Airships (16 page)

But it was dropped and I was pulled out and went home a lieutenant.

That's all right. I've got four hundred and two boys out there—the ones that got back—who love me and know the truth, who love me
because
they know the truth.

It's Tubby's lost fame I dream about.

The Army confiscated the roll and all his pictures. I wrote the Pentagon a letter asking for a print and waited two years here in Vicksburg without even a statement they received the note. I see his wife, who's remarried and is fat herself now, at the discount drugstore every now and then. She has the look of a kind of hopeless cheer. I got a print from the Pentagon when the war was over and it didn't matter. Li Dap looked wonderful—strained, abused and wild, his hair flying over his eyes while he's making a statement full of conviction.

It made me start thinking of faces again.

Since I've been home I've crawled in bed with almost anything that would have me. I've slept with high-school teachers, Negroes and, the other night, my own aunt. It made her smile. All those years of keeping her body in trim came to something, the big naughty surprise that the other women look for in religion, God showing up and killing their neighbors, sparing them. But she knows a lot about things and I think I'll be in love with her.

We were at the John Whitelaw vs. Whitney Maxwell play-off together. It was a piece of wonder. I felt thankful to the wind or God or whoever who brought that fine contest near enough by. When they hit the ball, the sound traveled like a rifle snap out over the bluffs. When it was impossible to hit the ball, that is exactly when they hit it.

My aunt grabbed hold of my fingers when the tension was almost up to a roar. The last two holes. Ah, John lost. I looked over the despondency of the home crowd.

Fools! Fools!. I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful.

I threw a party, wore a very sharp suit. My wife had out all sorts of hors d'oeuvres, some ordered from long off—little briny peppery seafoods you wouldn't have thought of as something to eat. We waited for the guests. Some of the food went bad. Hardly anybody came. It was the night of the lunar eclipse, I think. Underwood, the pianist, showed up and maybe twelve other people. Three I never invited were there. We'd planned on sixty-five.

I guess this was the signal we weren't liked anymore in town.

Well, this had happened before.

Several we invited were lushes who normally wouldn't pass up cocktails at the home of Hitler. Also, there were two nymphomaniacs you could trust to come over in their highfashion halters so as to disappear around one in the morning with some new innocent lecher. We furthermore invited a few good dull souls who got on an occasional list because they were
good
and furnished a balance to the doubtful others. There was a passionate drudge in landscaping horticulture, for example.

But none of them came.

It was a hot evening and my air-conditioner broke down an hour before the party started.

An overall wretched event was in the stars.

Underwood came only for the piano. I own a huge in-tune Yamaha he cannot separate himself from. Late in the evening I like to join him on my electric bass.

Underwood never held much for electric instruments. He's forty-two, a traveler from the old beatnik and Charlie Parker tribe. I believe he thinks electric instruments are cowardly and unmanly. He does not like the basic idea of men joining talents with a wall socket. In the old days it was just hands, head and lungs, he says. The boys in the fifties were better all-around men, and the women were proud of being after-set quim.

Underwood liked to play with this particular drummer, about his age. But that night the drummer didn't show up, either. This, to my mind, was the most significant absentee at our party. That drummer had always come before. I thought he was addicted to playing with Underwood. So when Underwood had loosened up on a few numbers and the twelve of us had clapped and he came over for a drink, I asked him, “Why isn't Fred Poor here?”

“I don't know. Fred's got a big family now,” said Underwood.

“He's always come before. Last month. What's wrong with tonight? Something is wrong with tonight,” I said.

“The food's good. I can remember twenty friends in the old days around Detroit who'd be grooving up on this table. You'd thank em for taking your food. That's how solid they were,” said Underwood, drinking vodka straight off the ice and smelling at one of the fish hors d'oeuvres.

I saw my wife go into the bathroom. I eased back with a greeting to the sweated-up young priest who had the reputation of a terrific sex counselor. He was out there with the great lyrical lie that made everybody feel good. Is that why he showed up and the others not? His message was that modern man had invented psychology, mental illness, the whole arrogant malaise, to replace the soul. Sex he called God's rule to keep us simple and merry, as we were meant to be, lest we forget we are creatures and figure ourselves totally mental. One night I asked him what of Christ and Mary and the cult of celibacy. “Reason is, Mr. Lee, believe or
disbelieve and let be,” he answered. “I'm only a goddamned priest. I don't have to be smart or be a star in forensics.”

He headed out for more bourbon, and I trucked on after my wife.

I whispered in the bathroom keyhole and she let me in. She was rebuckling her sandal with a foot on the commode.

“Why didn't anybody come tonight? What do you think's wrong?” I asked her.

“I only know about why five aren't here. Talked to Jill.” She paused. One of Carolyn's habits is making you pose a question.

“Why?” I asked.

“The people Jill knew about said there was something about our life they didn't like. It made them feel edgy and depressed.”

“
What
?”

“Jill wouldn't ever say. She left right after she told me.”

When I went out, there weren't as many as before. Underwood was playing the piano and the priest was leaning on the table talking to one of the uninvited, a fat off-duty cop from about four houses up the row I'd wave to in the mornings when he was going out in his patrol car. Sitting down fanning herself was a slight old friend of my wife's who had never showed up at our other parties. She was some sort of monument to alert age in the neighborhood—about eighty, open mind, colorful anecdotes, crepy skin, a dress over-formal and thick stockings.

“Hi, Mrs. Craft,” I said.

“Isn't this a dreadful party? Poor Carolyn, all this food and drink. Which one's her husband?” the old lady said.

I realized maybe she'd never got a good look at me, or had poor eyes.

“I really don't know which one's her husband. What would you say was wrong with them, the Lees? Why have people stayed away from their party?” I said.

“I saw it happen to another couple once,” she said. “Everyone suddenly quit them.”

“Whose fault was it?”

“Oh, definitely theirs. Or rather
his
. She was congenial, similar to Carolyn. And everybody wanted a party. Oh, those gay sultry evenings!” She gave a delicate cough. “We invented gin and tonic, you know.”

“What was wrong with the husband?” I asked.

“He suddenly changed. He went bad. A handsome devil too. But we couldn't stand him after the change.”

“What sort of change?” I offered her the hearts of palm and the herring, which, I smelled, was getting gamy in the heat. She ate for a while. Then she looked ill.

“A change . . . I've got to leave. This heat is destroying me.”

She rose and went out the kitchen, opening the door herself and leaving for good.

Then I went back to the bathroom mirror. The same hopeful man with the sardonic grin was there, the same religious eyes and sensual mouth, sweetened up by the sharp suit and soft violet collar. I could see no diminution of my previous good graces. This was Washington and my vocation was interesting and perhaps even important. I generally tolerated everybody—no worms sought vent from my heart that I knew of. My wife and other women had said I had an unsettling charm.

I got out the electric bass and played along with Underwood. But I noticed a baleful look from him, something he'd never revealed before. So I quit and turned off the amplifier. I took a hard drink of Scotch in a cup and opened a closet in my study, got in, shut the door, and sat down on all my old school papers and newspaper notices in the cardboard boxes in the corner.

Here was me and the pitch dark, the odor of old paper and some of my outdoor clothes.

How have I offended? I asked. How do I cause depression
and edginess? How have I perhaps changed for the bad, as old Mrs. Craft hinted?

By my cigarette lighter I read a few of the newspaper notices on me and my work. I looked at my tough moral face, the spectacles that put me at a sort of intellectual remove, the sensual mouth to balance it, abetted by the curls of my auburn hair. In fact, no man I knew looked nearly anything like me. My wife told me that when we first met at Vanderbilt my looks pure and simple were what attracted her to me. Yet I was not vain. She was a brown-haired comely girl, in looks like many other brown-haired comely girls, and I loved her for her strong cheerful averageness. Salt of the earth. A few minor talents. Sturdy womb for our two children.

It was not her. It was me!

What have I done? I asked myself.

Then I heard heels on the stairs of my study. A pair was coming down, man and woman. They walked into the study and were silent for a while. Then I heard the sucking and the groans. For three or four minutes they must have kissed. Then:

“It's not any good
here
.”

“I know. I feel it. Even sex wouldn't be any good
here
.”

“You notice how all this good liquor tastes like iodine?”

They moaned and smacked a few more minutes. Then the man said, “Let's get out of here.”

When they went away, I let myself out of the closet. Underwood was standing at my desk. He looked at me crawling out of the closet. I had nothing to say. Neither did he for a while.

Then he said, “I guess I better not come over anymore.”

“What's wrong?” I said.

“The crazy . . . or
off
chick that lives upstairs that always comes down and leans on the piano about midnight every night? She's good-looking, but she sets me off. I get the creeps.”

“Did she come down again? I guess it's the piano. You ought to be flattered. Most of the time she sits up there in her chair reading.”

“Somebody said it was your sister. I don't know. She
looks
like you. Got the same curly auburn hair. It's like you with tits, if you think about it.”

“Well, of course it
is
my sister. For a while we had a reason for not telling that around. Trust me.”

“I trust you. But she makes my hair cold.”

“You loved all types back in the time of the beatniks. I always thought of you as a large-hearted person.”

“Something goes cold when she talks. I can't get with the thing she's after. For a while I thought she was far-out, some kind of philosopheress. But nothing hangs
in
in what she says.”

“She can have her moments. Don't you think she has a certain charm?”

“No doubt on that, with her lungs dripping over her gown. But when she talks, well . . .” He closed his eyes in an unsatisfactory dreaming sort of trance.

“Can't you see it? Can't you see the charm?” I demanded.

“Whatever, it don't sweeten me,” he said, setting down his glass.

He went out the study door.

There, leaning on the piano, in her perfect cobalt gown, was Patricia. She was waiting for Underwood. Near her, as I have intimated, I sometimes have no sense of my own petty mobility from one place to another. I appear, I hover, I turn. Her lush curls burned slowly round and round in the fire of the candle of the mantel. A blaze of silver came from her throatpiece, a lash of gemmy light bounced from her earrings.

Not a soul was in the room with her.

“Underwood's left,” I said.

“Music gone?” she said, holding out her hand and clutching her fingers.

“It would be cooler upstairs with your little window unit. You could read. What were you reading tonight?”

“
Heidi
. Such a sugar,” she said.

“Oh, yes. Much sugar. The old uncle.”

“Mountain,” she said.

By this time only the priest was left. He was having an almost rabidly sympathetic conversation with my wife. The man was flushed out and well drunk, a ship's captain crying his
full speed ahead
in the stern house of a boat rotting to pieces.

I looked over the long table of uneaten fish tasties. The heat had worked on them a couple more hours now and had brought them up to a really unacceptable sort of presence.

“Well. Ho ho. Look at all the stuff. All the cost,” I said.

“Just garbage God knows who, namely me, has to haul off and bury,” said my wife.

“Ah, no madam. I'll see to all. Trust me. I'm made for it,” swore the priest.

With that he began circling the table, grabbing up the fish dainties and cramming them in his pockets, coat and pants, wadding them into his hat. He spun by me with a high tilt of adieu. But then he bumped into Patricia, who had come in, and spilled some of the muck in his hat on the front of her gown. She didn't move. Then she looked downward into her bosom to the grease and fish flesh that smeared her gown.

“Fishies,” she said.

“What a
blight
I am! On this one, on this innocent belle! Strike me down!”

The priest wanted to touch her and clean her off, but could not. His hands trembled before the oil and flakes of fish on her stomach. He uttered a groan and ran from the house.