The World Is the Home of Love and Death (46 page)

Mad Moira said, “Oh hell: why think? I can’t think.”

Deut said, “Fuck thinking? It gives people pimples.”

Moira said with modesty, “I
am
crazy: I think you’re funny.”

The party was a whiff of battle—think how
human
everyone is, and who they sleep with, and then how surprised they are by death or by grief.

Moira said to me, “Do you have a tiger in you?”

Imagine the reality of a tiger inside you, the clawing restlessness and stretching and the stench, the carnival-colored predator.

Deuteronomy said,
apropos of nothing
(a phrase fairly popular then), “Why don’t you write a play for me?”

The insistent,
insurgent
urgency of ambition—“By the time I try you may have begun to dislike my work.” We were for the moment almost entirely ambition with only a thin rim of the human. “What kind of play did you have in mind?”

“Hunh?” he asked warmly, agreeably: a joke. “I wanted some young art—you know.”

I had a small vocabulary of American boy noises. I made a naive squeak and said, “I don’t really like the young art bit …” Cal Higgins had told me,
Don’t think, just sing like a bird
—God, he was awful. I said to Deut, “I don’t like the birdsong shit.” People don’t have to understand you; they’ll ask you to explain if they care.

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to do
American
work but psychologically grownup—not just daydream freedom-and-success shit …” Very unpompous in manner when being pompous: that was politeness.

He had become still, physically. It is immodest to say so, but he felt something in what I said, in the noise I’d made—he’d had a glimpse of an idea like a glimpse of a deer in the woods, the whispering of the small
a’s
and
b’s
of an idea in the shadows and lights of his mind of something he could use. I suppose it was as if I was doing Moira’s role but from an angle unlike hers.

“What you mean?” he asked in a voice so gently musical that I smiled involuntarily.

I said, “I resent having this form of interest as
a young writer
—it is like being a male model, one so handsome he can’t act, his face is so dimensionally suggestive that he can suggest little further: he can merely carry the damn thing around and flicker, now and then, with feeling, while others’ dreams of happiness play on him. I want to be sufficiently in control that I go to hell or heaven in the light of some responsibility I have carried out on my own. I know how to be understood, but that means I say things in order to be understood: it is not my real face: it is like a director’s face, an invented face. I intend to make a try at creating something American—but unexpected. I am talking about young art, the thing of being young—”

“Yes? But the thing you want to create,
what
is that? What would it
be?”

How do you say enough to get them interested to the point they give you money and a contract? Or do you just let go? Or do you go off on a
serious
tangent that they can’t use, although even a singer like Deut can find a way: “Well, first, you have to know that the language we use mostly only points to what is there already in language, something in a book, copyrighted, something already said, a territorial noise for a generation.” We didn’t use the word
media
yet.

“So it has a weird double nature as comprehensible and as
not-yet-sensible:
we know life is different from language. You have to go take a look—the herd of lions has to trot over the top of the hill and
see
the herd of okapi. And learn English to cover the exigencies of the hunt.…”

“I like okapi,” he said warmly. But my weird little joke was a dud. It wasn’t right for the 1950s.

“Language can have a predictive nature. Visual images are inherently worldly since their mistakes don’t involve prediction. They simply misrepresent what is there or not, and if they do, that becomes the draw of fantasy, O.K.? I don’t want to mislead anyone. Perhaps I could invent a way of dealing in more lifelike perspective—but what if this is just adolescent bullshit, you know?”

“Gosh, if I were you, I would do it. The thing about being young—you should do it for
people.”

“Make a fool of myself.” I said, “Well, it’s a mastery tussle"—Deuteronomy let me go on being boastful; I mean his face was kind—and interested—“I see the United States as a series of adjacent legislatures with various bullies and systems of bribery and of voting: this is the nature of reason here. I am told, fairly often, almost daily, as a matter of fact, that if I would convert I could have the prizes, and if I was silent, silent about my being a Jew and about my writing being a Jew’s writing, Jew-writing, I could have
some
of the prizes. Or none if I do what I want to do, do you follow me. I’m the writer who got the word
Jew
in
The New Yorker
the first time. I am seen as a
blind
kid. It’s the second-rate who band together and who conspire. I mean in America it’s the lone figure that matters, the lonely Neitszchean kid next door—you know what I mean? It’s terrible here in a lot of ways … I am watched as a monster, a monster-bully, a sissy-monster-bully, minor, a Jew …”

Then I tried to, I don’t know, show I knew what was going on: “Ideas, good or bad ones, mediocre ones, strange ones have a particular value in this country where no one is anything much for long. No matter how stupid I sound, it is a matter of ideas but not such intelligent ones that they aren’t easy to modify.” For popcult: we didn’t have that term yet.

Brr and Deut were listening, and mad Moira put a blue-and-white plate of peaches on the table next to me where I slouched on the couch with a big sunflower: “There, that’s Renoir
and
Van Gogh,” she said, refreshed, re-pilled; she’d vanished for a while; her eyes were dead, her smile was sweet, her voice was rather eely … She wasn’t jealous. She was offering me to Deut and Brr. Brr’s nickname came from a
New Yorker
cartoon of a showgirl wearing a fur coat, who said,
I got it for going Brr in front of Bergdorfs.

The last time Brr had taken an idea of mine, he’d given me a black-and-white sketch of me by a woman painter who was mostly only fashionable but had an interesting series of lovers; she suffered articulately and was willing to divulge everything on the telephone—she was a star on the telephone circuit. She later jumped out a window—we had a lot of suicides. The 1950s were hard on everyone: perhaps it was guilt. Or remorse.

What good would it have done anyone to love Deuteronomy—he reeked of sellout. Not just common sense but a whole, crass poetry of it. So did Moira and Brr. And Ora, my lover, tried. I’m not quick enough or smart enough to be king of the hill—if you take into consideration characters’ behavior over a span of minutes, you get a different notion of character, as linkages within an enterprise, an agenda (not a word we used then). Why bother to act anything out when you can pretend nothing is real?

Moira said, “Oh you’re a brilliant young man and you’re having your hour—”

Brr said, “How does it feel?”

He was strange.

“You get cheated and used a lot,” I said.

Deuteronomy said, “Come on: tell us how it feels.” He and Brr thanked me at times for saying things or writing things useful to them. But they never did it in public. Still, Brr was
respectful
, and Deut was on an arc of sweetness that didn’t obligate him; he was tougher than I am, at least toward the world. I don’t know how evasive I was and how malicious he was. I know how malicious Brr was: it was an uncontrollable element in him, for him I mean. He had to cheat you. Maybe everyone is like that a little bit: a sly child-man.

I said, “It feels unusable as
example.
In public you become merely a phrase or some such thing, a political image, I think. But if I am actually good at what I do, then it is completely unusable as example. I feel famous and overinflated and not famous enough and underrated—I feel a lot of different things: it depends on details and on the time of day. You’re more famous than I am. And no one is interested in seeing how style arises as moral choice out of the rush and charge of the multiplicity of moments.”

He nodded. He got his ideas from everywhere but his notion of being young came from me—for a while. I was useful, which was dizzying.

Moira has said she would like to be hurt by a grasping Englishman or vain, arrogant Frenchman. She wants to be part of the background of her time. I guess I did too but in a different spirit.

Anyway, she seemed to understand my position or rank. I thought her vulgar and irritating in her interest in Pygmalionization: “We have to buy you some nice clothes—or who here is the same size you are?” Get the clothes free.

“I have already decided to wear the wrong clothes: it’s a kind of privacy.”

Deuteronomy naughtily said, “Brr dresses like you already. He says you
are
the next style.” If he’d taken an idea from me, it was because Brr had suggested it.

I wear modified Harvard black tinged with
rabbinical
black—black cashmere with a slightly hoodlum tone.

Deuteronomy said, “I wore a sweater Brr liked once and he did a piece on sweaters in every one of his magazines: it was eerie going to the theater and seeing maybe a half-dozen men dressed wrong like me, only it was no longer wrong.”

“Whitto does it now,” Moira said smiling nicely, too nicely. Her smile was a mad headlight.

Brr said, “I got my style from Jouvet.” A French actor of the 1930s and 1940s, very tall, very discreet in style, very different from Brr. So Brr was perhaps joking.

What I meant about Moira’s vulgarity in her Pygmalion sense of clothes and stardom and psychoanalysis was that it was
a-song-and-dance, a whole rigmarole
, pre-suicide stuff—you lost yourself.

Moira mentioned a piece that Brr ran on Paris and the existentialists and Parisian women, “Lipstick and Nothingness” it was called, and she said the idea had come from me. But it hadn’t. Part of the piece had been about the aging Coco Chanel, an ex-Nazi: did her guilt matter? Brr told me advertisers made him run that piece, which, like many others, was a lie, a
duty.
So much for my influence.

But he was on some sort of arc now; he took pills too but he managed them. He called in the youthful semi-butler and sent him upstairs to get a Chanel suit that Moira wouldn’t wear but would lend out so I was to look at it to consider the
Pygmalionization
of Ora. Ora wasn’t to choose; I was.

It was an extraordinary object, that suit, rough, nubby, navy blue fabric, workmanlike or vaguely seamanish, a uniform suggesting adventure and dutifulness and patience all at once in a world when workmen and barmaids were sexual objects. Or if it was a uniform, it was a uniform for a long sail across the universe, gold buttons and black braid. It seemed more fully an invention than any other such dress object I had, until then, seen.

“But she was a Nazi,” Brr said, lightly stroking the suit with his fingerends. “A loathsome woman. I loathed her—”

“Brr dislikes a lot of people,” Moira said.

“Ora, would you like this suit?” Brr said in a loud voice, in front of everyone.

To my surprise Ora said, “I had better try it on …”

Deut said, “Women trying on clothes are
very
sexy.”

Brr said, “I always masturbate after Moira tries on clothes in Paris.”

Schwearzen said, “I am a
great
, great, GREAT masturbator—”

Brr, who from time to time did sudden riffs, said, “I am a Napoleon of masturbation—masturbation is my
art. ”

“Oh goody,” Moira said. “Now we’ll have fun for a while.…”

Brr said, trying it for purposes of giving interviews, “Masturbation is the foundation of my work.” (Moira said in an aside, “He’s wonderful when he gets on a subject.” She did look interested.) Brr said, of masturbation and the fantasies that went with it, “That’s my secret life—I can have no women after Moira.… No woman compares with Moira.…”

(Most people figured he was
queer
—that’s how we said it back then.) Deuteronomy said of masturbation, “That’s the secret of show business—but
I
love
Hollywood—”

I said, “Masturbation, after all, after the first few times, is largely memory-lane plus amendments. It’s interesting that you pay attention: you pay attention physically:
this is my prick, this is my abdomen, this my grown-up hand, these are
my
rhythms
 … You keep watch internally—”

“That’s really
true
, “ Deut said.