of all those éclairs and petits fours and napoleons and creampuffs. An arm reaches down and whisks my plate away, slides another in. Right behind the pastry cart comes another with a bowl of kirsch-and-cointreau-flooded fruit and a tray of fruity ice-cream molds. Forty thousand calories stare me in the face; my esophagus produces a small protesting conscientious pwwk! From the pastry man with his poised tongs and poised smile Ruth cringes away as if he were Satan with a fountain pen.
“Pick something,” I tell her. “Golden apples of the sun, silver apples of the moon. You have a duty.”
“Ha, yeah, don’t let that bother you,” Bill says, like a man who gets a nudge without letting it distract him from what he is looking at. Sue has stopped at a nearby table to talk to the Ackermans and the white-haired critic and the harpsichord man. The little music teacher, typecast for the homely sister of a Jane Austen novel, has managed to squeeze into the musical company. It is all out of some bird book, how the species cling together, and the juncoes and the linnets and the seed-eaters hop around in one place, and the robins raid the toyon berries en masse, and the jaybirds yak away together in the almond trees. The party has split into its elements, neighbors and unknown visitors and the little cluster of musicians. And now Sue, bending across them, beckons Kaminski, and he comes around the diving board, the hatchings of some cuckoo egg whose natural and unchangeable use it is to thrust his bottomless gullet up from the nest and gobble everything a foolish foster mother brings.
