“We both want to. We arrived at the decision mutually.” He made no effort to hide his anger.
“Which more mutually than the other?”
“Mutually mutually!”
“And how old is she that she’s so in tune with you and life?”
“Nineteen.”
“Nineteen and a Catholic. Splendid.”
“Asher, I didn’t expect this from you.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Tell lies? You only take walks with right-minded people?”
“You can disagree, but why on this level?” Paul demanded.
“What level? You tell me you like shikse pussy, you’re telling me something I don’t know? I’m you, Paulie, I’m you. Jewish girls devour you. Haven’t I seen my friends go under? The wives can’t walk upstairs. They need maids. They need vacations — once in August, then in January all over again. They’re sorry they laid anybody before they married you. They stop sanctioning looseness, bang, all of a sudden. One Friday you come in the door and they got the candles going, and then you’re really home. I’m not saying I blame you, Paul. I’m only trying to get to the bottom.”
“Getting to the bottom doesn’t mean digging into sewers. How can you talk like this? You don’t even know the girl. You never even saw her.”
“I never even saw that baby I carry a picture of either. But I know what a baby is, so I can appreciate this one. This girl’s got a background on her you don’t even begin to understand. She’s got a family that probably this minute is churning gall over you. True?”
“Like mine over her. Just as smart and sensible.”
“You think happiness comes out of gall? You think that’ll be nice, earning all those enemies? You think it’s enough to squirm around in bed with her, to wake up with her hand on your vitals? What do you think that solves, Paulie, after the wad is popped?”
“Christ, Asher, you’re a dunghole, a toilet!”
“We’re talking man to man, right? Don’t start crying. I’m not a charming man.”
“All right, Asher, man to man. If you’re a man, a human being, then why don’t you talk about love? I love Libby. I’m giving it to you straight now, though not so flowery as you. I love Libby. She’s alive, she’s sweet, she has deep and generous instincts. She has feelings. She, unlike you, is charming.”
“You like that?”
“Yes.”
“Charm is shit.”
“She’s a woman, Asher, listen to me! She behaves like a woman. I want to stick with her, to live with her.”
“Go ahead.”
“I am. I’m marrying her.”
“You’re a circular reasoner,” said Asher, “and I’m a cynic, but you’re worse. Marriage kills love. Do me a favor, look around at all the loving happy couples. You count them for me, all right? I’ll close my eyes, you tell me how many you come up with.” He took off his glasses, blew into them, then wiped away the steam on a piece of cloth he extracted from his coat pocket. His lower lids were jeweled with tears from the cold. Hooking the rims back over his elaborate ears, he said, “How many? Once you get past the Duke and Duchess of Windsor it’s slim pickings, no? Paulie, kiss the girl, caress her, stick it right up in her, but for Christ’s sake do me a favor and wait a year. You’re an artistic type, a serious observer of life, why kill your talent? You’ll sap yourself with worry, you’ll die of a hard-on in the streets. Other women will tantalize you some day and you and your conscience will wrestle till you choke. Artists and artistic types must go it alone. If a year elapses and the urge remains, then go ahead, hang yourself, there’s nothing anybody can do. Is a year too much to ask?”
“I’m graduating, Asher,” Paul said, speaking with the patience of a wronged man. “She has a year to go, this girl you have so little regard for. When I leave Ithaca she’ll stay. Because I am so hard up, you see, so controlled by my hot pants and this guilt I feel at having deflowered her, I feel I want to marry her. It’s as simple as that.”
“Precisely.”
“Asher! Asher! When I leave, you shmuck, I lose her. That’ll be that.”
“I wouldn’t myself, if I were you, stand in the way of an ending.”
“But the plain and simple fact is, Asher, I don’t want it to end! Does that mean nothing?”
“Don’t you read history in your school? Don’t you study anything?” Asher demanded. He ran his sleeve roughly under his nose so that the whole ungristled last inch of it moved back toward his face. The amazing thing was that Asher Buckner seemed to be angry. He swallowed; he looked as though he’d been weeping and wailing for an hour. “Listen to Uncle Shmuck, will you? Things come and go, and you have got to be a receptacle, let them pass right through. Otherwise death will be a misery for you, boy; I’d hate to see it. What are you going to grow up to be, a canner of experience? You going to stick plugs in at either end of your life? Let it flow, let it go. Wait and accept and learn to pull the hand away. Don’t clutch! What is marriage, what is it but a pissy form of greed, a terrible, disgusting ambitiousness. Do you know what I do now, Paulie, for a living? I paint gangsters, petty thieves, the lousiest of rats, way way up there in the unions and the garment trade. They come in with their henchmen and they spit tangerine pits on my floor and they make fun of me while I paint the boss. They’re rich and lord it over whole precincts, and I’m a sloppy-ass bohemian. They’re the big shots and I’m the nothing. All right, I take it. I accept. The boss’s got warts, I lop them off. He’s got murder in his eyes, I put doves instead. He sends his wife, and I fill up her brassiere for her. I take out scowls, boils, wrinkles, bags, pores — everything goes. I give out only peaches and cream. Please, I don’t want to be the greatest painter in the world. I don’t want to be a maker of beauty, a religious personage. I don’t bottle experience. I’m interested in the flow. I’ll take the shape the world gives me. Fuck the rest. Let me buy you a drink. It’s a hell of a day for a walk. You could freeze.”
In the bar, a no man’s land where Madison Avenue and the Bowery met and embraced, a drunken youngster in a tight suit and tight hair had his arm draped around a seventy-year-old alcoholic — somebody’s mother. “Nothing in the world is irretrievable,” said the young man to the old woman, his head lolling down on his shirt front. “Nothing. If you’d just go back to County Cork and start all over again you’d be amazed—”
The woman was shaking her head. “Ah, you just don’t know what it’s like, having to take all that crap day in and day out …”
The uncle and the nephew sipped whiskey and said nothing; Asher looked at his watch, then began to whistle to himself between his teeth. He didn’t look much less ravaged to Paul than the old lady next to him. So was this girl friend of his a dream? Asher had bad breath — wouldn’t a twenty-five-year-old girl mind? Had there ever really been a Chinese who had drawn with her lips at that skin of his, wrinkly like a dying old flower? Asher was a total surprise, not at all the kind of monk Paul had imagined. All his renunciations — family, children, food, clothes — hadn’t been for his art at all. He had no art left. He was a tube with no plugs at either end. A receptacle. And that was what — courage or cowardice?
Paul was serious beyond his twenty-one years, and once an idea had been planted he could not easily discard it. He could not help asking himself if it made any sense at all to let Libby go. He was too purposive a young man — applying always in January for scholarships in September had given him a strong sense of consequence — to be casual about his decisions. However, his plan to marry was, he knew, no simple revolt against family, no simple sexual bite. As an adolescent busing tables in mountain resorts, he had been well enough tipped by vacationing housewives and lonely widows; from beneath him they had stroked his hair: “Oh, how nice and serious. You’ll be something in life. I’m not worried about your future.” As for the family, there was no sense talking about revolutions at this point; he had revolted at birth and lived a separate life under his own flag from infancy on. His kind of independence had not even allowed for the usual complaints; nobody had to stand and shout at him to get into his bedroom and study — he had always gotten A’s and never once in his life had he been in trouble. If his father was prickled by his own failures, it was not because his son had insulted him by bringing them up. Something had tipped off the boy early not to expect anything of the man, and he had gone ahead to respect his father, if only on the strength of his office. When he had not known the spelling of a word, he had taken down the dictionary — this at age seven. His mother claimed it made her proud, though secretly it gave her the shivers. She was a normal-school graduate, a major in arithmetic, and she could have helped him with his long division. But he did everything himself, even fractions. When he was between the years one and four his father had failed in haberdashery; four to six it was hardware; six to eleven real estate; and then eleven to twelve — the blinding, total crash — he lost his shirt in quick-frozen foods. One day, creditors calling at every door, he got into the cab of a truckful of his frozen rhubarb and took a ride out to Long Island to think; the refrigeration failed just beyond Mineola, and by the time he got home his life was a zero, a ruined man. Now, in his reclining years, he got up once in a while to collect rents for an old friend.