The World Is the Home of Love and Death (41 page)

“Pussy cool cats,” Jeffrey Bestmann said, a tough guy,
promising
director. And yet a hanger-on.

Whacko Williams, a big-shot show business corporation figure in the business world of that decade, said, “I want to drink champagne from your slipper, Moira—”

“I’m a size eight,” she said drolly.

Whacko, still in his making-love mode, said, “You know all there is to know.… You are a sexual
Britannica
 …”

Natalie Bone, a ballet star once, then a movie star, then an ex-star, married three times, and well-married still, called a
great beauty
because her large face was streamlined, large-boned, Nordic, and
famous
in gossip for her bad temper, for her being a dominatrix, for her tormenting men who pursued her, said, “I hate champagne in the afternoon …”

“I always need a lift,” Moira said pitiably and put herself as a rival to Natalie as someone agreeable and
feminine
according to 1950s Freudian analysis. She turned and said to a man on her other side on the couch, “Judy Garland is wonderful but she’s stale.… Alden Whitto, he’s really wonderful, he has a
dirty
purity.… He’s not trapped in the middle class.… He’s
escaped
.” She was an expert, a woman consulted by columnists and people writing for magazines; she knew a lot, encyclopedically, in the language of her particular world.

Thirty people are here so far. Ten are strewn in the couches that molest you. Some are walking around or standing here or on the balcony outside the windows. The younger, less famous, more decorative men sit on the floor in supple self-advertisement. Some are in the dining room.

“They get haircuts that look good blowing in the wind,” Moira said of the people on the windy terrace: all were men. There are many more men than women; there are only a few women.

Harvey Deuteronomy was standing over us and looking down at us, and he said in a witty manner—a kind of cabaret comic actor manner:
wittily
as a trick of manner, as someone
pretending
—in a carrying voice, “Why is it like high school here—why is it I never escaped from high school—why are the grownups always someplace else? I think your bridge is giving me a
migraine.”

“Isn’t it
wonderful
?” Moira said with her giggle. She said in the high-pitched, slick voice she had sometimes, “The bridge is
nicer
in the morning.… It’s shadows and
blur
 …” She means with sunglare pouring through its beams. “We should have people in then, but I can’t face people in the
mornings.”

“I’m so gauche,” Deuteronomy said
humorously
, sinking with a neurotic, tousled, gangling air into a couch at right angles to the one Moira and I were on.

American speech, with its transposed keys, its mimicries, its Gentile and Jew thing, its democratic and snobbish elements, is almost never used in books—it’s too hard. An American conversational exchange is a peculiar thing, businesslike or like an encounter in a wilderness even if it is erotic. In general, you have to be careful because you are in contact with so many social and psychological categories of people.

Moira said, “The French are so
tiresome
, they think they know everything, such snobs; after all, I’m
gauche
, I’m hardly going to hold it against the men or boys who visit here: I don’t want to be bored, but I don’t care if you’re gauche …”

And you had individual, current professional standing and marital standing, and current and former social classes, lied about, hidden, or exhibited; and gender attitudes—Natalie Bone was a feminist and a purposeful bitch: it was a
famous
style: she had done it in the movies and been apostrophized in magazines as a
goddess.

Then you have educational differences and sexual attitudes hidden or paraded; and various kinds of susceptibility to intimidation—
What? you haven’t slept with Moira?
or
You haven’t read Camus?
Depending on how
innocent
and helpless you appear and on how powerful you are, then when you get things wrong—and how can you not when people’s lives are so unliterary and sprawling in America—the person you’re talking to maybe will set out to get you in order to prove themselves to be O.K. It’s a kind of sparring and is a measure of wit-and-power on Park Avenue. Sometimes it’s said that it is better not to listen too closely, that it’s better to swing along like a playground swing, alongside and parallel.

Mostly in real life, American men don’t talk—talk is a special trait with us, specially indulged in, men and women … Books use phony dialect or modified English dialogue, which is stylized to start with, and it suggests the characterization, not a real person. So does the theater. And the movies.

So this group sounds like movies. Pauses in the middle of a speech to think, changes of direction, hands over mouths, bold eye-stares are fairly theatrical. And do form an almost complete language. So mad Moira, if she wants to be a conversationalist, and if she imitates books, her druggy voice will be mannered for performance synchronous with Deuteronomy’s, and influencing his songs and other work, as if Harvey and Moira were lovers or were brother and sister. She has her own style, but it is not eccentric but is derived from successful examples in her time.

Moira said, “I love my drugs—Don’t mind me—I’m just making party talk.… I need a little help to get through the things I have to do.”

“Be married to Brr and drink champagne … ?” Whacko said.

“Why not be superhuman if you can get a prescription for it?” Deuteronomy said. He was very sharp-witted, very bright.

Moira giggled. Then: “I never wanted an ordinary life.”

A handsome, oldish man smiled at her, hearing a joke I didn’t get.

Moira then complained that she wasn’t a writer or a performer, she had no money of her own, she was dependent on Brr: “I’m not an artist: I’m mostly just hungover from all my wonderful pills.… Haha.” She gave a mad Bohemian toss to her magnificently tended hair. She said in another voice, abruptly other, “I used to think it would be worth selling your soul to get the hair of your dreams.”

Deut said, “Brr, he do has he little ways … Brr knows how to get the hair of your dreams …” He is talented and strange—I don’t think he likes being talented. I don’t think he is possessed by it—he hasn’t that kind of greatness. He was a huge new celebrity, a singer who wrote and sang
the new songs
—he led the next wave in the
American Popular Song.
He playacted naive and bumbling but he produced his own shows and was already very rich.… He is maybe androgynous.

Deuteronomy said, “I
like
this room …”

Moira said, “Oh it’s a stage set: it’s so gloomy when no one’s here I never enter it.…”

The room’s anatomy glimmered when it was empty, unlit; I had seen it, a semi-vast social machinery of space and furnishings.

Brr said, “An arm and a leg …” His English is like that of his magazines, but when he is being personal, he leaves phrases off: this was a phase he went through. “I’m eaten
up
alive—”

“Keeping the ball in the air,” Deut supplied.

“I have no time: I would like to create something before I die …” I
think
he was imitating Moira—as I said, we all stole from one another. “The only thing I can say of this room is that it photographs well—”

“I run away in it, in it,” Deuteronomy said; he had a large, unarguable, naïve, deeply photographable, deeply feelable smile.

“A little bit,” Moira said. “You can be comfortable here: you’re among friends …”

Brr said, “It’s for running away a little: You can be comfortable here: you’re among friends.” He tended to own, to hold a copyright on anything said in his presence.

He had a trait of looking sad when he subsided from his tough mode into politeness, a form of visiting his past, before he was so successful. His awareness of your style was the mark of his awareness—his own style was never discussed (he owned quite a few magazines).

Moira said, “I think it’s
moral
to have a good time.… Oh look at the bridge: it’s a big net and the clouds are little fish.… The sun is a big fish—ha-ha.” She pushed her riffs quite far. Her laugh was unsettling, discreetly soft, but still looney and threatening: an
Oh God, I am so unhappy
laugh, a
fuck me
 …

Brr said, “People always say Moira ought to be a writer.”

“No one ought to be a writer—it’s a dog’s life …”

“They say she should just write the way she talks, just write down what she says,” Brr said ignoring me.

If you listened carefully to the talk, if you noticed the real shape of it—the physical shape, the stirrings of meaning and intention, the breaths and the hysteria—Deut and Brr were stringing her along. I mean she couldn’t write but she was, forgive me,
insanely
interesting (in a way). But they were cheating her, fooling her—was it hatred? I don’t mean only in the overpraise, I mean in the ways they looked at one another, in what they understood and she didn’t.

She said, “I wish we could afford a really expensive apartment but Brr says we’re always broke, because of me …” She giggled again. “Brr is stingy …” She was fighting back perhaps.

Deuteronomy, at that time the most famous, let’s say upper-middle-class, entertainer in the world, said, in a slightly other voice—a voice slanted some way: “It is a
clever
room.… I can’t say it is stingy,” he said drolly.

The room was important in that decade: to some extent it defined our lives, our careers: does a room do that?

Moira said, in a strangely evil voice, “It’s a room for clever talkers.”

Neither she nor Brr, who have, of course, influenced each other, can go for long without making threats or demands as in this implicit ukase that we be clever or forfeit our right to spend time here. But it had a jokey tone, the threat.

“I come here to bumble,” said Deuteronomy, privileged—he is a star but it is more than that; he is close to Moira and to Brr.

“Bumble bee,” said Moira. “I like the James writers, James Joyce, Henry James, and James Jones … I like Noel Camtippy best because he kisses my hand …”

Brr said, “He kisses her ass: he steals ideas from Moira.”

Deut said, “The James gang. You left out Jesse …”

Brr seems young for his age, almost pre-pubic, as if he has been able to stay close to being ten years old, as if he had never been wrenched by puberty and physical size.

“Honey,” Moira said to Deuteronomy in a complex New York inflection: New York of the 1950s. She was addressing him with unusual intimacy, and I lost my attention; I blacked out; I didn’t want to know about their intimacy.

The room was beautiful with handsomely radiant, softly glaring light. The maybe-marvelous floral fabrics of the chairs bloomed meadowishly. I remarked that I was “devoted to not spilling coffee on myself.” Then I asked Deuteronomy if he was aggressive. I meant because he was a famous star. It was maybe half all right for me to say odd things.

“Passive aggressive,” he said. He had a kind of young innocence that was part of 1950s style.

“You’re aggressive,” mad Moira said to me.

“You’re interesting,” Deuteronomy said to her with a different sort of smile, an encouraging smile, contingently intimate.

“
Life
is aggressive,” Brr said.

“Books aren’t,” I said.

“We like books,” Brr said.

“We steal our lives from books,” Moira said.

“We depend on books,” Deuteronomy said.

“We depend on and steal from books,” Brr said.

“Ha-ha,” I said, unable not to laugh. “Do you think the word
shtick
comes from
stichomythia?
” I asked.

“Oh you talk like a book,” Moira said. She had a profound sense of the unfairness of things, social class and talent especially. She said, “We’re acting just like Protestants …”
Wasp
hadn’t become a social term yet.

Socially you are what people think you are. Sharply observed by these souls expert in our sorts of lives, the young man was in a state of cold visitation, of animal expectancy and naïveté mixed with youthful nerves.

“We get our routines from books,” Deuteronomy said. In the webby thing of real life, they are talking for Moira but really for me—a seriocomic
normal
, with a normal surface.

“I hate it when everyone agrees,” Moira said. “I want everyone to be
nasty
—and fresh—I love insolence in men. Englishmen are good at it. Although the French aren’t bad.” She leaned back still further on the couch and crossed her legs and did something with her torso, a sideways arch.