The World Is the Home of Love and Death (42 page)

“Routines are the soul of America,” Deuteronomy said sadly.

Brr said, “Sincerity is the key—you have to recognize that a lot of people are sincere.”

In the 1950s Moira is Isaac on Mount Moriah, the child-creature who is to be sacrificed. The rest of us are busy. And have projects. She does not like being the one who is sacrificed. Harvey Deuteronomy said in his patter, in his show, that the secret appeal of religion was that it encouraged you to disembowel your children. Brr’s children—four of them from three marriages—he uses as evidence of his normalcy. He espouses doctrines of their sweetness; they have no room to be anything but saintly in relation to his worldliness. Being famous is attention-getting, soul-wearying stuff. But it is a party, and you use people.

“He sounds like Gerard
Manley
Hopkins,” Deuteronomy said to Moira about me, an old joke between them used for other men. He speaks with his
famous
sweetness, sweetness of an order specific to him, to his public performances, Deuteronomy’s.

“Oh I don’t like him,” Moira said and grinned evilly because I was so young and wouldn’t be able to know if she meant me or the poet Hopkins. My blood ran cold with guest’s fear and then with dismissal of her—and with hidden anger. I have a secret inner life not much like my outward manner. “Who?” I said stern-faced: a tall boy said it.

Deuteronomy said, “You know: all those college professors—those
biddies
—who talk about the priest writers as so
manly
and muscular … are peculiar.” Deuteronomy disliked the Catholic writers. All the people in that room were better informed than I was.

Brr was rarely courteous if you were tall; he measured out such things with a curious exactitude, a form of beauty of manner; he said, going back in the conversation, “It’s a compliment.” He said it
courteously
—it seemed to me almost an admission that I was being courted and competed for by all of them.… A game.

I had no idea what any of them knew—or planned. Faintly drunk, bold, I said, “A RARE TRUE HOPPING TOUGHLY MANLINESS KINNY-KIN-KINS …” Much of the time (when I write or in company) I am being
funny
or making jokes, but few people notice. These were surprisingly unfrightened people.…

Moira said, shifting the intensity, “There is more happiness in a good movie than in all of New Jersey. That’s why I left New Jersey.” A special stink of time-riddled language as of old clothes, but Freudian-rebellious, sucked in, well-adjusted-by-rote, the word
happiness.
“We’re just rich garbage.… I’m glad I’m not an artist … I’m an
artiste
—I’m a
socialist
 …” She didn’t want to talk books.

I think Moira was sexually profound in her self-destruction and in her destruction at the hands of men and of society, and in her vengeance, which was to spend money and to have style and to go mad: a form of intelligence and
real wit.
Not in what she said—but in her destruction. Perhaps it was a
narcissistic masochism
but I don’t think so.… How strange everything was.… She said, in a kind of ugly way, sneering at Deut and Brr: “I like Chekhov.… And you know what he says? He said,
How are we to live?”

“We are to live well,” Deuteronomy said.
Living well
as a phrase and idea had a lot of meaning then but not Chekhovian meaning, but a weight of its own weightlessness.
“Seriously,”
he said in a droll way.
Serious
meant to attempt to be ultimate.

“Do you like the way we talk? Do you like New York talk?” Moira asked me.

“I feel we’re floating around in the idea of the quotable …” I was trying to be interesting.

In Moira’s house, it is sophisticated to be grudging. Also, a social get-together is a rehearsal, a part of preparation for worldwide performance—that’s a kick. But my audience is smaller than theirs. Moira believes that
art
is as well-paid as it is for Noel Camtippy or Picasso, as in the small Picassos on the walls of her room, men she desires or likes.

The two ex-movie stars here are aging women of powerful presence and extremely pronounced views (on everything). Perhaps in some sense they are whores, as Moira has whispered. But they are universal whores. It is hard to
read
the signals of a person such as Moira. It is easier to know what the screen image of either ex-star means. Also present is another show-business corporation figure, a behind-the-scenes intellectual, who knows thousands of critics and writers and who gives parties and determines reputations and the gloss or glamour on them. Here is a fairly famous script writer often called The Jewish Noël Coward by well-informed movie reviewers who don’t get to come to these get-togethers. He is a “famous” parlor wit and “famous” lover. Moira has said, “We keep score on Stanley.” He is describing a movie comedian star: “No Funny Business” Martin Stone, “the shlong of destiny: he just puts it in and salutes Charles Darwin.” Then he said, “Now that Noël Coward is old and Dorothy Parker is toxic drunk, I’m the quickest tongue in the non-Communist West, the daddy firecracker, the daddy
wisecracker—”

God, I’m the poorest one here.

Moira said eerily, “Oh you won’t sell out; that’s not what coming to see us means.” Moira said it in a little
hopping
voice, mocking everything. Peccinorda di Gustibus, the lesbian, is watching
Moira
carefully.

Moira had stepped on the summoning bell and a
manservant
had appeared and been sent to get champagne, “not the really good stuff,” Moira said with a little laugh. “No one will notice.”

Whacko came in from the balcony, knelt, and kissed her feet again.

To be here is as mysterious as hieroglyphics. It is like floating out to sea. I said something like that to Moira.

“A group is who is friends with who, and everyone has secrets, and I don’t know, is this a good group?” Moira said, looking around—the style she was adapting was French and American, like one of those American women who spent time in Paris.

Did I say that Ora accepts the Kellows’ judgments? So does three-quarters of the educated population of this country. Ora fawns on them—I can think of a dozen or two dozen women in whose careers Brr was the initial or secondary figure of discovery, who gave them public names, public existence, public roles as
women
, establishing the public image of the proportion of looks to style to brains. She is fascinated by what they know, and she is enragedly jealous—or fawning.

When he introduces Ora—who is of another social caste from the people in the room: exiled, upper-crust Maine—to someone, he says,
And this is Ora
, leaving off her last name. I think what he is doing is encouraging her in her magnetism and brainy good looks, her aura of power and heat, to be bitter; he wants her to cheat on me. He makes trouble for all the couples: he is known for it.

He is likely to take her arm and seat her next to Peccinorda di Gustibus, famous for being lesbian and brainy, and then he looks at me innocently. Ora doesn’t want to be defined as The Lesbians’ Darling—her phrase—but she likes those women; I often find a number of monocled and booted women, a lot of them European, with powerful haircuts and brilliant eyes, in the front room of our apartment; they look bruised emotionally—by Ora. Ora said once,
Well, sweet housewives aren’t going to call me and ask to have tea anymore.
(They had at the beginning.) But now we were too famous, and she was dressed wrong for a housewife; she worked for Arestow, the photographer, a friend of Brr’s.

Or Brr will seat her next to famous male lechers such as Jewish comic scriptwriters deep in analysis for their male nymphomania and who have written movies about
all their women
and who are notoriously
forward
and vital and suffering. They attract women justly. One has heard Ora in this very room say sternly,
I am not a schiksa, I am a person.
Also, she was totally not blond—I am partly blond but she is nut-brown.

Or Charles Pearl, the most popular movie star of that time who was also a famous lecher, and so maybe was the most famous fucker in the world at that moment except for Porfirio Rubirosa and Alden Whitto:
he
said to her, “Hello—my god, what nice breasts you have,” cupping one. Ora, dark-eyed, vibrant in her dark youth, in her renegade Maine upper-crust avatar—and often coldly ferocious with people who mauled her, although she was as likely to become passive and victimized and tearful but scathing-mouthed and contemptuous. (Pearl also cornered her in the back hall near the bathroom; he said to her—he told me—
Touch me, just touch me, see what you do to me
, and Ora said,
No, this wasn’t my idea—whatever you do, you do on your own
.) And saddened when professors did it or someone she wanted to know. Now she was confronted by a movie star whose work she admired and a man she would like to work with (if nothing else: I didn’t know what her desires were in men), and she may have felt left out and betrayed by me and ill-at-ease in that group. She looked slick-haired and finely erect. Already a number of Brr’s photographers had imitated Ora’s look and exaggerated it—she herself was unphotogenic; she closed in when a camera was aimed at her—and then cried, “DON’T DO THAT! I HATE THAT!” Then:“I’M PRACTICALLY MARRIED to him!” And she pointed at me. This was when Pearl mauled her in the Big Room.

But she didn’t push him away. I did that, and she berated me later:
I can take care of myself.
Well, she can and she can’t; she can’t within the frame of a monogamous affair; and she doesn’t want me to sleep with (fuck) Connie Lewistein with whom I am making a small movie.

Or rather she keeps changing her mind, yes, no, yes, no—finally, I
will kill you if you fuck her
—She is really odd—everyone is really odd; it’s a world of mad people: “New York is a looney bin,” Moira announces gaily.

But Ora is the most odd: her father named her after the Latin vocative for
pray.
He meant her to be a virgin of light. She is, she says,
the dirty girl, the Wild Girl
—now in the big city, in this setting, a supernumerary: what will she do next?

A tubby, really famous,
serious critic
, also famous as a lecher, and resigned mostly to affecting women writers, not young, but old, tough-minded, dirty, moved to join Pearl and Ora, one hand out and cupped. I went back to Moira.

“Everybody loves everybody,” mad Moira said with considerable disinterest to me: she was wearing a weird green-colored thing, a silken jumpsuit or version of it, a dress with pants, I don’t know about such advanced clothes (but I am learning) and in her hair was a narrow pink ribbon, a quietly vivid unforgettable pink, that was the dominant color in the room. She was clever that way. She said with a laugh, “I don’t know who I am when I wear
clothes
 …” Famous clothes. “Brr likes it; he makes me wear
things
 …” Famous clothes, famous at the moment. “I am designer designed.”

“Oh my
goodness
I didn’t
know
, ” Pearl said to Ora in a hick manner, well below his usual enunciation. “Let me get you a drink. But I would like to screw you, you know.”
Very
gentlemanly and
dear.

Ora turned her face aside and, without thinking, raised her stiffened arm and kept him an arm’s length away from her breasts. Ora was wearing a discarded black, sleeveless dress from Paris that Moira had given her and which was worn without a bra. Ora is genuinely beautiful often; her posture, the sloping, bare shoulders, and then the proud neck, and the great-skinned radiant side-and-front finely shaped fleshed out boniness of her face. But she was a
type
, gorgeous girl dowager, sadly fastidious but passive about it, something of a good sport resigned to
dirtiness
but so given to lies that if she liked Brr, she would deny these events had occurred. She wanted to be there. And she hated it. It was heart-stopping to see her. So good-looking and so knowing and so full of ignorance and so out-of-place there, although not entirely. And she didn’t know how out-of-place she was. She was herself, and she didn’t realize yet that for these
performers
, if I might call them that, everything was stylized.

“She’s new,” Moira said with condescension to me. “Well, you know what you’re getting into when you come to
this
madhouse,” she said evilly: “You’re getting a madhouse! Tee-hee …”

The fat critic Walter Pauline Christian said, “No: I expect a very sweet evening when I come here—and good food—and pretty women—and
you
, Moira.” He kept glancing toward Ora.

Moira said to me, “He’s not bad in bed you know.”

He was partly drunk, taut with party-nerves and social conceit, but he was also shy, teddy bear—like, arrogant, hard-working socially, sexually looney, and like most of the men in the room, he was quick to signal he had been recruited and used by Moira, that he had a sexual entrée.

Brr said to him, “Wiley is brilliant …”

This grated on Christian who was in his own view the Julius Caesar of literary reputations. “Brilliant?
Brilliant?”
he said: “Well, you have a backer,” he said to me, backing down, uneasy at Brr’s control of so many magazines. Christian was
charming
with a fat, smart man’s practiced enticing curmudgeonliness. He said to me, “I have noticed that tall writers usually overwrite.”