Collected Stories, page 42
“Come on,” Bill says. He lifts Kaminski and starts him along, but Kaminski kicks loose and staggers and almost falls among the chairs in the foggy patio, and now what has been impossible becomes outrageous, becomes a vulgar burlesque—and I use the word vulgar deliberately, knowing who it is that speaks.
“Don’t you worry about me!” Kaminski shouts, and kicks a chair over. “Don’t you worry about a starving kike pianist from Blue Hill Avenue. Maybe I grew up in Egypt and maybe I didn’t, but I can still play the piano. I can play the God damn keys off a piano.”
He comes back closer, facing Sue with a chairback in his hands, bracing himself on it. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I can see you worrying, but don’t worry. I’ll be out of your damned little gardener’s cottage in the morning, and thank you very much for nothing. Will that satisfy you?” With a jerk he throws the chair aside and it falls and clatters.
Bill Casement takes one step in Kaminski’s direction, and the outrageous turns instantly into slapstick. The pianist squeaks like a mouse, turns and runs for his life. Behind a remoter chair he stops to show his teeth, but when Bill starts for him again he turns once more and runs. For a moment he hangs in mid-air, his legs going like a cat’s held over water, and then he is in the pool. The splash comes up ghostly into the moonlight and the fog, and falls back again.
Maybe he can’t swim. Maybe in his squeaking terror of what he has stirred up he has forgotten that the pool is there. Maybe he is so far gone that he doesn’t even know he has fallen in. And maybe, on the other hand, he literally intends to drown himself.
If he does, he successfully fails in that too. By the time Bill has run to flip on the underwater lights the white coat is down under, and Kaminski is not struggling at all. While the women scream, Bill jumps into the water, and here he comes wading towards the shallow end dragging Kaminski under his arm. He hauls him up the corner steps and dangles him, shaking the water out of him, and Kaminski’s arms drag on the tile and his feet hang limp.
“Oh my God,” Sue whispers, “is he dead?”
Bill looks disgusted. After all, Kaminski couldn’t have been in the pool more than a minute altogether. As Bill lowers him on to the warm pavement and straightens him out with his face turned sideways on his arm, Kaminski shudders and coughs. His hands make tense, meaty grabs at the concrete. The majordomo, Jerry, pops out of the kitchen end of the cabaña in his undershirt, takes one look, and pops back in again. In a moment he comes running with a blanket.
Kaminski is not seriously in need of a blanket. For the first time that evening, he is not seriously in need of an audience, either. We stay only long enough to see that Bill and Jerry have everything under control, and then we get away. Sue walks us to the gate, but it is impossible to say anything to her. She looks at us once so hurt and humiliated and ashamed that I feel like going back and strangling Kaminski for keeps where he lies gagging on the patio floor, and then we are alone in the surrealist fog-swept spaces of the parking area. In the car we sit for a minute or two letting the motor warm, while the windshield wipers make half-circles of clarity on the glass.
“I wonder what …” Ruth begins, but I put my hand over her mouth.
“Please. I am an old tired philistine who has had all he can stand. Don’t even speculate on what’s biting him, or why he acts the way he does. I’ve already given him more attention than I can justify.”
As soon as I take my hand away, Ruth says softly, “The horrible part is, he played awfully well.”
We are moving now out the fog-shrouded drive between curving rows of young pines. “What?” I say. “Did you think so?”
“Oh yes. Didn’t you?”
“He hit a big blooper in the Chaconne.”
“That could happen to anybody, especially somebody young and nervous. But the interpretation—didn’t you hear how he put himself into first the one and then the other, and how the whole quality changed, and how really authoritative he was in all of them? Some pianists can only play Mozart, or Beethoven, or Brahms. He can play anybody, and play him well. That’s what Mr. Arpad said, too.”
“Who’s Mr. Arpad?”
“The one that accompanies singers.”
“He thought he was good?”
“He told me he had come down expecting only another pianist, but he thought Kaminski had a real chance.”
Tall eucalyptus trees are suddenly ghostly upreaching, the lights shine on their naked white trunks, the rails of a fence. I ease around a turn in second gear. “Well, all right,” I say in intense irritation. “All right, he was good. But then why in the hell would he …”
And there we are back on it. Why would he? What made him? Was he lying at first, lying later, or lying all the time? And what is more important to me just then, where in God’s name does he belong? What can the Sue Casements do for the Arnold Kaminskis, and where do the Bills come in, and what function, if any, is served by the contented, beagle-running, rabbit-chasing, patio-building, barbecuing exurbanites on their hundred hills? How shall a nest of robins deal with a cuckoo chick? And how should a cuckoo chick, which has no natural home except the one he usurps, behave himself in a robin’s nest? And what if the cuckoo is sensitive, or Spiritual, or insecure? Christ.
Lights come at us, at first dim and then furry and enormous, the car behind them vaguely half seen, glimpsed and gone, and then the seethe of white again. I never saw the fog thicker; the whole cloudy blanket of the Pacific has poured over the Coast Range and blotted us out. I creep at ten miles an hour, peering for the proper turn-off on these unmarked country lanes.
The bridge planks rumble under us as I grope into our own lane. Half a mile more. Up there, the house will be staring blindly into cottonwool; my study below the terrace will be swallowed in fog; the oak tree where I do my birdwatching will have no limbs, no shade, no birds. Leaning to see beyond the switching wiper blades, I start up the last steep pitch, past the glaring-white gate, and on, tilting steeply, with the brown bank just off one fender and the gully’s treetops fingering the fog like seaweed on the left. All blind, all difficult and blind. I taste the stale bourbon in my mouth and know myself for a frivolous old man.
In the morning, probably, the unidentifiable bird, towhee or whatever he is, will come around for another bout against the plate glass, hypnotized by the insane hostility of his double. I tell myself that if he wakes me again at dawn tomorrow with his flapping and pecking I will borrow a shotgun and scatter his feathers over my whole six acres.
Of course I will not. I know what I will do. I will watch the fool thing as long as I can stand it, and ruminate on the insanities of men and birds, and try to convince myself that as a local idiocy, an individual aberration, this behavior is not significant. And then when I cannot put up with the sight of this towhee any longer I will retire to my study and sit looking out of the window into the quiet shade of the oak, where nuthatches are brownly and pertly content with the bugs in their home bark. But even down there I may sometimes hear the banging and thrashing of this dismal towhee trying to fight his way past himself into the living-room of the main house.
We coast into the garage, come to a cushioned stop, look at each other.
“Tired?” Ruth whispers.
Her pet coon face glimmers in the dim light of the dash. Her eyes seem to be searching mine with a kind of anxiety. I notice that tired lines are showing around her mouth and eyes, and I am filled with gratitude for the forty years during which she has stood between me and myself.
“I don’t know,” I say, and kiss her and lean back. “I don’t know whether I’m tired, or sad, or confused. Or maybe just irritated that they don’t give you enough time in a single life to figure anything out.”
Something Spurious from the Mindanao Deep
A half-hour before noon, Burns had the bar to himself. Warm air blew in gusts through the room; outside, awnings and pool and umbrellas and lounges blazed under the vertical sun. Beyond the breakwater and the bordering palms, Manila Bay was congealed lead, with three rusty hulks jutting above the surface, not quite melted down. It was all as lurid as a surrealist painting; it half fused in his mind with a picture he had in his study at home—a painting by the Mexican Meza, a desert water hole and a shrouded Indian with feet like bird claws or like roots. He was as metamorphosed as that Indian; his own feet might be claws or roots, the emaciated face reflected back at him from a dusky glass door might be a caricature of his real face, or again it might be face of beast or bird.
In the sharp lime taste of his gimlet was concentrated a memory of all the places where in the last seven months he had braced himself with that characteristic drink of the Empire. Cairo, Alexandria, Karachi, Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Madras, Calcutta, Singapore, Bangkok—in all of them there had been residual fortresses like this one where Europeans and Americans kept themselves aloof. They had drawn his criticism, those segregated compounds.
As a cultural ambassador, representing a foundation dedicated to the unity of mankind, he was eager to show himself the very opposite of a snob. Unfortunately, he had found that there were other reasons than snobbery for the compounds. By mingling democratically with all levels of life around the globe, snooping in suqs and bazaars, eating and drinking everything that hospitality and good will put before him, Burns had managed to contract most of the diseases that snobbery might have saved him from. He reflected with gloomy irony that it was in payment for an excess of democracy that he now dragged on doctor’s orders over to the Army and Navy Club every morning to build himself up with regular, gentle exercise. Nearing the end of his tour of duty, he was also nearing the rueful admission that East was East and West was West. All men were human but their humanity took very different forms; and to insist on overlooking the differences was to come finally to massive doses of vitamin C and a reliance on the gimlet to get you from breakfast to lunch, from lunch to dinner, and from dinner to bed.
It was near the time of his appointment with the editor, Avellanos. Burns signaled the waiter, signed his chit, and got out. Outside, the sun was pale and intense, the air milky. The promontories that enclosed the bay reached out and faded distantly in veils of heat. MacArthur Boulevard poured with the converted jeep taxis they called jeepneys; a squad of constabulary had stacked arms and was resting in the shade of Rizal’s statue. Walking slowly, not to heat or exert himself, Burns had made it halfway across the lawn that stretched to the Manila Hotel when he saw the pearl peddler coming. The transparent sport shirt with its tails blowing, the bony grinning Malay face, made him feel tired. If he had had a hearing aid he would have turned it out.
From twenty feet away the peddler hailed him. “Hey, Joe, how about those pearls today? You think it over? Real Mindanao pearls, my brother just come back with them. Real bargain, four for eighty pesos.”
Burns waved him away. Quite apart from his professional determination to be friendly to everyone, he could not dislike this cheerful crook, but he had heard the spiel every day for five days. He said, smiling fiercely, “Go sell your phony pearls to someone else!”
“Phony pearls? Now hey, Joe, you just look. My brother dives, he got these himself. …”
“Right out of the Mindanao Deep,” Burns said, still walking.
“You guessed it, Joe.” The peddler hopped backward, untying a knotted bandanna. His grin, Burns thought, was part of a considered practice of scoundrelship; it said that of course you were as crooked as he was, you came into the racket as a sort of guest. “Look! Pearls, they’re small, go in your shoe, anywhere. Customs never look. You sell these in the States a hundred dollars apiece. You don’t get these big oysters, with these big pearls, anywhere but Mindanao, down in that Deep like you say.”
Burns walked through him. “Away, away!”
“You got a girl,” said the peddler, skipping at his side. “Maybe wife. Man like you. Nice present for a lady. Just take a look. I make them seventy-five.”
Finally he succeeded in blocking Burns off and shoving the opened bandanna before his eyes. The pearls were the size of flattened marbles, rather pretty, opalescent, with a look like moonstones. Someone had evidently ground them out of an abalone shell on an emery wheel.
“Very pretty,” Burns said. “But no. I don’t need any pearls. Find some other sucker.”
The pearl man was not upset. He did not affect the injured dignity that an Egyptian or Indian sharper would have assumed if his integrity had been doubted. “You come out again soon?”
“Not if I see you waiting.”
“I be around,” the pearl man said with great friendliness. “I wait for you.”
Shaking his head, Burns went into the hotel and looked in the bar for Avellanos. The editor was not yet there. He sat down and ordered a gimlet.
Within ten minutes Avellanos came in, a short man, compact, full of energy. Being patriot and politician as well as editor, he wore a pineapple cloth shirt. He carried an important briefcase, he smoked cigars like torpedoes, he had a cocky air that reminded Burns a little of the pearl peddler. And he had a change of plans to suggest.
It was his assignment and his pleasure to open up Manila to Mr. Burns for three weeks. Very well. But instead of going this afternoon to three universities, at each of which Burns would probably be asked to make a speech on English as a world language, how about going to a party? With a smile that was boyish and sly he took a newspaper from his briefcase and pointed out a small box advertisement at the foot of page one. It said:
Pacita Delgado, feeling that it is much too long since the old crowd of writers met, is taking this means of inviting them all for roast pig and plenty tuba at her house on January 10. For old times’ sake, come.
Politely but positively Burns shook his head. “It would be charming, I know. But I’ve been sick, and I have to be careful.”
“Of roast pig? That’s delicious, a feast. That won’t hurt you.”
“In the last six months,” Burns said, “I have had hepatitis, a strep throat, mononucleosis, and two bouts of what is affectionately called Delhi Belly. All I need is a case of amoebic to set me right up. No, I’m sorry, I’d love to come otherwise. But I just don’t have any resistance to strange bugs.”
“Don’t eat, then. Just drink.”
“Is it important to you? Is there some special reason?”
Avellanos wagged his head. “It’s a literary crowd. You’d meet most of Manila’s writers.”
Watching his brown face, the face of a tough good-natured boy, Burns said, “It seems an odd way to issue an invitation.”
The editor rocked back on the hind legs of his chair and guffawed so that people lunching under the windows looked up. “All right, I’ll confess,” he said, and the chair legs came down with a clack as he hunched close. “This advertisement is aimed at me, you see? In my own paper. How she ever got that front-page space is interesting, too. I would like to know. This Pacita is my mistress—my ex-mistress, you understand? I haven’t been to see her for three months.”
Beginning to feel like the captive audience of a tale by Conrad or Somerset Maugham, Burns licked the taste of Rose’s lime juice off his lips. He was not eager to share this Avellanos’ overlively private life. But out of politeness he said, “You haven’t? Why not?”
“Naturally a man has other things to think of. She was becoming possessive. Also, as a politician I have to be careful.” His cheeks crumpled in the wide delighted grin that seemed his most natural expression. “Besides, there are so many women, all charming. And I dislike scoldings.”
“Why do you think she advertised this barbecue?”
Avellanos cocked thumb and finger, winked his eye. “Maybe she plans to shoot me.”
“You’re kidding, of course.”
“She’s a reckless woman.”
“Maybe she’s just sentimental.”
“Sentimental too. I admit. I’m curious to know what this girl has in her head. She is never dull, and she is also very good-looking.”
“Well, let’s go, then,” Burns said. “It must be marvelous to be so sought after.”
The smile that Avellanos threw at the ceiling was ecstatic; his brown throat worked with laughter. “My friend,” he said, “you have no idea!”
There was no chance for a rest after lunch. Already tired, Burns waited for Avellanos at the hat-check stand under the sign, “Check all firearms here.” After five days in Manila he was used to giving cultural speeches while a guard with a carbine patrolled the hall, and he had dined in gardens where a watchman, also with a carbine, moved steadily up and down. But he thought the hat-check sign absurd and melodramatic. Filipinos lived for drama; if the Huks had not existed they would have had to be invented. Burns said so, in effect, and Avellanos, giving the girl his check, accepted with a broad smile the automatic she handed him. He slipped it into the briefcase and hooked his arm in that of Burns.
“There are all sorts of possibilities,” he said.
On the way to Pacita Delgado’s house, which seemed to be far out, Burns leaned back and closed his eyes, opening them once when the car stopped at a roadblock and brown faces of constabulary looked in, and again when they parked in an unpaved street of banana trees and small fenced houses on stilts. Avellanos had slammed the door and started up the path when Burns, noticing, said, “You’re forgetting your briefcase.” The editor tossed his fingers in the air with a laugh.
“Did you think I carried it for Pacita? No, if she shoots me, she shoots me.”
This house was built not on stilts but on the ground, with a garden that went around behind. Inside the bamboo fence they met whiffs of richly flavored smoke and cascades of brittle talk. That was another thing about Filipinos: they spoke English as if it were another language, they reduced it to its particles and made it a language not of words but of syllables. Burns braced himself for the party chatter, the amenities of thoroughly decent people whom he would never see again and who were marked in his mind as unalterably different from himself. His long, idealistic, exhausting tour came down in the end to a reiteration of banalities, a constant assertion of good will as empty as a Presidential handshake. Avellanos knocked on the door.
