Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust (4 page)

Miss Lonelyhearts drank steadily. He was smiling an innocent, amused smile, the smile of an anarchist sitting in the movies with a bomb in his pocket. If the people around him only knew what was in his pocket. In a little while he would leave to kill the President.

Not until he heard his own name mentioned did he stop smiling and again begin to listen.

“He’s a leper licker. Shrike says he wants to lick lepers. Barkeep, a leper for the gent.”

“If you haven’t got a leper, give him a Hungarian.”

“Well, that’s the trouble with his approach to God. It’s too damn literary—plain song, Latin poetry, medieval painting, Huysmans, stained-glass windows and crap like that.”

“Even if he were to have a genuine religious experience, it would be personal and so meaningless, except to a psychologist.”

“The trouble with him, the trouble with all of us, is that we have no outer life, only an inner one, and that by necessity.”

“He’s an escapist. He wants to cultivate his interior garden. But you can’t escape, and where is he going to find a market for the fruits of his personality? The Farm Board is a failure.

“What I say is, after all one has to earn a living. We can’t all believe in Christ, and what does the farmer care about art? He takes his shoes off to get the warm feel of the rich earth between his toes. You can’t take your shoes off in church.”

Miss Lonelyhearts had again begun to smile. Like Shrike, the man they imitated, they were machines for making jokes. A button machine makes buttons, no matter what the power used, foot, steam or electricity. They, no matter what the motivating force, death, love or God, made jokes.

“Was their nonsense the only barrier?” he asked himself. “Had he been thwarted by such a low hurdle?”

The whisky was good and he felt warm and sure. Through the light-blue tobacco smoke, the mahogany bar shone like wet gold. The glasses and bottles, their high lights exploding, rang like a battery of little bells when the bartender touched them together. He forgot that his heart was a bomb to remember an incident of his childhood. One winter evening, he had been waiting with his little sister for their father to come home from church. She was eight years old then, and he was twelve. Made sad by the pause between playing and eating, he had gone to the piano and had begun a piece by Mozart. It was the first time he had ever voluntarily gone to the piano. His sister left her picture book to dance to his music. She had never danced before. She danced gravely and carefully, a simple dance yet formal…. As Miss Lonelyhearts stood at the bar, swaying slightly to the remembered music, he thought of children dancing. Square replacing oblong and being replaced by circle. Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.

He stepped away from the bar and accidentally collided with a man holding a glass of beer. When he turned to beg the man’s pardon, he received a punch in the mouth. Later he found himself at a table in the back room, playing with a loose tooth. He wondered why his hat did not fit and discovered a lump on the back of his head. He must have fallen. The hurdle was higher than he had thought.

His anger swung in large drunken circles. What in Christ’s name was this Christ business? And children gravely dancing? He would ask Shrike to be transferred to the sports department.

Ned Gates came in to see how he was getting along and suggested the fresh air. Gates was also very drunk. When they left the speakeasy together, they found that it was snowing.

Miss Lonelyhearts’ anger grew cold and sodden like the snow. He and his companion staggered along with their heads down, turning corners at random, until they found themselves in front of the little park. A light was burning in the comfort station and they went in to warm up.

An old man was sitting on one of the toilets. The door of his booth was propped open and he was sitting on the turned-down toilet cover.

Gates hailed him. “Well, well, smug as a bug in a rug, eh?”

The old man jumped with fright, but finally managed to speak. “What do you want? Please let me alone.” His voice was like a flute; it did not vibrate.

“If you can’t get a woman, get a clean old man,” Gates sang.

The old man looked as if he were going to cry, but suddenly laughed instead. A terrible cough started under his laugh, and catching at the bottom of his lungs, it ripped into his throat. He turned away to wipe his mouth.

Miss Lonelyhearts tried to get Gates to leave, but he refused to go without the old man. They both grabbed him and pulled him out of the stall and through the door of the comfort station. He went soft in their arms and started to giggle. Miss Lonelyhearts fought off a desire to hit him.

The snow had stopped falling and it had grown very cold. The old man did not have an overcoat, but said that he found the cold exhilarating. He carried a cane and wore gloves because, as he said, he detested red hands.

Instead of going back to Delehanty’s, they went to an Italian cellar close by the park. The old man tried to get them to drink coffee, but they told him to mind his own business and drank rye. The whisky burned Miss Lonelyhearts’ cut lip.

Gates was annoyed by the old man’s elaborate manners. “Listen, you,” he said, “cut out the gentlemanly stuff and tell us the story of your life.”

The old man drew himself up like a little girl making a muscle.

“Aw, come off,” Gates said. “We’re scientists. He’s Havelock Ellis and I’m Krafft-Ebing. When did you first discover homo-sexualistic tendencies in yourself?”

“What do you mean, sir? I…”

“Yeh, I know, but how about your difference from other men?”

“How dare you…” He gave a little scream of indignation.

“Now, now,” Miss Lonelyhearts said, “he didn’t mean to insult you. Scientists have terribly bad manners…. But you are a pervert, aren’t you?”

The old man raised his cane to strike him. Gates grabbed it from behind and wrenched it out of his hand. He began to cough violently and held his black satin tie to his mouth. Still coughing he dragged himself to a chair in the back of a room.

Miss Lonelyhearts felt as he had felt years before, when he had accidentally stepped on a small frog. Its spilled guts had filled him with pity, but when its suffering had become real to his senses, his pity had turned to rage and he had beaten it frantically until it was dead.

“I’ll get the bastard’s life story,” he shouted, and started after him. Gates followed laughing.

At their approach, the old man jumped to his feet. Miss Lonelyhearts caught him and forced him back into his chair.

“We’re psychologists,” he said. “We want to help you. What’s your name?”

“George B. Simpson.”

“What does the B stand for?”

“Bramhall.”

“Your age, please, and the nature of your quest?”

“By what right do you ask?”

“Science gives me the right.”

“Let’s drop it,” Gates said. “The old fag is going to cry.”

“No, Krafft-Ebing, sentiment must never be permitted to interfere with the probings of science.”

Miss Lonelyhearts put his arm around the old man. “Tell us the story of your life,” he said, loading his voice with sympathy.

“I have no story.”

“You must have. Every one has a life story.”

The old man began to sob.

“Yes, I know, your tale is a sad one. Tell it, damn you, tell it.”

When the old man still remained silent, he took his arm and twisted it. Gates tried to tear him away, but he refused to let go. He was twisting the arm of all the sick and miserable, broken and betrayed, inarticulate and impotent. He was twisting the arm of Desperate, Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband.

The old man began to scream. Somebody hit Miss Lonelyhearts from behind with a chair.

Miss Lonelyhearts and Mrs. Shrike

Miss Lonelyhearts lay on his bed fully dressed, just as he had been dumped the night before. His head ached and his thoughts revolved inside the pain like a wheel within a wheel. When he opened his eyes, the room, like a third wheel, revolved around the pain in his head.

From where he lay he could see the alarm clock. It was half past three. When the telephone rang, he crawled out of the sour pile of bed clothes. Shrike wanted to know if he intended to show up at the office. He answered that he was drunk but would try to get there.

He undressed slowly and took a bath. The hot water made his body feel good, but his heart remained a congealed lump of icy fat. After drying himself, he found a little whisky in the medicine chest and drank it. The alcohol warmed only the lining of his stomach.

He shaved, put on a clean shirt and a freshly pressed suit and went out to get something to eat. When he had finished his second cup of scalding coffee, it was too late for him to go to work. But he had nothing to worry about, for Shrike would never fire him. He made too perfect a butt for Shrike’s jokes. Once he had tried to get fired by recommending suicide in his column. All that Shrike had said was: “Remember, please, that your job is to increase the circulation of our paper. Suicide, it is only reasonable to think, must defeat this purpose.”

He paid for his breakfast and left the cafeteria. Some exercise might warm him. He decided to take a brisk walk, but he soon grew tired and when he reached the little park, he slumped down on a bench opposite the Mexican War obelisk.

The stone shaft cast a long, rigid shadow on the walk in front of him. He sat staring at it without knowing why until he noticed that it was lengthening in rapid jerks, not as shadows usually lengthen. He grew frightened and looked up quickly at the monument. It seemed red and swollen in the dying sun, as though it were about to spout a load of granite seed.

He hurried away. When he had regained the street, he started to laugh. Although he had tried hot water, whisky, coffee, exercise, he had completely forgotten sex. What he really needed was a woman. He laughed again, remembering that at college all his friends had believed intercourse capable of steadying the nerves, relaxing the muscles and clearing the blood.

But he knew only two women who would tolerate him. He had spoiled his chances with Betty, so it would have to be Mary Shrike.

When he kissed Shrike’s wife, he felt less like a joke. She returned his kisses because she hated Shrike. But even there Shrike had beaten him. No matter how hard he begged her to give Shrike horns, she refused to sleep with him.

Although Mary always grunted and upset her eyes, she would not associate what she felt with the sexual act. When he forced this association, she became very angry. He had been convinced that her grunts were genuine by the change that took place in her when he kissed her heavily. Then her body gave off an odor that enriched the synthetic flower scent she used behind her ears and in the hollows of her neck. No similar change ever took place in his own body, however. Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.

He decided to get a few drinks and then call Mary from Delehanty’s. It was quite early and the speakeasy was empty. The bartender served him and went back to his newspaper.

On the mirror behind the bar hung a poster advertising a mineral water. It showed a naked girl made modest by the mist that rose from the spring at her feet. The artist had taken a great deal of care in drawing her breasts and their nipples stuck out like tiny red hats.

He tried to excite himself into eagerness by thinking of the play Mary made with her breasts. She used them as the coquettes of long ago had used their fans. One of her tricks was to wear a medal low down on her chest. Whenever he asked to see it, instead of drawing it out she leaned over for him to look. Although he had often asked to see the medal, he had not yet found out what it represented.

But the excitement refused to come. If anything, he felt colder than before he had started to think of women. It was not his line. Nevertheless, he persisted in it, out of desperation, and went to the telephone to call Mary.

“Is that you?” she asked, then added before he could reply, “I must see you at once. I’ve quarreled with him. This time I’m through.”

She always talked in headlines and her excitement forced him to be casual. “O. K.,” he said. “When? Where?”

“Anywhere, I’m through with that skunk, I tell you, I’m through.”

She had quarreled with Shrike before and he knew that in return for an ordinary number of kisses, he would have to listen to an extraordinary amount of complaining.

“Do you want to meet me here, in Delehanty’s?” he asked.

“No, you come here. We’ll be alone and anyway I have to bathe and get dressed.”

When he arrived at her place, he would probably find Shrike there with her on his lap. They would both be glad to see him and all three of them would go to the movies where Mary would hold his hand under the seat.

He went back to the bar for another drink, then bought a quart of Scotch and took a cab. Shrike opened the door. Although he had expected to see him, he was embarrassed and tried to cover his confusion by making believe that he was extremely drunk.

“Come in, come in, homebreaker,” Shrike said with a laugh. “The Mrs. will be out in a few minutes. She’s in the tub.”

Shrike took the bottle he was carrying and pulled its cork. Then he got some charged water and made two highballs.

“Well,” Shrike said, lifting his drink, “so you’re going in for this kind of stuff, eh? Whisky and the boss’s wife.”

Miss Lonelyhearts always found it impossible to reply to him. The answers he wanted to make were too general and began too far back in the history of their relationship.

“You’re doing field work, I take it,” Shrike said. “Well, don’t put this whisky on your expense account. However, we like to see a young man with his heart in his work. You’ve been going around with yours in your mouth.”

Miss Lonelyhearts made a desperate attempt to kid back. “And you,” he said, “you’re an old meanie who beats his wife.”

Shrike laughed, but too long and too loudly, then broke off with an elaborate sigh. “Ah, my lad,” he said, “you’re wrong. It’s Mary who does the beating.”