It was something like that, she was saying. Sweetheart couldn’t really understand it herself, but I saw how it excited her. And now, much later, I myself am scratching my head trying to work out what it is that bugs us all. The stuff the bourgeois have that still remains to get. It’s hard to get, of course, because the bastards have taken good care to hide it. My insides itch when I think of it. There was a time when only the upper classes allowed themselves to suffer from nerves. But nowadays I see how nervous a guy in jeans gets when someone different from him comes and sits next to him on the subway. Or at the movies. Anywhere. He gets nervous, makes sure he has no body contact, and gives his neighbor — so different from himself — sidelong glances. He suspects that he is not as important as that other guy, the one next to him, the one with the pressed clothes and spectacles. It’s not the guy’s manner that gets to him — I mean, I learned that a long time ago, and I’m as well-mannered and as correct in my behavior as the newly elected chairman of the local council. It’s something else, the devil knows what, whoever invented it.
Sweetheart quickly learned everything you need for good manners. But the bald guy said something to her that wouldn’t let her be. Right down to when it seemed it wasn’t her speaking. It was someone else speaking through her, the way someone plays an instrument, a violin or a piano. The music is what comes out. When this idiot half-ass scribbler disappeared from her life, from our lovely Budapest, she couldn’t just let him go, so she followed him … Eventually she confessed that he’d died there in Rome, among the statues, in the very hotel, in the very bed in the very room where we were sleeping, that’s when we weren’t making hay. That’s women for you. Take it from me, buddy, listen to experience. They’ll follow whoever they’ve really set their eyes on, providing they haven’t already slept with them. They get all screwed up and twisted with frustration. They are set on the idea that the guy they want should become a part of them. They visit the cemetery and get upset when they see someone else’s flowers on the grave of the poor faithless departed. All because a second-rate poet tells them there’s something better in the world than grub and booze. What is it? They call it “culture.” And the clown goes on to say this culture thing is all a kind of reflex.
Have you any idea what that is? Neither of us really got it: not her, not me. Afterwards I couldn’t help looking it up in the dictionary … I actually took a walk down to the library and looked up “reflex.” I thought about it, I turned it over and over in my mind till I was quite sick of it, but ended no wiser. It was compulsive, like when someone’s constantly touching their nose to check it’s still there … The dictionary said there was the learned kind and the inherited kind … you ever heard of such a thing?
But that’s the shit with culture, you need it for status too now. I can’t see why people sweat tears over it, because it’s not like it’s a secret anymore. It’s all there in the big encyclopedias. You just take the book from the shelf and there you are, you got culture. So what is it? Oh yes, it’s a reflex too. Look, I’m a simple guy, as you know. A modest man. So I’m telling you straight, I am genuinely cultured. Just look at me! I know I don’t play the drums anymore, but I still got reflexes … Sometimes, when I’m at home with my Irish widow — she’s religious — I take out the drums and I drum like I see on TV, like that black preacher when he’s whipping up his flock. The widow grows dreamy then, leans her head on my shoulder, and her breath comes short until she too gets the reflex. Nobody could say of me I don’t have a reflex … So am I still a prole? Is there something left for me to take from the gentry that I haven’t yet taken? Something they don’t want to give me? … You and I saw the Commies up close, didn’t we? They can do their song and dance about what it will be like when everything belongs to the masses, the people. The union guys here have worked it out that they get a better deal here with Count Rockefeller and Prince Ford than they’d get from the fruits of their socialist labor. The pay’s better. We know by now that it’s all talk and big words. Is it possible, then, that the class war is still not over? Is there anything the bourgeois has tucked away from us? And should a prole lose his hair over that?
Wait a moment, I see the lady is crying. I can’t bear to look at her when her eyes are full of tears but her mouth is grinning. I must look after the embalmer too … look how enviously he’s looking at her, because she’s got that holy smile without the use of paraffin.
Look, this is what she looked like the moment before she got on the plane without a return ticket. Go on, have a good look. I look at it sometimes myself.
One evening there was someone else who was looking at her. Year ago, about midnight, when the place was almost empty, these two customers came in. The play in the theater next door had just failed, because it was all talk, all philosophy. They arrived about midnight, they sat here where you’re now sitting. They sat opposite the shelves where we keep the goods. And they looked at the photographs.
They were quiet drinkers. Refined types. You could see they were classy guys with proper reflexes. But you could also see they were drawing their pensions. It’s the kind of thing you immediately notice. Three-eighty a month, plus sickness benefit. One had snow-white hair like Father Christmas. The other had sideburns, like he’d still fancy a good time, but could no longer afford it, all he could afford being a bit of extra hair on the side of his head. I wasn’t really listening to them, but they were speaking a different version of English from the rest … they spoke like they hadn’t grown up with English but learned it. But they’d learned it not here in the U.S.A. but in England. Both wore glasses and well-traveled suits. I noticed that Santa’s sleeves were longer than they should be, because they weren’t made to measure for him, he’d bought the jacket cheap, off the peg at a thrift store — I guessed he hadn’t paid more than two Lincolns for them. All the same, they were nice guys, by which I mean they had no money.
But they went through their bludimeris like there was no tomorrow. They chatted away quietly. I half-heard them discussing the fact that in a country as wealthy as America very few people were happy. I pricked up my ears then, because I myself had formed that impression. That’s hard to see when you’re new here, and from over the water, but once you get used to it and become a regular Joe, like me, well, you get to thinking about it too, and soon there I am stroking my chin as if I’d forgotten to shave. Because, no good denying it, here where people have everything they need for the good life, it’s as if happiness — I mean real, joyful, ear-to-ear-grinning happiness — simply escaped them. Over at Macy’s nearby you can really buy anything you need in this world. You can even get a lighter that never needs new fuel. It comes in a case. But you can’t buy happiness, not even in the drugs department.
That’s what the two customers were saying. Actually it was the one with the sideburns doing all the talking, Santa just nodded. And as they grew ever more absorbed in their philosophizing it was suddenly like hearing Sweetheart’s voice. That last night she was saying something about how culture and happiness were the same thing … or maybe that’s what her scribbler hero said. I didn’t understand it then, I don’t really understand it even now, but when the two old guys started talking I remembered her words. I listened in discreetly.