«Well I'll be damned!» Ned exclaimed. «/ never heard you talk this way before.»
«Of course you didn't, darling. You never credited me with having an ounce of brains, did you? You get your little nookie and then you go to sleep. I've been asking you to marry me for a year now but you're not ready for that yet. You've got other problems. Well, some day you'll discover that there's only one problem on your hands—yourself.»
«Good! Good for you, Marcelle!» It was Mona who suddenly burst out with this.
«What the hell!» said Ned. «What Is this—a conspiracy?»
«You know,» said Marcelle, as though she were speaking to herself, «sometimes I think I really am a cluck. Here I am waiting for this guy to marry me. Suppose he does marry me—what then? He won't know me any better after marriage than before. He's, not in love. If a guy's in love with you he doesn't worry about the future. Love is a gamble, not an insurance racket. I guess I'm just getting wise to myself.... Ned, I'm going to stop worrying about you. I'm going to leave you to worry about yourself. You're the worrying kind—and there's no cure for that. You had me worried for a while— worrying about you, I mean. I'm through worrying. I want love—not protection.»
«Jesus, aren't we getting rather serious?» said Ned, baffled by the unexpected turn the conversation had taken.
«Serious?» said Marcelle mockingly. «I'm walking out on you. You can stay single for the rest of your life—and thrash out all those weighty problems that bother you. I feel as though a big load had been taken off my shoulders.» She turned to me and stuck out her mitt. «Thanks, Henry, for giving me a jolt. I guess you weren't talking such nonsense after all....»
22
Cleo was still the rage at the Houston Street Burlesk. She had become an institution, like Mistinguett. It's easy to understand why she fascinated that audience which the enterprising Minsky Brothers gathered every night under their closed roof garden. One had only to stand outside the box office of a matinee, any day of the week, and watch them dribble in. In the evening it was a more sophisticated crowd, gathered from all parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and New Jersey. Even Park Avenue contributed its clientele, in the evening. But in the bright light of day, with the marquee looking like the aftermath of small-pox, the Catholic Church next door so dingy, woe-begone, so scroungy-looking, the priest always standing on the steps, scratching his ass by way of registering disgust and disapprobation. It was very much like the picture of reality which the sclerotic mind of a sceptic conjures up when he tries to explain why there can be no God.
Many's the time I had hung around the entrance to the theatre, keeping a sharp eye out for some one to lend me a few pennies to make up the price of admission. “When you're out of work, or too disgusted to look for work, it's infinitely better to sit in a stinking pit than to stand in a public toilet for hours—just because it's warm there. Sex and poverty go hand in hand.
The fetid odor of the burlesk house! That smell of the latrine, of urine saturated with camphor balls! The mingled stench of sweat, sour feet, foul breaths, chewing gum, disinfectants! The sickening deodorant from the squirt guns levelled straight at you, as if you were a mass of bottle flies! Nauseating? No word for it. Onan himself could scarcely smell worse.
The decor too was something. Smacked of Renoir in the last stages of gangrene. Blended perfectly with the Mardi Gras lighting effects—a flushed string of red lights illuminating a rotten womb. Something disgracefully satisfying about sitting there with the Mongolian idiots in the twilight of Gomorrah, knowing all too well that after the show you would have to trudge it back home on foot. Only a man with his pockets cleaned out can thoroughly appreciate the warmth and stench of a big ulcer in which hundreds of others like himself sit and wait for the curtain to go up. All around you overgrown idiots shelling peanuts, or nibbling at chocolate bars, or draining bottles of pop through straws. The Lumpen Proletariat. Cosmic riff-raff.
It was so foul, the atmosphere, that it was just like one big congealed fart. On the asbestos curtain remedies against venereal diseases, cloak and suit ads, fur trapp..., tooth-paste delicacies, watches to tell time—as if time were important in our lives! Where to go for a quick snack after the show—as if one had money to burn, as though after the show we would all drop in at Louie's or August's place and look the girls over, shove money up their asses and see the Aurora Borealis or the Red, White and Blue.
The ushers... Ratty, jail-bird types, if male, and floozy, empty shits, if the other sex. Now and then an attractive Polish girl with blonde hair and a saucy, defiant mien. One of the dumb Polaks who would rather earn an honest penny than turn up her ass for a quick fuck. One could smell their filthy underwear, winter or summer...
Anyway, everything on a cash and carry basis— that was the Minsky plan. And it worked too. Never a flop, no matter how lousy the performance. If you went there often enough you got to know the faces so well, not only of the cast but of the audience too, that it was like a family reunion. If you felt disgusted you didn't need a mirror to see how you looked—you had only to take a glance at your neighbor. It should have been called «Identity House». It was Devachan hindside up.
There was never anything original, never anything that you hadn't seen a thousand times before. It was like a cunt you're sick of looking at—you know every liverish crease and wrinkle; you're so goddamned sick of it that you want to spit in it, or take a plunger and bring up all the muck that got caught and the larynx. Oh yes, many a time one had the impulse to let fire—turn a machine gun on them, men, women and children, and let 'em have it in the guts. Sometimes a sort of faintness came over you: you felt like sliding to the floor and just lying there among the peanut shells. Let people walk over you with their greasy, smelly, shitty shoes.
Always a patriotic note too. Any moth-eaten cunt could walk out front-and-center draped in the American flag and by singing a wheezy tune bring down the house. If you had an advantageous seat you could catch her wiping her nose on the flag as she stood in the wings. And the sob stuff... how they liked the mother songs!
Poor, dopy, dog-eared saps! When it came to home and mother they slobbered like wailing mice. There was always the white-haired imbecile from the Ladies' Room whom they trotted out for these numbers. Her reward for sitting in the shit-house all day and night was to be slobbered over during one of the sentimental numbers. She had an enormous girth—a fallen womb most likely—and her eyes were glassy. She could have been everybody's mother, so goofy and docile she was. The very picture of motherhood—after thirty-five years of child-bearing, wife-beating, abortions, haemorrhages, ulcers, tumors, rupture, varicose veins and other emoluments of the maternal life. That nobody thought of putting a bullet through her and finishing her off always surprised me.