Barbary Shore (3 page)

“Yes, it is.”

When we reached his house, he paused, shook my hand, and smiled. “It’s been great knowing you, kid, and I’m glad I did you a favor.” Before I could reply, he went on. “There’s something I’d like to say, because right now like everybody else you’re at the crossroads, and the thing you want to ask yourself, Lovett, is which way are you going to go? Will you be against the people or will you be for them?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t thought that way in a long time.”

“You’ll have to. Wall Street will leave you no choice.” He smiled wisely, and something hard and smug came into his face. “There’s just one thing you got to remember, Mikey. It’s the basic issue, it’s the basic trouble with this country. Do you know what it is?”

I confessed I was not completely certain.

He prodded his thumb against my stomach and in a sepulchral voice he stated, “Empty bellies … empty bellies. That’s the issue, kid.”

Thus, unlike most partings, ours was on a basic issue. I turned once to wave at him from down the street before he went inside his house, and then I continued back to the dormitory and gathered my belongings. It was time for me to move.

My few possessions transported and unpacked, I lay on my new bed and mused about the novel I was going to write. Through this long summer I could turn back upon myself and discover … but I had seen so much of the world and, seeing, had so disconnected it, that I had everything to discover.

I daydreamed only a little while about my novel. Instead I was thinking of Guinevere. She was a nymphomaniac, he had said. Such a curious word. I had never applied it to anyone. It was difficult to forget her breasts which had thrust upward from their binding in copious splendor, so palpable that they obtained the intensification of art and became more real than themselves.

A jewel. But set in brass. This morning she had sported a house dress and covered it with a bathrobe. Her red hair, with which undoubtedly she was always experimenting, had been merely blowzy and flew out in all directions from her head. Yet there had been opera pumps on her feet, her nails had been painted, her lipstick was fresh. She was a house whose lawn was landscaped and whose kitchen was on fire. I
would not have been startled if she had turned around and like the half-dressed queen in the girlie show: surprise! her buttocks are exposed.

The nymphomaniac. As I was about to fall asleep for the first time in my new room, I realized that I wanted to take Guinevere to bed.

T
HE
attic, as I have indicated, was up three gloomy flights of stairs. Once, many years ago, the house had been a modest mansion, but now it was partitioned into cubicles. On the top story, a masterpiece of design, no window gave upon the landing, and at the head of the stairs, burning into perpetuity, one weak light bulb cast its sallow illumination upon my door, upon the doors of the two neighbors I had not met, and upon the oilcloth of the bathroom we shared.

It was a big house and gave the impression of being an empty house. Downstairs there were ten names arranged in ten brackets next to as many bells which did not ring, but a week could go by and I would pass no one upon the stairs. I hardly cared. In the last months I had come to know fewer and fewer people, and by the time I quit the dormitory, for better or for worse I was very much alone. At first this did not matter. I began my novel, and for a few days, completely isolated, I made progress. Since I could assume that a sizable portion of my life had been spent in one barracks or another, a room for myself was more than a luxury. Temporarily I felt free and rather happy. As though to exploit all the advantages of my new situation, I ate meals around the clock and slept as my whim directed.

Such a period could not last for long. A day passed and another, while pages of new manuscript collected on the desk. And about me, with patient regular industry, dust accumulated everywhere. Whatever plans I might have entertained for Guinevere were not to come passively to fruition. I never saw her. Conventional landlady, she never bothered to clean, and the dust in my room increased from minute to minute in competition with the hall outside. The entire house was filthy.

Except for the bathroom. This bore the evidence of regular attention, and even presented a certain immaculacy at times, a mystery to me until I met McLeod.

One morning I found a man at work washing the bathroom floor. He looked up and nodded, his cold clear eyes staring at me from behind his spectacles. “You’re the one who took over Dinsmore’s room?” he asked finally.

I answered his question, and he rose from his knees, introduced himself and made a short speech in a dry ironic voice. “I’ll tell you,” he said, pinching his thin lips primly, “this place is always a mess. Guinevere don’t get off her bottom long enough to wash a handkerchief, so I’ve taken over cleaning the bathroom twice a week, and far as I see there’s small profit in it.” He scratched his chin sourly. “I’ve asked Hollingsworth, the gentleman who resides in the other room up here, to pitch in once in a while, but he’s always got a hangover, or else he’s sprained his wrist, or there’s a mole on his belly.” He shrugged. “If you want to, Lovett, you can help me keep this clean, but I can tell you from the outset that if you don’t want to co-operate, I’ll still be doing it because unfortunately I’ve got a mania about neatness.”

My introduction to McLeod. On completing the discourse, he folded his long slender hands over the top of a broom handle, and pursed his mouth. At the moment he bore an astonishing resemblance to a witch, his gaunt face nodding
in communion with himself, his long thin body stooped in thought. When I did not reply immediately, he filled the gap by running a comb through his straight black hair, the action emphasizing the sweep of his sharp narrow nose.

“You’re a writer, Dinsmore told me.”

“More or less.”

“I see.” He gave the impression of listening carefully to what I said, evaluating my words, and then discarding them. “I’ve got a proposition,” McLeod said to me, “which you can take or leave. You clean up the bathroom on Wednesdays, and I’ll keep doing it on Saturday.” With little effort he gave the impression of saturating each word with a considerable weight of satire. I sensed that he was laughing at me.

Annoyed, I yawned. “What do you say we draw up a contract?”

His mouth, severe in repose, became mocking as he smiled. He looked at me shrewdly. “I’m getting you down a bit, eh?” Laughter altered his face so that for an instant he could appear young and merry. He drawled out his next offering with a self-satisfied air as though he were sucking a candy-drop. “Well, now, that’s a thought, Lovett. It’s a thought.” And still chuckling, he examined the bathroom floor, found it to his satisfaction, and stowed the broom in a corner. “I’m across the hall. Drop by when you’re dressed,” he offered.

I did, and we talked for an hour. I had thought he might be taciturn about himself, but he belied this impression by talking freely, or more exactly by conveying a series of specific details much as he might have furnished a dossier. He was forty-four, he told me, and he worked in a department store as a window dresser. He had grown up in Brooklyn, he had always been a solitary man. He had a father who lived in an Old Folks’ Home. Rarely saw him. Possesed a high-school education. Obtained in Brooklyn. “I’ve lived here always,” he said with his mocking
smile. “I’ve never been out of New York with the exception of one small trip to New Jersey. That’s m’life.” And he burst into laughter.

“Just that?” I asked.

“I see you don’t believe me. People rarely do. It’s because I give the impression of having some culture. I’ve studied, you see, by myself. I’m not a joiner, and I don’t put my education to work, but I am a great reader, it must be said.”

And with that, subtly yet unmistakably, he directed me to the door and shook hands, his eyes studying me in amusement.

I dropped into his room again the next evening and the next. I think I talked with McLeod five or six times that first week. However, I would not say we became friends quickly. He had a brutal honesty which made it difficult to speak casually with him. He would leap upon some passing statement I might make, and figuratively twirl my words about his finger as if to examine them from every aspect. I found myself continually on the defensive, and though with a left-handed fascination I was always providing matter for his mill, nonetheless I resented him for it.

What glee the process gave him. Once I mentioned a girl with whom I had recently had an affair, and I shrugged and said, “But it didn’t mean much. We got a little bored with each other, and drifted out of it.”

McLeod gave his sly grin, the side of his mouth sucking on the imaginary candy-drop. “You drifted out of it, eh?”

Irritably, I snapped, “Yes, I drifted out of it. Didn’t you ever hear of anything like that?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it. I hear it all the time. People are always drifting in and out of things.” He leaned back on the bed, and pressed his finger tips together. “I’ll tell you the truth, Lovett, I don’t know what those words mean. ‘Drifted in and out, drifted in and out,’ ” he repeated as though the phrase were delicious.
“When you have to, it’s pretty convenient to think of yourself as driftwood.”

“I can explain it to you.”

“Oh,” he said, grinning, “I know you can explain it to me. I just want to try to figure out m’self what it signifies drifting out of an affair. Because in the old days when I used to cut a figure with the women I had my share of it, and it seems to me now that when I broke up with a woman it was often somewhat nasty.”

“With a sadist like you,” I said in an attempt at humor. My answers were invariably dull, my temper ragged. He had a facility for wearing one down, and it was not surprising that when I swung I was wild.

McLeod nodded. “Oh, yes. When I’d examine my motives, I’d find elements which were ugly enough. I’ve been a bad piece of work in my time.” He said this with great severity.

Almost immediately, however, he would be prodding again. “Now, I don’t know about you, Lovett, but when I’d drift out of an affair I’d find if I started to think about it that the reasons were somewhat interesting. There were women I quit because I made love to them ineptly, unpleasant as that may be to admit. And then, taking the converse of the proposition, there was a woman or two in love with me and wanting to get married.” He began to laugh, quietly and ferociously. “ ‘What? Get married?’ I would say to them. ‘Who, me? Why I thought it was understood from the beginning that this was on a give and take basis.’ ” His mouth curled, his voice whined in a grotesque of outraged innocence. “Girlie, you got the wrong number. I thought it was understood we were modern individuals with a modern viewpoint.” He roared with laughter now. “Oh, my mother.” And then, his mouth mocking me, McLeod said, “That’s another one belongs with the driftwood.”

“Now, look,” I’d object, “does a man have to get married every time he starts a relation with a woman?”

“No.” He lit a cigarette, amused with me. “You see, Lovett, there’s a difference between you and me. You’re
honest.
I never was. I’d start off with the lady, and we’d have a nice conversation at the beginning about how neither of us could afford to get tied up, all understood, all good clean healthy fun.” His voice was steeped in ridicule. “Fine. Only you see, Lovett, I could never let it go at that. The old dependable mechanisms would start working in me. I’d begin operating. You know what I mean? I’d do everything in my power to make the girl love me—when you think of the genius I’ve squandered in bed. And sure enough there’d be the times when I’d talk her into being in love, when I’d worry her to death until there was never a man in the world who made love like me.” He coughed. “But once she admitted that.… finito! I was getting bored. I thought it was time we drifted apart.” He laughed again, at himself and at me. “Why, when the little lady would suggest marriage you should have seen me go into my act. ‘You’re welshing on the bargain,’ I would tell her, ‘I’m disappointed in you. How could you have betrayed me so?’ ” Once more he roared with laughter. “Oh, there was a devilish mechanism in it. You see, she betrayed me, you get it, she betrayed
me,
and it was time for us to drift apart.”

“I’m to take it that the shoe fits?”

McLeod looked out his window at the apartment house beyond. He seemed to be listening intently to the clanging of the steam donkey on the docks below the bluff, working overtime into the night. “I can’t say, Lovett. It’s always a good idea to know oneself.”

“I think I do.”

His face was still impassive, his thin mouth straight. “I suspect in your case there are special conditions.” Casually, he flicked the next sentence at me. “Mind telling a man how you got that patch on your skull?”

I was caught without guard. “It’s not your business,” I managed
to stammer, and I could feel myself blushing with anger.

He nodded without surprise, and continued in the same casual tone. He could have been a scientist examining a specimen. “My guess is that there’re other tattoos on your skin.”

“Guess away.”

“You need maintain no front with me,” McLeod said quietly. “It’s friendly curiosity.”

“Anything you want to know,” I murmured.

He did not answer directly. “The analysis I gave of your motives and mine in drifting out of an affair is very curious.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not the least bit true for either of us. I presented it merely as a construction. I, for example, have never been tormented by excessive sexual vanity.”

“Then what were you getting at?”

McLeod shrugged. “I was interested in the way you spoke so casually. It would not be surprising if the affair with the little lady you mentioned were more painful than that to you.”

He was not far wrong. Casual it had been for her, and painful for me. “Possibly,” I admitted with some discomfort.

“You see, Lovett, the thing I noticed from the beginning is a certain passion to pass yourself off like anyone else. Perhaps someday you’ll tell me why you choose to stay in this rooming house, a lonely proposition I should think.”