— It would be. Ha, ha.
— Don’t make me laugh.
— Anal erotic, what.
— Scatological too. Step up and see the scatological hebephrene, watch him weep pig’s tears into his snout.
— He eats them all.
— The pig with wings was a much smaller pig — a tiny pig, and such a little darling, as clean as clean could be. His wings were transparent and opalescent, lovely, and oh so tender — they were just unfurled, and scarcely dry, and imagine it, Bill, a dirty little bastard of a mongrel dog chose just that moment to attack him, biting at the wings! When I threw stones at him, he turned and attacked me.
— That dog was your best friend.
— My best friend — Christ. I mean Judas.
— You mean yourself.
— My polysyllabic soul, yes, of course I am guilty, I go about projecting my guilt like a magic lantern.
— Do you mind if I open the window a little, and let the smoke out?
— Oh, no, knock out the wall if you like. Einstein is waiting just outside with the fourth dimension on his forehead.
— I’ll ask him in.
— Do.
— Meanwhile, have you called up Bertha today.
— No, I went to see the Dingbats. The Dingbat sisters. I met them in the elevator, and one of them was carrying a bottle of gin, and I was already tight and so were they a little, and what with one thing and another, though I’d never spoken to them before, we smiled at each other and they invited me to come in and have a drink. So I did. The mystery women of Shepard Hall. They’re always getting telephone calls from the Navy Yard, and it amuses me to hear them at the public phone trying to answer indiscreet proposals in discreet words of one syllable. The older one took me into her bedroom to show me photographs of her two kids in Montreal. I hadn’t known she was married, and that put me off a little — I understood then why her breasts were so — ahem — mature and maternal. She leaned one of them against me, Bill, but I didn’t budge or feel a tremor. Not a tremor. Then they gave me six cocktails in rapid succession, in the dining room, a horrible room with red walls and fumed-oak furniture with an umbrella stand in one corner and such jolly colored prints of John Peel singing at the hunt breakfast. Why had I never been to see them, they said. They were always glad to see the people they liked, and if I just rang their bell six times, any time of the day or night, they would know it was me, and get out of bed even, if necessary. Very obliging. I asked them if they ever cried, and they were amused. I told them that I had a peculiar passion for crying, and would be glad to come in from time to time and have a good noisy cry with them while punishing the gin bottle. They laughed their heads off, and thought I was a hell of a wag. Then I said I must be going. The younger one, who is not so pretty, but who has no children, she is tall and has a gentler face, not quite so tough, you know, perhaps a trace of what you fellows call the anima type, she pleaded softly and cajolingly with me at the dining-room door, standing so close to me that I couldn’t get past her without embracing her, and she followed me to the front door and there, what do you think, just round the corner from Alice, we had a ten-minute nonstop kiss, you know the kind. Alice after a few minutes of the silence, said, Hey, there, what are you kids doing out there, and laughed, and then I went back for another cocktail. Oh, it was great fun, you have no idea. And when I finally came away I kissed her again at the door, a long, long kiss, not forgetting the tongue, and so went to the University Theater, where I suddenly and inexplicably felt very drunk. An undergraduate in front of me said, I smell boooooooze, and looked round. I smiled at him, very amiably.
— Well, and what was it all about? Do you understand it?
— Don’t be simple-minded. Of course I do.
— And what about Bertha.
— That’s what it was about, you idiot. That’s what I’m talking about all the time.
— So I see.
— Well, then, don’t interrupt. This was my little attempt at a counterblast.
— Not the first, either.
— What do you know about it?
— Oh, I’ve been here and there myself, and in and out, and up and down, and heard a thing or two, some from your own lips, before this.
— Too true, too true. I’ve always been your best case, Bill, your richest specimen. What on earth would you have done without me. I’m one of those talented fellows who combine all the madnesses in one — paranoia, dementia praecox, manic depressive, hysteria — name another. And so I watched faces on the screen — large weeping faces, eight feet high and five feet wide, with tears the size of cannon balls on the common and teeth like gravestones in the snow. Eyes—! You never saw such eyes. Like glassless windows in a ruined church. I think bats were coming and going out of them and into them. And the hair was like high-tension wires, and I saw a louse the size of a sparrow being electrocuted. It was great. Did I ever tell you of the time I stole a girl’s hat in the University Theater?
— No.
— Then I won’t. Now don’t tell me what Freud thinks a hat means.
— What do you think a hat means.
— If I were a Martian, strayed to earth, long after the death of the last man, I could reconstruct the whole of human civilization from one female hat. Preferably one of those early specimens with a lot of ostrich plumes. But this is a hypothetical question and I won’t go into it. The truth is, I want to cry.
— Go ahead and cry.
— No, I can’t. You’ve become my alter ego for the moment, the skeptical and analytic part of myself, and you disapprove of crying. So do I. Did you every cry at a prize fight? No? Why, Bill, I’m surprised at you. I don’t think you can have been to any prize fights. Everybody cries at a prize fight. The tears of Christ. You can buy them at the soda fountain, if you can get near enough to buy anything, which you seldom can, between bouts. And on Vesuvius once — but that was long ago, far away, and besides it was in the spring.
— You’re a riot. I wish to God I could take this down. But I don’t doubt you’ll remember it.
— Why should I. It’s my business to forget.
— So you think.
— So it is.
— The ostrich puts its head in the sand.
— I’m an ostrich, one of the best. An Arabian sparrow. Hiding my head in the desert of memory.
— I don’t think you’d better drink any more. You’re pretty well advanced.
— Not at all. How easily whisky comes out of a bottle — did you ever notice? Just like that. I think I’ll sit down. I think I’ll lie down. I think I’ll put this nice cold silk cushion on my face. Oh, that’s grand. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. And so I came back from New York, in response to a note from Fred (nice fellow, Fred) and found a hat, a man’s hat, a dirty felt hat, just as he predicted, on the chair in the front hall. What a melodrama. I had foreseen, in the train, every detail — that’s my way, Bill, I always foresee. So the hat wasn’t really a surprise at all. I was so sure it was there that I let myself in very quietly, like a cat, and banged the door behind me, and went up to the hat. It occurred to me to address the hat in Elizabethan style. O thou, most treasonable shape 0’ the human head, cornuting horror … but there were gloves also, and a stick — and what do you think of this — this is the dirtiest touch of all — a pair of humble muddy galoshes. Side by side, so meek and subservient, waiting for their exhausted master.
— For God’s sake, Andy.
— Yes, for God’s sake. You shrink from the horror, the plain physical horror, just as much as I did. Isn’t it wonderful? What a symbol, what a symbol. The hat, the stick, the gloves, the galoshes — a little constellation in the front hall, of which the meaning was plain even to me, who am no astronomer. I saw the whole life which they signified: Thomas Crapo, idealist, scientist, professor of biology, my friend, excellent tennis player, frequenter of wrestling matches, lover of Beethoven, but also the lover of my wife. And the apartment was so quiet, Bill! I could have heard a pin drop — and perhaps I did. A hairpin. Ting! And then silence.