The World Is the Home of Love and Death (43 page)

I couldn’t afford to care or not to care, do you know? He was sweaty and red—like a eunuch washerwoman. Brr had stepped between Pearl and Ora. He said, “We don’t want to upset Wiley—he’s quite
crazy
at parties …” He winked at me. I had already confronted Pearl at that point; Brr was
playing a game.

He had already told me privately:
It’s unwise to be settled down with someone while you are finding your way in the THE REAL WORLD
—he tended to speak in an excited, magazine-captionish way. He meant you had to be available. He said, “Mad Moira knows all about it …” She was defeated by him but cruel about him; she’d called him Little Balls and Mr. No Love the Killer. This was when she was very high. A guy I knew and his new wife explained to me that it was part of being a good hostess and host, if you wanted to be famous for that, to laugh at your wife or husband or lover: otherwise, you excluded people, the people you were talking to.

Brr said, “Mad Moira says you are like an idiot—” Brr spoke very clearly as if to be recorded.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Prince What’s-his-name …”

“Prince? Myshkin? The Dostoyevsky one: From
The Idiot.
I thought you were telling me Moira thought I was dumb.”

“She thinks you’re a big brain: she hopes you’re big elsewhere, too. She says you’re
heavy
 …” Not light company.

“I’m sorry I’m heavy,” I said. “Phallically, I’m maybe more the family economy size than giant.”

After a moment, he said, “Do you think your approach works with … people?” He sounded naive for a change.

I looked at him, big-eyed, meaning
I don’t know.
I said, “Work how? For what reason?” I was on the defensive in his house.

“Don’t you want to write a Proustian novel? And have a good life.” Proust, in this set, was supposedly the best novelist ever.

“No. Do you? I want to write best-sellers like Jack London and Hemingway: sincere, popular—”

He caught on faster than I could talk: “You
are
an idiot,” he said so quickly that it gave an interesting rhythm, I thought, to the dialogue, which struck me as intelligent dialogue, not because of what was said but because of the structure given to it by Brr, who was so alert and ruthless and such a captain of industry.

“But not saintly—not like Myshkin,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. His yes was like a self-conscious sentence, but it didn’t require knowledge of sentence structures. He meant I was
weird.

I was dressed in very dark gray flannel slacks and a good black cashmere sweater and a white shirt: it was all I could afford in terms of dressing up; and it was a sign of respectful effort toward people who cared about clothes. I don’t know how this was taken except that after a few weeks, other people—some women—showed up, dressed the same way. Of course, in this social group of hard-working people, mostly
freaks
, to use Brr’s word (
They’re all freaks and their work is their masks
, Moira has said), I was given the role of someone
healthy
—a specialized form of ephebe, supposedly
a sexy man
, but the favorite of the house
for the moment.
Everything everyone did in this room was a signal, was semiotics because of everyone’s careers.

Ora knew
other
people from her girlhood: the governor of New York State, for instance, who was the third-richest man in the world. We sometimes saw some of those people. They were often put off by me—and my clothes. What I’m trying to say is that what was signified wasn’t clear at all outside its own context. The critic wanted me to talk to him and Ora; he kind of wanted to see if I would whore her. That kind of stuff can be done good-naturedly; in the middle of night sometimes back then when I couldn’t sleep but had an attack of panic, I wished Ora was a cold-blooded, ruthless climber who did sleep around and get us places like many of the women we knew.

Calvin Higgins’s wife—Higgins was my publisher—his wife was extraordinarily ambitious and pretty and charming but stupid, too, and pretentious; she was very jealous of our
knowing
the Kellows. She had a little high-pitched voice and short legs and she said to me in her kitchen, “I am Faustian: I made a Faustian bargain with my life when I married Cal.” She said it in this little high-pitched, Ivy League woman student’s voice, which made it all even stranger, and I felt cold terror.

She was sensitive and quick and mannerly and had money of her own, but she was, in a way, high-bred white trash, hysterical and full of calculation and not capable of much victory. She was really a supernumerary and exploited by Calvin, who was a small, nervous, determined man, a great liar, and charmer—a heart-tugger once you got past an initial shudder at some clownish and very white physical repulsiveness he had. He hinted at a tragic sexual past and told anecdotes of being spurned—he managed to avoid mentioning which gender. He was so thoroughly second-rate and so irresistibly sweet—but it was a lie; he was ambitious; and his wife was nearly as imprisoned as Moira—that if the sweetness didn’t put your teeth on edge, knowing him put
you
on edge.

He wrote deeply sincere, very sweet social diaries about how human and humane the ruling class was, but I don’t think he knew the ruling class; he knew some fine-drawn, well-educated, rich people. His books did gloat. He loved writing about maimings. He had worked to establish my reputation.

Anyway, Higgins’s wife, unlike Moira,
adored
Ora, her life, her social standing which she recognized. Higgins’s wife was from North Dakota or Indiana. She had a Faustian woman’s college dormitory crush and she spoke of Ora as
such a big person, so brave, she goes out and meets life halfway—I want to be like her.

So at the party it was confusing to me that Ora was sort of disapproved of and not much liked. Ora said to me sotto voce, “I am humiliated when you defend me: let me defend myself.”

“But you weren’t defending yourself: you were crying.”

“Don’t live my life for me. Now everyone knows about me.”

“Knows what about you?” Do you ever have talks with someone that you think are utterly meaningless but that a day or two later you see a meaning in, but you can’t check it out because they don’t remember clearly enough and neither do you. And they don’t want to talk; their mood has changed.

“That I’m a victim and a fool—oversexed.” She really wasn’t. But she was a brave, moving, sexual sight: a mother of dynasties. Among her old friends, I was, if not disliked, distrusted and looked at askance, just as she was here: I think it was the amused value I placed on myself that upset the Prots she knew, most of whom were famous, just as the unamused, subcutaneous value she placed on herself upset the Jews here.

“Ora, I thought you were trying not to make a scene for my sake”—because of Kellow’s commissioning a piece from me.

“You think I’m weak—you think I’m a nobody—”

“I think you’re a hero …” But then I went too far: “of the Third Reich …”

“I am not anti-Semitic! I am as good with you as any Jewess could be!”

“Ora, so help me God, I’m going crazy: you’re absolutely nuts: let’s not have a scene at this party. God, you’re driving me crazy—”

“You live in a dream, Wiley. You’re so spoiled because you have a
brain—”

“Fuck off, Ora.”

I hadn’t any real idea what we were talking about. She was jealous, I was a star there, in that house for a while. I don’t know; I smiled at her: the smile just happened—how frail and intimate real life is … I mean the smile was uncalled for and had no subtext except amusement, partly at the horror.

The speed and dexterity of the man, Brr, the distance back from the surface of his eyes that he stands and his sadly triumphal, tireless (pilled-up) nature afflict me with vertigo. And
amusement.

“I kiss your shoelaces,” Sam Chonberg said to me in echo of Whacko’s kissing Moira’s feet. Chonberg is semi-openly homosexual as is Camtippy, but Camtippy, not a Jew, is much much more famous. Moira said to me, “I love anti-Semitism—it just twists the whole world into knots and fills it with lies.” Gloria Peeler (my agent then) said Chonberg offered ridiculous terms for me to work on a script of a movie for him.
You can’t lower yourself that way: you can’t afford to yet—you’re too small potatoes now
 …

Peeler is openly, and in the most friendly way, an S&M lady, sort of
Let’s Tango, Let’s Tangle
—a famous Tough Cookie and
friendly
New York presence.

I told Moira what Peeler had said, and Moira chanted, “Small potatoes, small potatoes …” Then: “That’s better than itty-bitty balls.”

Kellow and Chonberg and Deuteronomy and Christian (a Jew). Ah,
Kellow is pure Arabian Nights
, oriental; Chonberg is The Little German turned American Star. Peeler does what she does for
The Feminine Principle.

Brr had earlier crushes on both Leonard Doetroch, who is, after all, kind of a very great commercial director, with pronounced elements of being an artist of some sort, and on Little Sam Chonberg (Kellow is a Jew who likes Jews) who is maybe a great comedian, who is at least very, very good, and who will never do comedy again. He is about to make a top of the line, top of the world movie in England, with Sir Edmund Buller and Lady Joan in it for class: “I can use extra dialogue—if you have any …”

Moira whispered, “That’s a nineteen-forties wisecrack. We don’t do that anymore.” She said in a regular voice, “We do nineteen-fifties wisecracks,” and she looked at Chonberg warmly. God, even that is an act of flirtation.

Chonberg and Brr have certain abilities in common: they are very good horsemen: I am a butcher boy when I get on a horse, without finesse or posture or sensibility: my procedures work but they’re brutal and stupid. They both dance extremely well. They both burn with restlessness.

I am a counterbalance to Chonberg. If I get out of hand, Kellow will make his way to Chonberg’s side. Actually, I think that Kellow intends to own me and this little movie I want to make with Connie Lewistein: that is, he expects it to reflect his world and to be about him. There is something about psychoanalysis that turns people into being almost General Terms: Kellow is Maneuver and Ambition.

Kellow pretends to a kind of (sexual) interest in Ora but actively dislikes her—he has “confessed” this to me. Chonberg has actually made a pass at her but doesn’t really feel drawn to women so far as I can guess. Kellow, sitting on the arm of the couch, his arms folded, asks me
warmly
, “What do
you
believe?” I can’t remember an immediate context in the last few minutes in which that would fit in. I look down at my hands in my lap.

In a voice of much more overt cleverness than Brr’s, Moira says to Brr, “Ask him what does his smile mean?”

Brr said, “Chonberg has done a great piece for us on smiles.”

Deuteronomy said, “You rarely smile, Brr. You part your lips and sparkle a little bit, and then you call it quits.”

Brr looked at me, meaning he wanted my opinion.

“You have a different tonality of no-smile for each one of us: it changes so swiftly I get the feeling of wind blowing off you, to me,” I said.

“You are very quick,” Moira said to me.

“I thought that before and remembered it now,” I said.

“You are like a rock,” Brr said mysteriously.

“A quick rock?” Then:
“Epater
the rocks? It’s a kind of agony being small-time compared to everyone else in the room.”

Moira said, “You ought to make a real movie—with Brr—on your own, you analyze everything too much.”

“My mind is a clutter of darkness,” I said.

“Oh listen to the
child,”
Moira said.

Kellow wanted me to use in my movie a very small, very short, fine-boned Chinese actor, aged about eighteen. Kellow said the Chinese guy was the most beautiful adolescent model in the world. (This was a long time ago; being Chinese was exotic.)

“How can he represent freakishness?”

“Have him wear glasses.… He loves a girl bigger than he is: a blond girl with big breasts—someone who never saw a desert, who hardly even knows he’s
Chinese. ”

“Is he greedy? Is he competitive? Why a desert in China?”

“What do you mean? The Gobi.”

Moira said, “Is he bossy? Does he always walk faster than everyone? Does he set the pace? Does he always have The Best Gossip? Where did you learn to notice things?”

“In some ways, you always manage to have the last word … Wiley,” Deut said.