Nothing definite had been said about the job, but I was doing all right. Swoon, on the other hand, was down, spinning on his back while the other man, with pointed shoes, kicked him in the face, skipped away, stopped, kicked him in the face again, and skipped away. A lady with bulging eyes and tendons scoring her neck shouted, “Get up, Jack, get up. Get up, you fairy.” Beyond the fight, through agitations of dancing couples, I saw his hand on her thigh. She offered semiparted lips, lick of bare leg, pure neck and arm, and inflexible attention to him. She was lovely all in all. To me, a stranger. I’d have fucked her myself, though the idea seemed unnatural. She was mother of my child, not lady of this glory. However unnatural, I wanted her and envied her. I wondered how long before I was homosexual by circumstance. “Didn’t you want me to do it, Phillip?” That they hadn’t once left the couch was proof they felt something. “I did it for your job.”
“No lies. Just tell me if you liked it.”
“He was revolting. An old man.”
“That means you liked it.”
Swoon suddenly seized the dancer’s crotch and dragged himself up through seven or eight punches in the face. The move was brilliant and courageous. I found myself shouting, “Go, baby. Kill. Kill. Kill.” A voice hissed into my ear, “Devil.” In another dress, another degree of fresher, whiter person, Nell smiled, then pinched at my kidney, screwing the flesh until I thrust an elbow into her abdomen. I giggled and tried not to look at the fight or across the room at dirty Mildred. To my giggles, shifting, and lack of focus, Nell said, “The toilet is that way” I said, “Thanks,” wondering if I had to piss. She smiled, and her smile deepened, taking knowledge of her devil into places she’d taken the man. She knew him, this deviclass="underline" he had to piss. In fact he didn’t, but he smiled, too, at her periodontal plastic, pink, low in the gleaming tooth. As I started away she grabbed my elbow.
“Tell me one thing.”
The fighting and the music were loud. I gave her a steady, deaf look.
“I want you to tell me one thing before you go.” She didn’t stop smiling.
“It was all right, Nell.”
“But?”
I waited to see what she made of nothing.
Her smile strained as if tugged by waters. “You’d like to beat me, wouldn’t you? I think you’d like to beat me.”
I winked.
The other man went down. Swoon was grinding a heel into his neck. People were cheering, calling his name. “Jack. Jack.” That was love, waves of love. Nell clasped her hands on her breast and jumped up and down. “Oh, kill, kill,” she said. “Make him be dead.”
Like a child, a little girl. Yet her exquisite jumping epitomized the party, spoke for the fighting men, and the others, too, even the servants. They served, danced, fought for the lady in white and gold, of the symmetrical face. The spot where she pinched me seemed to burn a message into my kidney. Her crowd wasn’t made of phonies. Between desire and action they interposed no mask. Impulse didn’t twist into perversion, into games. They were whole, straight, noble creatures, slave and master. To me, the challenge they represented left no alternatives. Maybe Stanger and Mildred had seen to that, but I was glad that I’d made the first deadly stroke, going to the zoo with Nell, killing Mildred as surely as Stanger killed giraffes. I imagined him on the veldt, amid naked blacks who hand him gun after gun, begging him to shoot straight as the giraffe charges. Great, but I’d buggered his wife. I’d wanted the job. Now, I could not not have it. Something definite would be said tonight. Yes or no. Either answer would be a comment on myself. Before the evening was over I’d be purged of irony. Made clean. Hired. Or a simple schmuck. I’d walked off in the direction indicated by Nell. My step was light. Too light, nearly wraithlike in the spacious, winding substance of this apartment. It made me feel weak and sick, the apartment, the creepy trivial way I walked in it. Like a man looking for his own pathetic step on a huge ship at sea. A man who has never seen or felt a high sea, never learned to walk its long surge, its remorseless drag and lunge. I needed this moment away from the blazing, loud incoherence of the crowded land, alone, out of sight, to practice walking. And my feelings, while practicing, were like those of a young captain in a novel by Conrad. First opportunity to command. He is alone, pacing the deck, getting a sense of himself. A storm is rising on the horizon. Members of the crew try to call it to his attention, but he has already noticed it, and seen through it to himself. He is sympathetic to their fears, yet more sympathetic to his own. Could I get at that sense of myself required by this storm? I notice it’s a moral storm. The worst kind. The ship is fraught with goods meant for the best people. Could I bring it home intact? Was I the captain? I tried to walk right. One, two, three, six, fifteen … It wasn’t easy to walk right. No prerequisite of honor is easy. I was afraid I might kick a jug, scratch a painting, the way I walked, like a crazy, spastic, stoned, drunken gawk. Not a captain. I might even fall off the whole fucking ship. But then I felt it begin: one, two, three, four … I was walking, and all right. I was the captain.
A hallway led to hallways, to rooms opening into rooms, a labyrinth, a weight of money, accumulating in vistas of paintings, etchings, hanging rugs, pewter, throbbing lacquers, silver, gold. Touch these good things, I thought. Let sublimation steel you. Touch. Let lech. Love any hole that feels. I smacked a door, hands flat to spare me a broken nose, and fell through onto my face. I looked up moments later and saw a girl at a dressing table. Her back was to me. She was brushing long brown hair, like the household genie of serene indifference. She didn’t seem to know or care that I lay behind her on the floor, watching. She spoke:
“Please don’t apologize for being late and slamming through my door like the offensive pig you happen to be. I much prefer your silence. Any apology will make me exceedingly furious. I’m not exceedingly furious now, Colin. So keep your mouth shut. I suppose you haven’t shaved, have you? I won’t hear your apologies. I won’t hear your voice.”
She clapped the brush down. Her legs lashed by my face, negligee flying, to the bed. Books and papers were knocked off the bed. I stood. She flung onto the bed, twisted onto her back, eyes shut, forehead writhing with contradiction. She gave a blind, shrill order to the ceiling:
“Go on, Colin, you know what I want.”
Lest he’d forgotten, her legs struck out, stiff, isoscelean. I saw voluted conch in wire tangle, the picture of her mind. The Colin in me rose, perked up like a rat, snout quivering, pointing at the answer to a question never asked. Life is this epitome. Red, tidal maw. Yawn. Aching exfoliant. Hole. I flicked light, shut door, three steps, and I straddled her neck. “Smells,” she cried, and muddy flux dragged me, gripping my head, churning circles into the circles of her need, the cherished head which she recognized—“Who you?”—as not the right head. A good one nonetheless, already thinking how to apologize. She screeched and kicked. I pressed on to suggest the suction of feeling, but, thinking, thinking, I felt only ideas, tones, and tropes rise upon one another like waves, curling, crashing, failing to hold, sliding faster, faster down the beach to the seething, shapeless inane. Remember the job, I thought, and a hairy hemp ripped from my liver to my throat. I came at both ends simultaneously. Apology was impossible. I opted for vigor. “Fantastic,” I cried, hoping thus to distract her with vigor. Also oblique flattery She said, “Eeee,” scrambling to one end of the bed, and me to the other, pleading, “Don’t scream. I’m turning on the light.” It discovered her biting the sheet. “Woo woo woo,” she said. I bent, pleading in the harmless posture of a dog at stool. “Didn’t you like it?” She twisted about to slap the night table. I expected a gun. She twisted back, glasses on her face, big eyes, the tigerish mother apparent. “Say, you’re Nell Stanger’s kid, aren’t you?” My voice was eager, genial. She screamed. I fled.