"Isn't that what they're paid to do? Interfere in one's personal affairs?"
"Don't get smart with me, old buddy. This is no joke. Dr. Kewie ruined my life. He convinced me I wasn't a queer and that I didn't love Fred. He told me I was finished as a writer unless I got rid of Fred. But the truth was Fred was the only good thing in my life. Maybe I didn't love him. But he loved me. He held my life together. He wasn't the phony Kewie said he was. Kewie said: Fred doesn't love you, he loves your money. The one who loves money is Kewie. Well, I wouldn't leave Fred, so Kewie calls him secretly and tells him I'm going to die of drink if he doesn't clear out. Fred packs and disappears, and I can't understand it until Dr. Kewie, very proud of himself, confesses what he's done. And I told him: You see, Fred believed you and because he loved me so much he sacrificed himself. But I was wrong about that. Because when we found Fred, and I hired Pinkertons who found him in Puerto Rico, Fred said all he wanted to do was bust me in the nose. He thought I was the one who had put Kewie up to calling him, that it was all a plot on my part. Still, we made up. A lot of good it did. Fred was operated on at Memorial Hospital June seventeenth, and he died the fourth of July. He was only thirty-six years old. But he wasn't pretending; he really had cancer. And that's what comes of shrinkers interfering in your private life. Look at the mess! Imagine having to hire whores to walk Bill."
"I'm not a whore." Though I don't know why I bothered protesting: I am a whore and always have been.
He grunted sarcastically; like all maudlin men, he was coldhearted. "How about it?" he said, blowing the ash off his cigar. "Roll over and spread those cheeks."
"Sorry, but I don't catch. Pitch, yes. Catch, no."
"Ohhh," he said, his way-down-yonder voice mushy as sweet-potato pie, "I don't want to cornhole you, old buddy. I just want to put out my cigar."
Boy, did I beat it out of there! — hustled my clothes into the bathroom and bolted the door. While dressing, I could hear Mr. Wallace chuckling to himself. "Old buddy?" he said. "You didn't think I meant it, did you, old buddy? I don't know. Nobody's got a sense of humor anymore." But when I came out, he was snoring slightly, a soft accompaniment to Bill's robust racket. The cigar still burned between his fingers: probably someday when no one is there to save him, this will be the way Mr. Wallace will go.
Here at the Y a sixty-year-old blind man sleeps in the cell next to mine. He is a masseur and has been employed for several months by the gym downstairs. His name is Bob, and he is a big-bellied guy who smells of baby oil and Sloan's Liniment. Once I mentioned to him that I had worked as a masseur, and he said he'd like to see what kind of masseur I was, so we traded techniques, and while he was rubbing me with his thick sensitive blind-man's hands, he told me a bit about himself. He said he'd been a bachelor until he was fifty, when he married a San Diego waitress. "Helen. She described herself as a gorgeous blond piece-ass thirty-one years old, a divorcée, but I don't guess she could have been much, else why would she have married me? She had a good figure, though, and with these hands I could get her plenty hot. Well, we bought a Ford pickup and a little aluminum house trailer and moved to Cathedral City—that's in the California desert near Palm Springs. I figured I could get work at one of the clubs in Palm Springs, and I did. It's a great place November to June, best climate in the world, hot in the daytime and cold at night, but Jesus the summers, it could go to a hundred twenty, thirty, and it wasn't dry heat like you'd expect, not since they built them million swimming pools out there: them pools made the desert humid, and humid at a hundred twenty ain't for white men. Or women.
"Helen suffered terrible, but there was nothing to do—I never could save enough in the winter to get us away from there in the summer. We fried alive in our little aluminum trailer. just sat there, Helen watching TV and coming to hate me. Maybe she'd always hated me; or our life; or her life. But since she was a quiet woman and we never quarreled much, I didn't know how she felt till last April. That's when I had to quit work and go into the hospital for an operation. Varicose veins in my legs. I didn't have the money, but it was a matter of life and death. The doctor said otherwise I could have an embolism any minute. It was three days after the operation before Helen come to see me. She doesn't say how are you or kiss me or nothing. What she said was: 'I don't ant anything, Bob. I left a suitcase downstairs with your clothes. All I'm taking is the truck and the trailer.' I ask her what she's talking about, and she says: 'I'm sorry, Bob. But I've got to move on.' I was scared; I began to cry—I begged her, I said: 'Helen, please, woman, I'm blind and now I'm lame and I'm sixty years old-you can't leave me like this without a home and nowhere to turn.' Know what she said? 'When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.' And those were the last words she ever spoke to me. When I got out of the hospital, I had fourteen dollars and seventy-eight cents, but I wanted to put as much space between me and there as ever I could, so I hit out for New York, hitchhiking. Helen, wherever she is, I hope she's happier. I don't hold anything against her, though I think she treated me extra hard. That was a tough deal, an old blind man and half lame, hitchhiking all the way across America."
A helpless man waiting in the dark by the side of an unknown road: that's how Denny Fouts must have felt, for I had been as heartless to him as Helen had been to Bob.
Denny had sent me two messages from the Vevey clinic. The script of the first was all but unintelligible: "Difficult to write as I cannot control my hands. Father Flanagan, renowned proprietor of Father Flanagan's Nigger Queen Kosher Café, has given me my check and shown me the door. Merci Dieu pour toi. Otherwise I would feel very alone." Six weeks later I received a firmly written card: "Please telephone me at Vevey 46 27 14."
I placed the call from the bar of the Pont Royal; I remember, as I waited for Denny's voice, watching Arthur Koestler methodically abuse a woman who was seated with him at a table-someone said she was his girl friend; she was crying but did nothing to protect herself from his insults. It is intolerable to see a man weep or a woman bullied, but no one intervened, and the bartenders and waiters pretended not to notice.
Then Denny's voice descended from alpine altitudes-he sounded as if his lungs were filled with brilliant air; he said it had been rough-going, but he was ready now to leave the clinic, and could I meet him Tuesday in Rome, where Prince Ruspoli ("Dado") had lent him an apartment. I am cowardly-in the frivolous sense and also the most serious; I can never be more than moderately truthful about my feelings toward another person, and I will say yes when I mean no. I told Denny I would meet him in Rome, for how could I say I never meant to see him again because he scared me? It wasn't the drugs and chaos but the funereal halo of waste and failure that hovered above him: the shadow of such failure seemed somehow to threaten my own impending triumph.
So I went to Italy, but to Venice, not Rome, and it wasn't until early winter, when I was alone one night in Harry's Bar, that I learned that Denny had died in Rome a few days after I was supposed to have joined him. Mimi told me. Mimi was an Egyptian fatter than Farouk, a drug smuggler who shuttled between Cairo and Paris; Denny was devoted to Mimi, or at least devoted to the narcotics Mimi supplied, but I scarcely knew him and was surprised when, seeing me in Harry's, Mimi waddled over and kissed my cheek with his drooling raspberry lips and said: "I have to laugh. Whenever I think about Denny, I got to laugh. He would have laughed. To die like that! It could only have happened to Denny." Mimi raised his plucked eyebrows. "Ah. You didn't know? It was the cure. If he had stayed on dope, he would have lived another twenty years. But the cure killed him. He was sitting on the toilet taking a crap when his heart gave out." According to Mimi, Denny was buried in the Protestant cemetery near Rome-but the following spring when I searched there for his grave, I couldn't find it.