The Old Man and Me (23 page)

We all used to go out a lot together, Seedy and me and the other four. All the time. All those nights.

But the night finally came, a night strung on to our long luminous necklace of bumpy baroque-pearl nights so apparently
endless I never dreamt that this particular night would be—at last—the clasp. It was a night, I mean, beginning so usually, so insignificantly, so like all the rest, I wasn’t even looking when it happened.

We were in pretty bad shape by then, both Seedy and I. I was smoking the roof off my mouth. I had lost fifteen pounds and any interest in food. I ate about every other day. On the other hand I was drinking a great deal. Drink had become important to me, it kept me going for long stretches at a time, although in the end, passing out around every three nights as I did, it tired me dreadfully so that I was sleeping well into most afternoons. Actually I kept myself going on a blend of nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, barbiturates, stimulants and a modest use of narcotics (only four or five puffs per evening on the communal marijuana stick; never more than one spoonful of hashish jam at a time). After a while I was able to balance one stimulant or sedative against another (rather like Alice nibbling on the two sides of the mushroom that made her grow or shrink) with such deftness that, by a dash of this, a few grains of that, and a puff of the other, I could play the most indescribably delicate airs on my psyche. Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard...! I cry now at their memory, blurred though they be. Sometimes I would arrange my pills neatly on my bureau top: dexedrine, deximyl, drinimyl, benzedrine, librium, seconal, veganin, etc., etc., anything I could get my hands on, in neat rows, spansules to the front in their pretty two-tone capsule-jackets; deep-green and white, or plum and bright-blue, the tiny pill grains of contrasting colours sparkling through the transparent celluloid; then the “shorties,” those heart-shaped “happy-pills” of soft musty mauve, pale blue, or apple-green, with that faint incision down their middles; a scattering of the stark white bennies, and, finally, the vitamin pills—Vitamin C
forte
(just for the hell of it) tailored in chic yellow-and-brown costumes, and looking at them I would feel within them (or rather with
them
within
me
) the possibilities of a whole symphony. First movement: (gulp) Dexedrine: Allegro. Second movement: (slurp) Gin-and-tonic: Andante. Spansule...(pouf!) Minuet. Third movement: Benzedrine: Scherzo. Rondo and collapse. Ah, that scherzoid rag. Or how about going along with those programme notes for Beethoven’s 6th? “Awakening of Serene Impressions on Arriving in the Country”: A soupçon of hashish jam? “Scene by the Brook”: A touch of drinimyl? “A Merry Gathering of Peasant Folk’: A couple of scotches. “Thunderstorm”: A couple of hundred more. “Glad and Thankful Feelings after the Storm”: A miltown and a seconal. I don’t know. Something like that.

It was curious how this heightened state of emotion affected my lachrymal gland so that quite often while witnessing some perfectly ordinary event I would find myself—for no reason at all—surprised by tears. I would notice, for instance, a young girl all dressed up for a party getting into a car with her mother and father, all of them going off together, and the familiar stinging behind my eyes would begin. Or that cheerful, pregnant waitress at the corner Espresso always so pleasant to me: “Afternoon, love. Saved you a bun. Bit soggy now—shall I heat it up?” Only that, and the sun shining through the windows on that particular corner of the street and pow! I was off again. Or a jar of honey at Fortnum and Mason’s, a pretty blue jar of honey. Imagine! My sense of direction too had become weak—would desert me—would even work in reverse sometimes. I didn’t know left from right any longer; didn’t know up from down. At least I would ponder it for bewildered minutes in Harrods. I would be on the fifth floor and want the elevator to come and take me down. Did you push the
up
button or the
down
one? I must have known once, it was a thing I had done all my life. But I didn’t know it now. I was always getting lost and having to ask for directions. Second turning on your right, they would say, and I would arrive at the second turning only to wonder—right? left? staring hopefully down at my hands waiting for them to yield up the answer.

Not that I was losing control. That was the funny thing. I was very much in control. It was as if I had so much
determination
on my mind I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. And my whole determination, of course, was centred around C. D. For again I was becoming aware of his attempts to slip away from me. I seemed to feel it even before he did. Lady Mary’s grey eminent shadow reappearing; that weekend with her in the country—saved by her bolting off with Michael Ward Bell—but wow—
close
. And at the same time, starting up slowly but gaining momentum, any amount of vague activity all pointing to a closing down of the interests of one side of Seedy’s life and an opening up of others. Oh, there was nothing so definite as
packing
. Most of my clues I gathered from straining outside the kitchen door trying to overhear his conferences with Blake, catching the odd “blankets to the cleaners and the morning room curtains too, I think,” and “for that month of course shan’t be needing” and “not absolutely necessary to forward,” until finally there was no doubt. Preparations for a journey. He was spending a whole month at the Daggoners’. From my point of view it couldn’t be worse—the Daggoners were his most ardent pimps and the air would be lush with aristocratic young English girls. All those sad young gels. Oh no you don’t, C. D. Oh no you don’t. And pit myself against those languid dreamy
real
heiress-kooks? I wasn’t having any of that. The only thing to do was somehow to keep him in my power and under my eyes and weak. But how weak? That was the question constantly exciting my imagination. I had satisfied myself by now that the idea of actually trying to kill him was a purely puerile prank playing itself out strictly between myself and my fantasy even if sometimes it ran away with me, and there was that constant Deathbed scene which I spun over and over again, working myself from a kind of sick frenzy into an orgy of wild weeping.

You are probably wondering at this point why I didn’t spirit him away completely from the temptations of the Island—from the English climate, the pretty leafy English squares and pretty leafy English girls, or Bread Sauce or Detachable collars, or the English railway dining-car smell, or the Arsenal-Manchester Cup Final or English sex scandals, or the Caste System, or whatever it is the Briton is supposed to hold so dear—and carry him off to some other country, some cannibal isle where I could eat him in peace, where at least I could have him and his money—dammit,
my
money—to myself. And in many ways this presented itself as the only logical solution. After all he did love travelling. At that time, however, I was hard at practising on myself the complicated perversity of worrying about why my true identity had
not
been discovered all this while; worrying why the faces on the streets
didn’t
happen to be those of American schoolmates. I took this as a sign that Providence was giving me a break, at the same time warning me that the safer it had allowed our known route and rut to become, the unsafer it would be to step outside the magic
circle. Added to that were all the technical difficulties that would be caused by my real name on my passport and the hotel registrations, and all the endless subterfuges against outside circumstances which I knew I was by then
too concentrated on him
to deal with effectively. And what other unknown dangers might not be lurking in foreign lands? He knew every place and he knew everyone everywhere; it was his business to know, as he had once put it to me. Except for America. I often wonder what would have happened if it had ever been possible—setting aside the gigantic risk it involved me in—for us to have gone to America together. Of course the question can never be anything but academic. For even if I had taken my courage in both hands...and...and what else? Worn dark glasses solidly year round? Hidden in the Hills of Forest or the Heights of Brooklyn? Informed every friend and acquaintance and the mailman of my deception? Even if I had had genius enough to work out some system, the bottom of the trouble was still old McKee. I mean he never would have gone. The New World, as we all know by now, represented to him a denial of everything he held sacred. It was a personal slap in the face to him—smug snob, poor, square, demented Esquare, ugly old obsolete monster. No wonder it became so important for me to ki— to destroy him.

But what I find now, thinking it all over, is that the
real
and
final
reason The Rape of C. D. (good idea for a painting) never took place was that, for what for want of a better word I shall have to call our “affair” to remain at its healthiest (by that I mean of course at its unhealthiest), it was absolutely necessary, as Jimbo would have put it, for us to make the scene in England and nowhere else, absolutely essential for C. D. to be constantly under the surveillance of his friends, always within hearing distance of their well-meant-never-listened-to advice and politely put objections. How he preened himself every time he heard “Poor old McKee. Making the most frightful ass of himself over that young American. She’s got him quite besotted.” And what about the young American? Wasn’t
I
making the most frightful ass of myself over him? Spoiling the best years of my life—well, one of them, ruining my health, throwing away my “chances”? All to devote myself to dragging the old satyr around from night-club to dreary night-club.

Then his attempts to get off the hook and wriggle away from me as fast as his tormented body could crawl: it was around five in the afternoon, C. D. in one of his critical moods, surveying the furniture and myself with something less than admiration. He rang suddenly for Blake and I thought oh-oh we’re in for it.

“Don’t you think it might be a good idea to bring the tea in now?” he inquired irritably. And in answer to Blake’s look of surprise at a demand for a repast which now Seedy never partook of: “Yes, tea. You do still know what the word means I suppose?”

A bad sign; an anti-myself sign whenever he was feeling “traditionally English.” I sat and waited and watched while C. D. paced up and down irately pursuing the notion that our tealessness was due solely to a churlish staff “sitting out there in the kitchen eating their heads off without a thought for anyone else.” I was reminded horrifically of the old loon’s ungraciousness on my first visit to his house.

Presently he sat down and gave it to me straight: His high blood pressure. The highly excitable, exciting nature of the life
he was leading with me wasn’t good for it. Frankly, it kept his bowels in an uproar, it led to indigestion, it would lead, unless the utmost care was taken, to a recurrence of that awful amoebic dysentery of some five years past. Then: his wretched, wrenched knee-cap (when was
that?
—oh yes, that day we went to look at the Rolls and he fell out of the car). It was causing him to limp, which was throwing his spine out of line, and this was promoting—any minute now—a slipped disc. How beautifully organic his troubles grew, one out of the other! Executing a stunningly graceful arabesque he managed to connect his hacking morning cough with his split lip (pulling tobacco off it after the cigarette-shooting incident) and banged fingernail (forgotten how). Oh dear—how could one not feel sorry for him? It would be only doing the decent thing to leave him alone for a spell, to turn him out to pasture and let him graze there peacefully awhile before the big push. Passionately, plaintively, pathetically he continued, delving deeper and deeper into the sources of his illnesses, looking so romantically
awful
that particular day, enfolded in his skin rather like a sick turtle, that even though I was not always attending closely I was relenting; my heart was melting. Then with a jolt I caught something he said. For two weeks now he had felt
his hands too unsteady to trust himself shaving—he had given himself some fearful gashes with the razor (a frisson went through me at the great opportunity missed: a slice through the jugular vein and wouldn’t
that
have done it just!) and had therefore been forced to employ the
daily services
of Bunty Suffolk’s special barber. So for two whole weeks he’d been throwing away my good money on luxurious kicks for his private pleasure. That was a spine-stiffener.

Then, a hiatus. For two whole days (I think) everything was still. I had the very definite feeling of coming to the end of a phase. I felt positively surrounded by an urgency to sit down and reorganize my whole approach. Every sign, every portent, every bone in my body warned me of danger and yet no sooner would I try to grapple with it, to plot and plan, than I would find myself slipping off into that day-dream I mentioned earlier: The Death-bed fantasy. Briefly: C. D. on a high white bed, his hands playing weakly with the coverlet. His friends anxiously around him. I am not there—but I am watching it all the same in the manner of dreams. He has been run over, fatally wounded, trying to cross the street to get to me on the other side. Or thrown from a horse trying to impress me with a jump. But I am never more intimately connected with his death than that. I mean he wasn’t trying to save my life or anything (thus absolving me from the guilt of having in any way delivered the
coup de grâce
).

Gradually, as his hour approaches, C. D. begins talking (about me of course) and then, as the wings of the Angel of Death beat about his head in earnest, I arrive to hear his last words—always the same ones whatever else varied in the dream: “To think that I have wasted years of my life,” he gasps, “that I have longed for death, that the greatest love I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style.” And with that he expires. And these words would strike me as so unbearably sad and beautiful and true that I always ended in tears.

Suddenly, in the midst of my weeping one day, I took out the sentence and looked at it squarely. That it had a strong literary ring I had of course been aware. This in itself was not unusual, I was constantly dreaming me into the heroines of my favourite books. What was maddening that day was that so far I had been unable to identify the quotation. I tried again. Not Shakespeare at any rate, I couldn’t jam it into the iambic pentameter for one thing. A Brontë? The elegiac mood was right but the word “style” no good. Austen? “Style” O.K. but mood wrong. A translation? Ah-ha, I felt—getting close. And then I got stuck at Chekhov. I gave up, wiped my eyes, and tried concentrating on the problems at hand when all at once, for no reason, I switched my literary inquiry to France and got it in one: Proust. My old friend Swann about Odette. I rose from the bed upon which I’d been lying and began walking around the flat in my excitement. In a flash I saw everything. As if I had read it yesterday I recalled that section in which Swann falls irrevocably in love with Odette at the precise moment that she does not show up where he expected her to be. My path became clear. I saw how I had been blundering. I had been pressing C. D. too hard. Pressuring him. No wonder he thought in terms of escape. Was it too late or could I, by simply following the text verbatim, still save the day? The more I thought of Swann and Odette the more it seemed right. “To think that I have wasted years of my life.. .” How marvellous!