Lily wept over the poor old woman.
“Why did you leave such a note?” she said.
“So nobody should move her until the coroner came,” I said. “That’s what the law is. I barely felt her myself.” I then offered Lily a drink, which she refused, and I filled the water tumbler with bourbon and drank it down. Its only effect was a heartburn. Whisky could not coat the terrible fact. The old lady had fallen under my violence as people keel over during heat waves or while climbing the subway stairs. Lily was aware of this and started to mutter something about it. She was very thoughtful, and became silent, and her pure white color began to darken toward the eyes.
The undertaker in our town has bought the house where I used to take dancing lessons. Forty years ago I used to go there in my patent-leather shoes. When the hearse backed up the drive, I said, “You know, Lily, that trip that Charlie Albert is going to make to Africa? He’ll be leaving in a couple of weeks, and I think I’ll go along with him and his wife. Let’s put the Buick in storage. You won’t need two cars.”
For once she didn’t object to one of my ideas. “Maybe you ought to go,” she said.
“I should do something.”
So Miss Lenox went to the cemetery, and I went to Idlewild and took a plane.
V
I guess I hadn’t taken two steps out into the world as a small boy when there was Charlie, a person in several ways like myself. In 1915 we attended dancing school together (in the house out of which Miss Lenox was buried), and such attachments last. In age he is only a year my junior and in wealth he goes me a little better, for when his old mother dies he will have another fortune. It was with Charlie that I took off for Africa, hoping to find a remedy for my situation. I guess it was a mistake to go with him, but I wouldn’t have known how to go right straight into Africa by myself. You have to have a specific job to do. The excuse was that Charlie and his wife were going to film the Africans and the animals, for during the war Charlie was a cameraman with Patton’s army-he could no more stay at home than I could-and so he learned the trade. Photography is not one of my interests.
Anyway, last year I asked Charlie to come out and photograph some of my pigs. This opportunity to show how good he was at his work pleased him, and he made some first-rate studies. Then we came back from the barn and he said he was engaged. So I told him, “Well, Charlie, I guess you know a lot about whores, but what do you know about girls-anything?”
“Oh,” he said, “it’s true that I don’t know much, but I do know she is unique.”
“Yes, I know all about this unique business,” I said. (I had heard all about it from Lily but now she was never even at home.)
Nevertheless we went down to the studio to have a drink on his engagement, and he asked me to be his best man. He has almost no friends. We drank and kidded and reminisced about the dancing class, and made tears of nostalgia come to each other’s eyes. It was then when we were both melted down that he invited me to come along to Africa where he and his wife would be going for their honeymoon.
I attended the wedding and stood up for him. However, because I forgot to kiss the bride after the ceremony, there developed a coolness on her side and eventually she became my enemy. The expedition that Charlie organized had all new equipment and was modern in every respect. We had a portable generator, a shower, and hot water, and from the beginning I was critical of this. I said, “Charlie, this wasn’t the way we fought the war. Hell, we’re a couple of old soldiers. What is this?” It wounded me to travel in Africa in this way.
But I had come to this continent to stay. When buying my ticket in New York I went through a silent struggle there at the airlines office (near Battery Park) as to whether or not to get a round-trip ticket. And as a sign of my earnestness, I decided to take it one way. So we flew from Idlewild to Cairo. I went on a bus to visit the Sphinx and the pyramids, and then we flew off again to the interior. Africa reached my feelings right away even in the air, from which it looked like the ancient bed of mankind. And at a height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed. From the cracks in the earth the rivers pinched back at the sun. They shone out like smelters’ puddles, and then they took a crust and were covered over. As for the vegetable kingdom, it hardly existed from the air; it looked to me no more than an inch in height. And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily. However, we made safe landings every time. Anyway, since I had come to this place under the circumstances described, it was natural to greet it with a certain emotion. Yes, I brought a sizable charge with me and I kept thinking, “Bountiful life! Oh, how bountiful life is.” I felt I might have a chance here. To begin with, the heat was just what I craved, much hotter than the Gulf of Mexico, and then the colors themselves did me a world of good. I didn’t feel the pressure in the chest, nor hear any voice within. At that time it was silent. Charlie and his wife and I, together with natives and trucks and equipment, were camped near some lake or other. The water here was very soft, with reeds and roots rotted, and there were crabs in the sand. The crocodiles boated around in the lilies, and when they opened their mouths they made me realize how hot a damp creature can be inside. The birds went into their jaws and cleaned their teeth. However, the people in this district were very sad, not lively. On the trees grew a feather-like bloom and the papyrus reeds began to remind me of funeral plumes, and after about three weeks of cooperating with Charlie, helping him with the camera equipment and trying to interest myself in his photographic problems, my discontent returned and one afternoon I heard the familiar old voice within. It began to say, I want, I want, I want!
I said to Charlie, “I don’t want you to get sore, now, but I don’t think this is working out, the three of us together in Africa.”
Stolid, he looked me over through his sunglasses. We were beside the water. Was this the kid I used to know in dancing class? How time had changed us both. But we were now, as then, in short pants. His development is broad through the chest. And as I am much taller, he was looking up, but he was angry, not intimidated. The flesh around his mouth became very lumpy as he deliberated, and then he said, “No? Why not?”
“Well,” I said, “I took this chance to get here, Charlie, and I’m very grateful because I’ve always been a sort of Africa buff, but now I realize that I didn’t come to take pictures of it. Sell me one of the jeeps and I’ll take off.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“All I know is that this isn’t the place for me,” I said.
“Well, if you want to, shove off. I won’t stop you, Gene.”
It was all because I had forgotten to kiss his wife after the ceremony, and she couldn’t forgive me. What would she want a kiss from me for? Some people don’t know when they’re well off. I can’t say why I didn’t kiss her; I was thinking of something else, I guess. But I think she concluded that I was jealous of Charlie, and anyway I was spoiling her African honeymoon.
“So, no hard feelings, eh, Charlie? But it does me no good to travel this way.”
“That’s okay. I’m not trying to stop you. Just blow.”
And that was what I did. I organized a separate expedition that suited my soldierly temperament better. I hired two of Charlie’s natives and when we drove away in the jeep I felt better at once. And after a few days, anxious to simplify more and more, I laid off one of the men and had a long conversation with the remaining African, Romilayu. We arrived at an understanding. He said that if I wanted to see some places off the beaten track, he could guide me to them.