He was telling me about a proposition he had up his sleeve, another «unique» idea for an advertising campaign. (How to make people smoke more— without injuring their health.) The trouble was, now that he was on the other side of the fence nobody would listen to him. Had he still been art director everybody would have accepted the idea immediately as a brilliant one. Ned saw the irony of the situation, nothing more. He thought it had something to do with his front—perhaps he didn't look as confident as he used to. If he had a better wardrobe, if he could lay off the booze for a while, if he could work up the right enthusiasm.... and so on. Marcelle worried him. She was taking it out of him. With every fuck he gave her he felt that another brilliant idea had been slaughtered. He wanted to be alone for a while so that he could think things out. If Marcelle were on tap only when he needed her and not turn up at odd hours—just when he was in the middle of something—it would be ducky.
«You want a bottle opener, not a woman,» I said.
He laughed, as though he were slightly embarrassed.
«Well, you know how it is,» he said. «Jesus, I like her all right... she's fine. Another girl would have ditched me long ago. But—.»
«Yes, I know. The trouble is she sticks.»
«It sounds rotten, doesn't it?»
«It is rotten,» said I. «Listen, did it ever occur to you that you may never again be an art director, that you had your chance and you muffed it? Now you've got another chance—and you're muffing it again. You could get married and become... well, I don't know what... any damned thing... what difference does it make? You have a chance to lead a normal, happy life—on a modest plane. It doesn't seem possible to you, I suppose, that you might be better off driving a milk wagon? That's too dull for you, isn't it? Too bad! I'd have more respect for you as ditch digger than as president of the Palm Olive Soap Company. You're not burning up with original ideas, as you imagine, you're simply trying to retrieve something that's lost. It's pride that's goading you, not ambition. If you had any originality you'd be more flexible: you'd prove it in a hundred different ways. What gripes you is that you failed. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to you. But you don't know how to exploit your misfortunes. You were probably cut out for something entirely different, but you won't give yourself a chance to find out what. You revolve your obsession like a rat in a trap. If you ask me, it's pretty horrible... more horrible than the sight of these poor doomed bastards hanging out of the windows. They're willing to tackle anything; you're not willing to lift your little finger. You want to go back to your throne and be the king of the advertising world. And if you can't have that you're going to make everybody around you miserable. You're going to castrate yourself and then say that somebody cut your balls off....»
The musicians were tuning up; we had to scoot back to our seats. Mona and Marcelle were already seated, buried in a deep conversation. Suddenly there was a full blare from the orchestra pit, like a snarl of prussic acid over a tight tarpaulin. The red-haired fellow at the piano was all limp and boneless, his fingers falling like stalactites on the keyboard. People were still streaming back from the lavatories. The music got more and more frenetic, with the brass and the percussion instruments getting the upper hand. Here and there a switch of lights blinked, as if there were a string of electrified owls opening and closing their eyes. In front of us a young lad was holding a lighted match to the back of a post-card, expecting to discover the whore of Babylon—or the Siamese twins rolling in a double-jointed orgasm.
As the curtain went up the Egyptian beauties from the purlieus of Rivington Street began to unlimber: they flung themselves about like flounders just released from the hook. A scrawny contortionist did the pin-wheel, then folded up like a jack-knife and, after a few flips and flops, tried to kiss her own ass. The music grew soupy, alternating from one rhythm to another and getting nowhere. Just when everything seemed on the verge of collapse the floundering chorines did a fade-out, the contortionist picked herself up and limped away like a leper, and out limped away like a leper, and out came a pair of incongruous buffoons pretending to be full-blown lechers. The back curtain drops and there they are standing in the middle of a street in the city of Irkutsk. One of them wants a woman so bad his tongue is hanging out. The other one is a connoisseur of horse flesh. He has a little apparatus, a sort of Open Sesame, which he will sell to his friend for 964 dollars and 32 cents. They compromise on a dollar and a half. Fine. A woman comes walking down the street. She's from Avenue A. He talks French to her, the fellow who bought the apparatus. She answers in Volapuk. All he has to do is turn on the juice and she flings her arms around him. This goes on in ninety-two variations, just as it did last week and the week before—as far back as the days Bob Fitzimmons, in fact. The curtain drops and a bright young man with a microphone steps out of the wings and croons a romantic ditty about the aeroplane delivering a letter to his sweatheart in Caledonia.
Now the flounders are out again, this time disguised as Navajos. They reel about the electric camp-fire. The music switches from «Pony Boy» to the «Kashmiri Song» and then to «Rain in the Face». A Latvian girl with a feather in her hair stands like Hiawatha, looking towards the land of the setting sun. She has to stand on tip-toe until Bing Crosby Junior finishes fourteen quatrains of Amerindian folklore written by a cow-puncher from Hester Street. Then a pistol shot is fired, the chorines whoop it up, the American flag is unfurled, the contortionist somersaults through the block-house, Hiawatha does a fandango, and the orchestra becomes apoplectic. When the lights go out the white-haired mother from the lavatory is standing by the electric chair waiting to see her son burn. This heart-rending scene is accompanied by a falsetto rendition of «Silver Threads Among the Gold». The victim of justice is one of the clowns who will be out in a moment with a piss-pot in his hand. He will have to measure the leading lady for a bathing suit. She will bend over obligingly and spread her ass so that he can get the measurements absolutely correct. When that's over she will be the nurse in the lunatic asylum, armed with a syringe full of water which she will squirt down his pants. Then there will be two leading ladies attired in negligee. They sit in a cosy furnished flat waiting for their boy friends to call. The boys call and in a few moments they start taking their pants off. Then the husband returns and the boys hop around in B. V. D's, like crippled sparrows.
Everything is calculated to the minute. By the time 10:23 strikes Cleo is ready to do her second and final number. She will have just about eight and a half minutes to spare, according to the terms of the contract. Then she will have to stand in the wings for another twelve minutes and take her place with the rest of the cast for the finale. Those twelve minutes burn her up. They are precious minutes which are completely wasted. She can't even get into her street clothes; she must show herself in all her glory and give just one little squirm or two as the curtain falls. It burns her up.
Ten twenty-two and a half! An ominous decrescendo, a muffled two-four flam from the drums. All the lights are doused except those over the Exits. The spot-light focuses on the wings where at 10:23 to the dot first a hand, then an arm, then a breast will appear. The head follows after the body, as the aura follows the saint. The head is wrapped in excelsior with cabbage leaves masking the eyes; it moves like a sea urchin struggling with eels. A wireless operator is hidden in the carmined mouth of the naveclass="underline" he is a ventriloquist who uses the deaf-mute code.
Before the great spastic movements begin with a drum-like roll of the torso, Cleo circles about the stage with the hypnotic ease and lassitude of a cobra. The supple, milk-white legs are screened behind a veil of beads girdled at the waist; the pink nipples are draped with transparent gauze. She is boneless, milky, drugged: a medusa with a straw wig undulating in a lake of glass beads.