I had never seen him like this before — human — actually gay! As I tried to explain why I must go home, Insel, in laughing over something he wanted to tell me, laid a fluttering hand on my shoulder— the torture of my body ceased.
It was not only an interruption of pain. I was regalvanized. Straightening from top to toe, I inhaled a limpid air — the neon tubes caressed my eyes.
I looked at Insel amazed. In what unheard of parasitism had I drawn this vitality out of a creature half-disintegrated?
Evidently he was in good form. The sparks he seemed to emit in turn gave off smaller ones; an added superficial illumination induced by a few drinks, having much the same effect as the perspective confusion of traffic lights among electric signs.
Out of all this an intimate twinkle approached me. “Promise to sit here with me till seven o’clock tomorrow evening,” Insel entreated.
“Naturally,” I acquiesced.
There is no field of fantasy so rich as the financial promoting of failures. Weaving in and out of our conversation was a shuttle of money-making devices for Insel’s relief, the most practical being to star him in a horror film. It is a poor horror which has to grime its face — the only face on the films that has true horror in it is Jouvet’s — and that only an inkling — and so discreet.
Insel said he had been offered such a role. But again he had not been able, or wishful, to pursue anything that carried him into the future — a future that ebbed from him as from others the past. He would look forward with one eagerly — always at a certain point he reverted — turned his blind back on the forward direction—.
He said, “I have worn myself out tramping the city on fruitless quests — to show my good will.”
Now I had found another profession for him— magnetic healer. Suddenly I foresaw the fear my physician would inspire nullifying his therapeutic value, and I did not suggest it to Insel.
In his unusual liveliness, words, like roomy cupboards, dipped into the reservoir of excited honey and flapping their open doors spilled it all over the place as they passed.
“Unglaublich,” said Insel. “With you alone am I able to express myself. You tell me exactly what I am thinking. No one else has understood what we understand.
“You have such marvelous ideas—”
“But Insel,” I protested conscientiously, “I have touched on my ideas so lightly— If I knew your language well enough to convey the subtlest shades of meaning—.”
We decided to get a first-class dictionary. Henceforth nothing was to be lost!
Summing it up, this unspecific converse whose savor lay in its impress of endlessness has left me an ineradicable visual definition of Insel with his whittled exterior jerking in tics of joy a pate too loosely attached and almost worn down to the skull — and myself expansive in some secondary glow from that icy conflagration strewing gray ashes over his face as it burnt itself out. Always at an instinctive interval of shoulder from shoulder, as two aloft on the same telegraph wire exchange a titter of godforsaken sparrows.
As night drew out — it got draftier and draftier— we removed, as if receding into a lair, from the terrace to further and further inside the cafe, from the open to the enclosed — each time ordering a new consommation from a different waiter — till we reached an inaereate core of the establishment. Here we inexplicably came upon that friend whose hypothetic non-existence insured Insel’s vaunted isolation. One after another the same Germanic wag would shuffle up to our table, each time wearing a different face.
One — projected that declamatory arm which in a certain condition present at the time falls with a forgetful plop before completing an indication. “Who is Insel,” it challenged, “to monopolize this perfectly fascinating woman?”
Another — equally appreciative until he discovered the hair in the shadow of my hat to be undeniably white — apologized with a shudder, “I won’t say it doesn’t look all right on you — but I can’t bear the sight. It reminds me that I am old.” He looked less old than Insel— He was one of the many unfortunates who have had nothing to “give off” but the bubbles of adolescence, whereas Insel’s rattling pelvis was trotting the leather seat in the sitting leaps of an exuberant child.
“They are so surprised,” he chortled repeatedly. “They are accustomed to seeing me all alone—.”
I ordered supper — got cigarettes at the counter and dumped them on our table on my way downstairs to buy some rouge (probably on a cue my subconscious had taken from my critic). When I returned it looked as if the empty space in our quiet comer had come alive, the leather padding had broken out in a parasitic formation, a double starfish whose radial extremities projected and retracted rapidly at dynamic angles.
It was Insel all cluttered up with his “private life.” Draped with the bodies of two negresses, spiked with their limbs. They seemed, out of ambush, to have fallen upon him from over the back of the high seat. The waiter had laid a startling oblong of white cloth which knocked the milling muddle of polished black arms and faces round Insel’s pallor into a factitious distance, although he and his mates were actually attached to my supper table.
The group being occupied it was difficult to know how to greet them. I swept an inclusive smile of welcome across them as I sat down and the waiter brought the food.
As I watched this virtually prohibited conjunction with a race whose ostracism “debunks” humanity’s ostensible belief in its soul, I scarcely heard the scandalous din they were making; these negresses, with their fingers of twig, were tearing at some object — my scarlet packet of “High-Life”!— rapidly becoming invisible under Insel’s touch — he clung to it with such constrictive tenacity, he might have been squeezing an atom.
“Maquereau!” “Salaud!” shrieked the dark ladies to stress their pandemonium accounting of benefits bestowed.
“Insel,” I addressed him authoritatively, not dreaming “pimp” and “skunk” were almost the only French words familiar to the poor dear, “if you could understand what they are calling you — you’d let go!”
Once more fallen sideways off himself like his own dead leaf in one of those unexpected carvings into profile; a zigzag profile of a jumping jack cut out of paper from an exercise book; shrunken to a strip of introvert concentration blind as a nerve among the women’s volume, clenching his gums in a fearful sort of constipated fervor, as if hammering on an anvil, Insel thumped his closest negress with an immature fist. Every thump drove in my impression — as this black and white flesh glanced off one another — of their being totally unwed — that Insel, whom I often called “Ameise” who was even now like an “ant,” occupied with his problem of a load in another dimension, could never have worked on those polished bodies than with the microscopic function of a termite — unseeing, unknowing of all save an imperative to adhere — to never let go. He clung to my cigarettes conscious of nothing but his comic “tic.”
There were onlookers peering under the brass rail topping the back-to-back upholstery — three heads left over from the crowded hours. One, the sharp mask of a Jew worn to a rudder with centuries of steering through hostile masses, lowered its pale eyelashes on the neighbors’ insurrection as if closing a shop.
I paid the waiter, bought some more cigarettes, jumped into a taxi, undressed and went to bed, all with the delicious composure Insel instilled — not questioning the continuity of this “elevation of the pure in heart” even while he in whom it originated was being slapped by inexpensive harlots on their way home from work.