“What do you suppose,” hissed my horrid guest, who somehow behaved like an alienated husband, “would happen to me if I were to lose anything?”
“Oh, I suppose,” I countered rudely, “I’d buy you another.”
Being the intrinsic complement of Insel’s enmity, logically my loathing for the real man was unconcealed, while he must actually hold himself in check not to assassinate me, for no crueller abhorrence could ever issue from the human heart than Insel’s for me.
There were brief abatements of his fantastic normality as when on coming up from the telephone I encountered only a creature of pathos in the hall.
“You would not notice, would you,” wistfully, “that I have polished everything in the flat.”
“No,” I concurred, “I would not have noticed that.”
Insel was long in swallowing his disappointment, then cryptically, “Gut,” he snapped, “and I am always amorous when drunk.”
And again, for fear I might forget the loan, Insel went limp as he had to the air raid siren. That unaccountable bloom he put forth when passing from one condition to another made his features appear to be of crumpled velvet.
Sitting on a chair of average height, he seemed to have sunk to bottomless depths, at the same time his imploring face peered at me — from the floor.
Craven to a degree that rendered his cowering august, of that meekness befitting a supplicant at the door of heaven, Insel was knowing an alibi so sublime — I again lost all knowledge of who he was.
“Here,” I hailed the will-o’-the-wisp, “after all I will give you the little box.” This box he desired, it was black, was a small object by the American surrealist, Joseph Cornell, the delicious head of a girl in slumber afloat with a night light flame on the surface of water in a tumbler, of bits cut from early Ladies’ Journals (technically in pupilage to Max Ernst) in loveliness, unique, in Surrealism— the tidal lines of engraving cooled its static peace. Under the glass lid a slim silver slipper and a silver ball and one of witch’s blue came raining down on the gray somnolence when one lifted it up.
I should have preferred to keep it myself had I not suddenly realized she belonged in those idle hands to which the unreal Insel intermittently returned.
I only went twice to the flat while Insel was living there, but I flitted in and out so busily — those hours retain no sequence. As part of his loan I had arranged for a strictly non-negotiable ticket and brought him a first thousand to speed the acquisition of that overcoat.
Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man to catch so many women. He seemed to be somehow barricaded with women. All my indulgence for human misdemeanors (which are so commendable when aesthetically good — such as the stellar combine of Insel and his ebony wives, his ivory eroticism in appraising thighs) was unavailing, confronted with this blatant lubricity of the normal Insel which, as he boasted, although in proper decency of word, seemed as did once an astral Venus to flow in his very veins: The dregs of all the secret gutters that carry off the unavowable residue of popular conceptions of physical life—
When I arrived with the rest of the loan, anxious to clear him out, my once luminous clochard had composed himself in the kitchen holding his usual insignia, the heel of pumpernickel, this time one in either hand — extreme oval ends — unbitten — of an absent loaf. He looked forbidding as had they been bone.
“Did you get the overcoat,” I inquired amiably.
“I may as well tell you,” he snarled, “that I don’t care for all this supervision — I had not the time. You understand — the last nights in Paris,” he raved ecstatically. “Es ist so schön das Leben, wenn mann so leben kann— It is so beautiful living, when one can so live.”
His emaciation no longer of flesh had become an exteriorized act of the flesh in which the last ooze of the spermatic juices might have been, in some fearful enervation, spent. Instead of being suffused with that liquidity of relief following upon embrace, his eyes, in some ultimate heat, were boiled to the creamy, soiled putrescence of stale oysters in a stew.
I did not reflect that this enormity of sensuous filth was probably as unreal as his nervous aromatics distilled from his astral collusions with a goddess. It was a mental impossibility to associate these opposite phenomena. Had I recalled the earlier iridescent Insel, it could only have been as a figment of my insanity.
An alarming presentiment occurred to me. “Insel,” I gasped, “you’ve blown that thousand francs.”
“What are you?” he sneered venomously, “an inquisitor?”
“He has notions as to how white women should be handled, too,” I laughed to myself as I hurried down the corridor to the dressmaker.
I was determined to take conventional leave of a guest who would be gone when I returned to Paris. It would put me to great pains, I supposed, breaking through animosity so unaccountable it left nothing intact but surprise. Still, it was pretty bad if I could not prevent the “epidemic quarrel with me” from spreading to even this lunatic whose essential void I had found so soothing.
After my fitting I invited him to come down to the cafe, intent on buttering him up, on bluffing him into forgetfulness of having allowed me to discover his awful alter ego (in cases of the sane, this alter ego seldom got to work until out of my sight), curious to see if we could part on good terms.
As we stood face to face with nothing in common, the last people on earth likely to become acquainted, I saw him force back his loathing, to accept. Our mutual distaste was noxious on the palate. We each had a pressing engagement for dinner.
I remembered Geronimo taunting me that I was “no psychologist.” “You just walk into a man’s brain, seat yourself comfortably in an armchair to take a look around — afterwards, you write down all you have found there,” he had said. Then what the hell in Insel had I “walked into”? His complaint was true. Nobody saw in him what I saw in him. A kind of consciousness unconscious of its own potency. Even now he was disgusting to the point of revelation.
Insel had also the idea of bluffing a conformative wind-up to our illusory alliance. Resorting to his earlier priggish decency, once we were in the back of the cafe, he hung his head, apparently poisoning it with spurious shame, and mumbled —
“The bad thing about me is that every now and then I come to a blind alley in my life — where somebody has to help me.”
“Now look here, Insel,” I persuaded him with stimulant hypocrisy, “if it were not for that basic something in you — no help would be forthcoming. That which is valuable one does not help, one responds to a cosmic imperative.”
He began to look as if he had been overdoing the shame.
“There was some mention,” I added offhandedly authoritative, “of you busting a thousand francs. You seemed on the defensive. But why? The artist requires color in his life.” This fallacious insight melted Insel’s imitation shame, disclosing the very really wounded face of a child who has long been sulking for being misjudged.
“You told me,” he burst out unhappily, writhing with reproach, “that I put lots of money in the bank.”
So that was it. Insel, with his organic magnifications, had become a foul lout, because he was feeling — cross.