She looked very white at this and averted her face and smiled as if it would be a long time before I could understand how much good it was doing me to have this portrait painted.
“I know,” I said. “The ladies around here gave you the business during the Milk Fund drive. They wouldn’t let you on the committee. I know all about it.”
But most of all what I recalled with those broken teeth in my hand on this evening in the African mountains was how I had disgraced myself with the painter’s wife and dentist’s cousin, Mrs. K. Spohr. Before the First World War (she’s in her sixties) she was supposed to have been a famous beauty and has never recovered from the collapse of this, but dresses like a young girl with flounces and flowers. She may have been a hot lay once, as she claims, though among great beauties that is rare. But time and nature had blown the whistle on her and she was badly ravaged. However, her sex power was still there and hid in her eyes, like a Sicilian bandit, like a Giuliano. Her hair is red as chili powder and some of this same red is sprinkled on her face in freckles.
One winter afternoon, Clara Spohr and I met in Grand Central Station. I had had my sessions with Spohr the dentist and Haponyi the violin teacher, and I was disgruntled, hastening to the lower level so that my shoes and pants could scarcely keep up with me-hastening through the dark brown down-tilted passage with its lights aswoon and its pavement trampled by billions of shoes, with amoeba figures of chewing gum spread flat. And I saw Clara Spohr coming from the Oyster Bar or being washed forth into this sea, dismasted, clinging to her soul in the shipwreck of her beauty. But she seemed to be sinking. As I passed she flagged me down and took my arm, the one not engaged by my violin, and we went to the club car and started, or continued, to drink. At this same winter hour, Lily was posing for her husband, so she said, “Why don’t you get off with me and drive home with your wife?” What she wanted me to say was, “Baby, why go to Connecticut? Let’s jump off the train and paint the town red.” But the train pulled out and soon we were running along Long Island Sound, with snow, with sunset, and the atmosphere corrupting the shape of the late sun, and the black boats saying, “Foo!” and spilling their smoke on the waves. And Clara was burning and she talked and talked and worked on me with her eyes and her turned-up nose. You could see the old mischief working, the life-craving, which wouldn’t quit. She was telling me how she had visited Samoa and Tonga in her youth and had experienced passionate love on the beaches, on the rafts, in the flowers. It was like Churchill’s blood, sweat, and tears, swearing to fight on the beaches, and so on. I couldn’t help feeling sympathetic, partly. But my attitude is that if people are going to undo themselves before you, you shouldn’t do them up again. You should let them retie their own parcels. Toward the last, as we got into the station, she was weeping, this old crook, and I felt terrible. I’ve told you how I feel when women cry. I was also incensed. We got out in the snow, and I supported her and found a taxi.
When we entered her house, I tried to help her take off her galoshes, but with a cry she lifted me up by the face and began to kiss me. Whereupon, like a fool, in stead of pushing her away I kissed back. Yes, I returned the kisses. With the bridgework, new then, in my mouth. It was certainly a peculiar moment. Her shoes had come off with the galoshes. We embraced in the over-heated lamp-lighted entry which was filled with souvenirs of Samoa and of the South Seas, and kissed as if the next moment we were going to be separated by the stroke of death. I have never understood this foolish thing, for I was not passive. I tell you, I kissed back.
Oh, ho! Mr. Henderson. What? Sorrow? Lust? Kissing has-been beauties? Drunk? In tears? Mad as a horsefly on the window pane?
Furthermore Lily and Klaus Spohr saw it all. The studio door was open. Within was a coal fire in the grate.
“Why are you kissing each other like that?” said Lily.
Klaus Spohr never said a word. Whatever Clara saw fit to do was okay by him.
XI
And now I have told you the history of these teeth, which were made of a material called acrylic that’s supposed to be unbreakable-fort comme la mort. But my striving wore them out. I have been told (by Lily, by Frances, or by Berthe? I can’t remember which) that I grind my jaws in my sleep, and undoubtedly this has had a bad effect. Or maybe I have kissed life too hard and weakened the whole structure. Anyway my whole body was trembling when I spat out those molars, and I thought, “Maybe you’ve lived too long, Henderson.” And I took a drink of bourbon from the canteen, which stung the cut in my tongue. Then I rinsed the fragments in whisky and buttoned them into my pocket on the chance that even out here I might run into someone who would know how to glue them into place.
“Why are they keeping us waiting like this, Romilayu?” I said. Then I lowered my voice, asking, “You don’t think they’ve heard about the frogs, do you?”
“Wo, no, I no t’ink so, sah.”
From the direction of the palace we then heard a deep roar, and I said, “Would that be a lion?”
Romilayu replied that he believed it was.
“Yes, I thought so too,” I said. “But the animal must be inside the town. Do they keep a lion in the palace?”
He said uncertainly, “Dem mus’ be.”
The smell of animals was certainly very noticeable in the town.
At last the fellow who was guarding us received a sign in the dark which I didn’t see, for he told us to get up and we entered the hut. Inside we were told to sit, and we sat on a pair of low stools. Torchlight was held over us by a couple of women both of whom were shaven. The shape of their heads thus revealed was delicate though large. They parted their large lips and smiled at us and there was some relief for me in those smiles. After we were seated, the women choking their laughter so that the torches wagged and the light was fitful and smoky, in came a man from the back of the house and my relief vanished. It dried right out when he looked at me, and I thought, “He has certainly heard something about me, either about those damned frogs or something else.” The clutch of conscience gripped me to the bone. Totally against reason.
Was it a wig he wore? Some sort of official headdress, a hempy-looking business. He took his place on a smooth bench between the torches. On his knees he held a stick or rod of ivory, looking very official; over his wrists were long tufts of leopard skin.
I said to Romilayu, “I don’t like the way this man looks at us. He made us wait a long time, and I’m worried. What’s your thinking on this?”
“I no know,” he said.
I unbuckled the pack and took out a few articles-the usual cigarette lighters and a magnifying glass which I happened to have along. These articles, laid on the ground, were ignored. A huge book was brought forth, a sign of literacy which astonished and worried me. What was it, a guest register or something? Strange guesses leaped up in my mind, completely abandoned to fantasies by now. However, the book turned out to be an atlas, and he opened it toward me with skill in turning large pages, moistening two fingers on his tongue. Romilayu told me, “Him say you show home.”
“That’s a reasonable request,” I said, and got on my knees, and with the lighter and magnifying glass, poring over North America, I found Danbury, Connecticut. Then I showed my passport, the women with those curious tender bald heads meanwhile laughing at my cumbersome kneeling and standing, my fleshiness, and the nervous, fierce, yet appeasing contortions or glowers of my face. This face, which sometimes appears to me to be as big as the entire body of a child, is always undergoing transformations making it as busy, as strange and changeful, as a creature of the tropical sea lying under a reef, now the color of carnations and now the color of a sweet potato, challenging, acting, harkening, pondering, with all the human passions at the point of doubt-I mean the humanity of them lying in doubt. A great variety of expressions was thus hurdling my nose from eye to eye and twisting my brows. I had good cause to hold my temper and try to behave moderately, my record in Africa being not so brilliant thus far.