Sexus (11 page)

“What is it you'd like to know about my family?” she said, turning to me.

“I don't want to ask you anything that would make you uncomfortable,” I said, “but if it isn't indiscreet would you mind telling us about your step-mother?”

“Where did your step-mother come from?” asked Kronski.

“From Vienna,” said Mara.

“And you, were you born in Vienna too?”

“No, I was born in Roumania, in a little mountain village. I may have some Gypsy blood in me.”

“You mean your mother was a Gypsy?”

“Yes, there's a story to that effect. My father is said to have run away from her on the eve of his marriage to my stepmother. That's why my mother hates me, I guess. I'm the black sheep of the family.”

“And you adore your father, I suppose?”

“I worship him. He's like me. The others are strangers to me—we haven't anything in common.”

“And you support the family, is that it?” said Kronski.

“Who told you that? I see, so that's what you were talking about when . . .”

“No, Mara, nobody told me. I can see it in your face. You're making a sacrifice of yourself—that's why you're unhappy.”

“I won't deny it,” she said. “It's for my father I'm doing it. He's an invalid, he can't work any more.”

“What's the matter with your brothers?”

“Nothing. Just lazy. I spoiled them. You see, I ran away when I was sixteen; I couldn't stand the life at home. I stayed away a year; when I returned I found them in misery. They're helpless. I'm the only one who has any initiative.”

“And you support the entire family?”

“I try to,” she said. “Sometimes I want to give up—it's too big a burden. But I can't. If I were to walk out they would starve to death.”

“Nonsense,” said Kronski heatedly. “That's the very thing you ought to do.”

“But I can't—not while my father is alive. I'd do anything, I'd prostitute myself, rather than see him in want.”

“And they'd let you do it, too,” said Kronski. “Look, Mara, you've put yourself in a false position. You can't assume all the responsibility. Let the others take care of themselves. Take your father away—we'll help you look after him. He doesn't know how you get the money, does he? You haven't told him that you work in a dance hall, have you?”

“No, I haven't. He thinks I'm in the theater. But my mother knows.”

“And she doesn't care?”

“Care?”
said Mara, with a bitter smile. “She wouldn't care what I did so long as I keep the house together. She says I'm no good. Calls me a whore. I'm just like my mother, she says.”

I interrupted. “Mara,” I said, “I had no idea it was as bad as this. Kronski's right, you've got to extricate yourself. Why don't you do as he suggests—leave the family and take your father along with you?”

“I'd love to,” she said, “but my father would never leave my mother. She's got a hold over him—she's made a child of him.”

“But if he knew what you were doing?”

“He'll never know. I won't let anybody tell him. My mother threatened to tell him once: I told her I'd kill her if she did.” She smiled bitterly. “Do you know what my mother said? She said I had been trying to poison her.”

At this point Kronski suggested that we continue the conversation uptown at the home of a friend of his who was away. He said we could spend the night there if we liked. In the subway his mood changed; he became again the leering, bantering, diabolical, pale-faced toad that he usually was. This meant that he considered himself seductive, felt empowered to ogle the attractive-looking females. The perspiration was pouring down his face, wilting his collar. His talk became hectic, scattered, altogether without continuity. In his distorted way he was trying to create an atmosphere of drama; he flapped his arms loosely, like a demented bat caught between two powerful searchlights.

To my disgust Mara appeared to be amused by this spectacle. “He's quite mad, your friend,” she said, “but I like him.”

Kronski overheard the remark. He grinned tragically and the perspiration began flowing more freely. The more he grinned, the more he clowned and aped it, the more melancholy he looked. He never wanted anybody to think him sad. He was Kronski, the big, vital, healthy, jovial, negligent, reckless, carefree fellow who solved everybody's problems. He could talk for hours on end—for days, if you had the
courage to listen to him. He awoke talking, plunging immediately into hairsplitting arguments, always about the fate of the world, about its biochemical nature, its astrophysical constitution, its politico-economic configuration. The world was in a disastrous state; he knew, because he was always amassing facts about the shortage of wheat or the shortage of petroleum, or making researches into the condition of the Soviet Army or the condition of our arsenals and fortifications. He would say, as if it were a fact beyond dispute, that the soldiers of the Soviet Army could not make war this winter because they had only so many overcoats, so many shoes, etc. He talked about carbohydrates, fats, sugar, etc. He talked about world supplies as though he were running the world. He knew more about international law than the most famous authority on the subject. There wasn't any subject under the sun about which he did not appear to have a complete and exhaustive knowledge. As yet he was only an intern in a city hospital, but in a few years he would be a celebrated surgeon or psychiatrist, or perhaps something else, he didn't know yet what he would elect to be. “Why don't you decide to become President of the United States?” his friends would inquire ironically. “Because I'm not a half-wit,” he would answer, making a sour puss. “You think I couldn't become President if I wanted to? Listen, you don't think it takes brains to become President of the United States, do you? No, I want a real job. I want to help people, I don't want to bamboozle them. If I were to take this country over I'd clean house from top to bottom. To begin with I'd have guys like you castrated. . . .” He'd go on this way for an hour or two, cleaning up the world, putting the big house in order, paving the way for the brotherhood of man and the empire of free thought. Every day of his life he went over the affairs of the world with a fine comb, cleaning out the lice that made men's thinking lousy. One day he'd be all heated up about the condition of the slaves on the Gold Coast, quoting you the price of bullion on the half shell or some other fabulous statistical concoction which inadvertently made men hate one another and created superfluous jobs for spineless, weak-chested men on financial dope sheets, thus adding to the
burden of intangible political economies. Another day he'd be up in arms about chromium or permanganate, because Germany perhaps or Roumania had cornered the market on something or other which would make it difficult for the surgeons in the Soviet Army to operate when the big day arrived. Or he would have just garnered the latest dope on a new and startling pest which would soon reduce the civilized world to anarchy unless we acted at once and with the greatest wisdom. How the world staggered along day after day without Dr. Kronski's guidance was a mystery which he never cleared up. Dr. Kronski was never in doubt about his analyses of world conditions. Depressions, panics, floods, revolutions, plagues, all these phenomena were manifesting themselves simply to corroborate his judgment. Calamities and catastrophes made him gleeful; he croaked and chortled like the world toad in embryo. How were things going with him personally—nobody ever asked him that question. Personally it was no go. He was chopping up arms and legs for the moment, since nobody had the perspicacity to ask anything better of him. His first wife had died because of a medical blunder and his second wife would soon be going crazy, if she knew what we were talking about. He could plan the most wonderful model houses for the New Republic of Mankind but oddly enough he couldn't keep his own little nest free of bedbugs and other vermin, and because of his preoccupation with world events, setting things to right in Africa, Guadaloupe, Singapore, and so on, his own place was always just a trifle upset, that is to say, dishes unwashed, beds unmade, furniture falling apart, butter running rancid, toilet stopped up, tubs leaking, dirty combs lying on the table and in general a pleasing, wretched, mildly insane state of dilapidation which manifested itself in the person of Dr. Kronski personally in the form of dandruff, eczema, boils, blisters, fallen arches, warts, wens, halitosis, indigestion and other minor disorders, none of them serious because once the world order was established everything pertaining to the past would disappear and man would shine forth in a new skin like a newborn lamb.

The friend whose house he was taking us to was an artist,
he informed us. Being a friend of the great Dr. Kronski that meant an uncommon artist, one who would be recognized only when the millennium had been ushered in. His friend was both a painter and a musician—equally great in both realms. The music we wouldn't be able to hear, owing to his friend's absence, but we would be able to see his paintings—some of them, that is, because the great bulk of them he had destroyed. If it weren't for Kronski he would have destroyed everything. I inquired casually what his friend was doing at the moment. He was running a model farm for defective children in the wilds of Canada. Kronski had organized the movement himself but was too busy thinking things out to bother with the practical details of management. Besides, his friend was a consumptive, and he would have to remain up there forever most likely. Kronski telegraphed him now and then to advise him about this and that. It was only a beginning—soon he would empty the hospitals and asylums of their inmates, prove to the world that the poor can take care of the poor and the weak the weak and the crippled the crippled and the defective the defective.

“Is that one of your friend's paintings?” I asked, as he switched on the light and a huge vomit of yellowish-green bile leaped out from the wall.

“That's one of his early things,” said Kronski. “He keeps it for sentimental reasons. I've put his best things away in storage. But here's a little one that gives you some idea of what he can do.” He looked at it with pride, as if it were the work of his own offspring. “It's marvelous, isn't it?”

“Terrible,” I said. “He has a shit complex; he must have been born in the gutter, in a pool of stale horse piss on a sullen day in February near a gas house.”

“You
would
say that,” said Kronski vengefully. “You don't know an honest painter when you see one. You admire the revolutionaries of yesterday. You're a Romantic.”

“Your friend may be revolutionary but he's no painter,” I insisted. “He hasn't any love in him; he just hates, and what's more he can't even paint what he hates. He's fog-eyed. You say he's a consumptive: I say he's bilious. He stinks, your
friend, and so does his place. Why don't you open the windows? It smells as though a dog had died here.”

“Guinea pigs, you mean. I've been using the place as a laboratory, that's why it stinks a bit. Your nose is too sensitive, Mister Miller. You're an aesthete.”

“Is there anything to drink here?” I asked.

There wasn't, of course, but Kronski offered to run out and get something. “Bring something strong,” I said. “This place makes you retch. No wonder the poor bastard got consumptive.”

Kronski trotted off rather sheepishly, I looked at Mara. “What do you think? Will we wait for him or shall we beat it?”

“You're very unkind. No, let's wait. I'd like to hear him talk some more—he's interesting. And he really thinks a lot of you. I can see that by the way he looks at you.”

“He's only interesting the first time,” I said. “Frankly, he bores me stiff. I've been listening to this stuff for years. It's sheer crap. He may be intelligent but he's got a screw loose somewhere. He'll commit suicide one day, mark my words. Besides, he brings bad luck. Whenever I meet that guy things turn out wrong. He carries death around with him, don't you feel that? If he isn't croaking he's gibbering like an ape. How can you be friends with a guy like that? He wants you to be a friend of his sorrow. What's eating him I don't know. He's worried about the world. I don't give a shit about the world. I can't make the world right, neither can he . . . neither can anybody. Why doesn't he try to live? The world mightn't be so bad if we tried to enjoy ourselves a little more. No, he riles me.”

Kronski came back with some vile liquor he claimed was all he could find at that hour. He seldom drank more than a thimbleful himself so it didn't make much difference to him whether we poisoned ourselves or not. He hoped it would poison us, he said. He was depressed. He seemed to have settled in for an all-night depression. Mara, like an idiot, felt sorry for him. He stretched out on the sofa and lay his head in her lap. He began another line, a weird one—the impersonal sorrow of the world. It was not argument and invective
as before but a chant, a dictaphone chant addressed to the millions of unhappy creatures throughout the world. Dr. Kronski always played this tune in the dark, his head on some woman's lap, his hand dragging the carpet.

His head nestling in her lap like a swollen viper, the words sieved through Kronski's mouth like gas escaping through a half-opened cock. It was the weird of the irreducible human atom, the subsoul wandering in the cellar of collective misery. Dr. Kronski ceased to exist: only the pain and torment remained, functioning as positive and negative electrons in the vast atomic vacuum of a lost personality. In this state of abeyance not even the miraculous Sovietization of the world could rouse a spark of enthusiasm in him. What spoke were the nerves, the ductless glands, the spleen, the liver, the kidneys, the little blood vessels lying close to the surface of the skin. The skin itself was just a bag in which was loosely collected a rather messy outfit of bones, muscles, sinews, blood, fat, lymph, bile, urine, dung, and so on. Germs were stewing around in this stinking bag of guts; the germs would win out no matter how brilliantly that cage of dull gray matter called the brain functioned. The body was in hostage to Death, and Dr. Kronski, so vital in the X-ray world of statistics, was just a louse to be cracked under a dirty nail when it came to surrender his shell. It never occurred to Dr. Kronski, in these fits of genitourinary depression, that there might be a view of the universe in which death assumed another aspect. He had disemboweled, dissected and chopped to bits so many corpses that death had come to mean something very concrete—a piece of cold meat lying on the mortuary slab, so to say. The light went out and the machine stopped, and after a time it would stink.
Voilà,
it was as plain and simple as that. In death the loveliest creature imaginable was just another piece of extraordinary cold plumbing. He had looked at his wife, just after the gangrene had set in; she might have been a codfish, he intimated, for all the attractiveness she displayed. The thought of the pain she was suffering was overruled by the knowledge of what was going on inside that body. Death had already made his entry and his work was fascinating to behold. Death is always present, he
asserted. Death lurks in dark corners, waiting for the opportune moment to raise his head and strike. That is the only real bond we have, he said—the constant presence of death in all of us always.