— You didn’t touch the doors of the cabin, did you?
— No, sir.
— Thank you, Andrew — that will be all.
I went out by myself to the tennis court, and met Juniper there, and he swished his tail against my bare leg and made the sound that Porper always called puttenyarruk, which meant that he wanted grasshoppers. I caught him a flying one, and he ate it. The tennis court was almost dry again, but the rain had made deltas in it, it would need rolling, and the lines were completely gone. It was August the 11th. I wished they hadn’t put Mother and Uncle David in the same room. And would Father come down to Duxbury now—)
III
— Perhaps, after all, I’d better go. I’m afraid you were busy, old man. And I think it’s stopped snowing.
— No — I don’t think it has. What about a drink.
— Well — well—
— It’ll do you good. Release the inhibitions, et cetera. Remove your consciousness from one plane to another, you know.
— Oh, yes?
— Yes.… Here.… Say when.…
— When. Thanks.… Thanks.…
— And come to think of it, why don’t you spend the night. You might talk it all out, between drinks. Plenty of whisky here — some Rhine wine, if you prefer — quiet as the tomb — you can sleep on the couch if you get sleepy — What do you say.
— Well, maybe — if you don’t mind — after all — good God, I feel like crying.
— Why not sit down.
— No, thanks, I’d rather stand — walk — touch things and hold on to things — do you mind if I put my hand flat on that picture of Michelangelo and feel the glass—
— Why should I?
— He, too. I wonder if he ever went as deep. Did he ever talk to a psychoanalyst and weep? Did he ever pace about a room, at midnight, with a glass in his hand, a glass that might have been his heart, and drink his own bitter blood? Christ, what am I chattering about.
— Don’t we all do it, sooner or later?
— Before I came here, half an hour ago, do you know what I was doing? I was walking in the snow, hardly knowing what I was doing. Oh, yes, I did know, too, for God’s sake let’s be honest. I was crying as I walked, and I enjoyed crying — I felt the tears at the corners of my mouth, tears mixed with melting snow, and I deliberately opened my coat and shirt, so that I could feel the snowflakes on my chest and throat. My feet were getting wet, and I didn’t care, I stepped into the puddles and slush, thinking what a good thing it would be if I got pneumonia. Isn’t it amazing how even at such a moment, when one is absolutely broken, dissolved, a mere whirlwind of unhappiness, when one walks without knowing or caring where one is going, nevertheless one still has to dramatize oneself, one sees oneself as a pitiful figure under an arc light in the snow, one lifts a deliberately tormented face to the storm, and despite the profound actuality of one’s grief, there is also something false in it too. Suddenly the snow is paper snow, one almost expects to hear an accompaniment of sob music on nicely ordered violins, or the whole world breaking into applause! Good God. Let’s laugh.
— Ha, ha. I’m laughing.
— Where is honesty then? I don’t believe we’ve got an honest fiber in our souls. We’re all colossal fakes — the more power we have, the more ingeniously and powerfully we fake. Michelangelo — what the hell. Did he ever tell the truth? Or Shakespeare? No, by God, they went lying into their graves, nothing said, their dirty little mouths twisted with deceit, their damned hearts packed full of filthy lies and blasphemies. Their whole lives wasted. One long fake, a pitiful and shameful glozing and glazing of the truth, slime upon slime and prettification on prettification, each new resolve to tell the truth coming to nothing, somehow turning to a neatly turned verse, a fine purple flight of rhetoric, a bloody little tune, an effective action, or a figure of which the very secret of power is artifact. Christ, Christ, what an agony — poor devils, they knew it too, and still they went on surrendering to the lies inherent in language and marble. Why? And why, even when I want to kill myself, do I have to cast myself as little orphan Annie with a rag doll clutched to her shawled bosom? I’m ashamed. No, I’m not either. Yes, I am too. I went into the Waldorf and cried into a cup of pale coffee. I could hardly swallow. I wanted to be dead. That damned dado of college banners made me sick. Old Turgenev, the cashier, was having trouble with a couple of drunks, they started to fight, and I got up with my coffee cup in my hand and went to talk to them — I persuaded them to go out to the sidewalk, and I went with them, holding my coffee cup. One of them, a tough guy from town, got the other down, the other was a mere kid, and when he got up his eye was cut open. I stopped the fight, with plausible words, feeling like a damned little pewter Galahad — Come on, now, I said, that’s enough, the kid’s had enough, leave him alone, what’s the idea, and I smiled a God-damned sickly smile at them both as if I were a paltry little Messiah, and they quit. I think it was the sight of the coffee cup out there in my hand in the snow that did it. One of them went down Holyoke Street and the other into the Yard, and I went back into the Waldorf feeling important and sat down with my coffee cup, and began to remember that I had wanted to cry, to die, to lie down on the mosaic floor with my coffee cup, just to stretch out like a dead Jesus on the dirty floor of this dirty and stinking world. But of course I didn’t do it. I merely thought about it, luxuriated disgustingly in the idea, imagined myself lying there among dead matches and wet sawdust, poor pitiful little Andrew Cather, him that was betrayed by the everlasting Judas tree. What is unhappiness, Bill?
— Defeated pride. A highball without ice. Ignorance.
— Ignorance be damned, and damn your eyes anyway. You and your amateur psychology. What the hell do you know about it, anyway? You sit there and goggle at the world as if you knew something — what the hell do you know? Oh, yes, I know, something hurt you irremediably when you were muscling your infant way into this cold, cold world, and you’ve never recovered, but you’ve fought your way back by superhuman intelligence to that drastic cold bath of a moment — isn’t that it? So now you’re wise and resigned, and smile Shakespearean wisdom on all the maimed host of mankind. You sit there and smile benignly at me, and wish to God I’d go home and leave you alone to sleep, you think I’m a fool, and you despise me because I’ve been betrayed and because I make such a fuss about it. What’s the use. Tea dance today. Novelty dance tonight. There will be charming favors, and saxophones will syncopate your livers. How long is it since you’ve cried, Bill?
— Oh, not since I was five or six, I guess.
— Why don’t you try it. It’s great. I’ve got the habit. I cry all the time. I wake up in the middle of the night crying — I dream I’m crying, and wake up crying. Yesterday morning I cried while I was shaving — it was the funniest thing I ever saw, the tears running down into the lather. I laughed at myself and then cried again. I think I’ll go insane. Deliberately — just think myself into madness. Why not?
— You’re insane now. Manic.
— Manic, hell.
— You’re heading a hell of a good time.
— Yes, indeed. Step up, ladies and gents, and see the trained lunatic, the miching mallecho Michelangelo, the pig with wings. Here lies the winged pig, feared and befriended by many, loved and betrayed by one. Why do I always dream about pigs? Last night I hit one in the snout with a walking stick — I thought he was attacking me, but it turned out I was mistaken. He merely wanted to attract my attention; but by that time I had fallen down in the mud, and my stick was dirty.