CHAPTER XVIII.
After that evening he managed to protect his loneliness with clever words. He told the Edlemans that he was looking for material for short stories and that he intended to roam about the city; and, elated at his purpose, they did not object. Since most of his relatives were still displaying their dignity, jewelry, and card-playing abilities at northern summer resorts, he found it easy to be alone.
In the midst of his restless, empty wanderings he often sat for a while in a little park that rustled and nodded upon the top of a bluff overlooking a broad river. There he would stare out at the wide, yellowish-brown flat of water, and the dull green convolutions of the distant shore, and the water would become an ethereal canvas where he painted fugitive salutes to the woman who had fled from life’s semblances. Under the spell of a melting daze he would sit for hours, almost unconscious of the fact that he held a body of slowly breathing flesh. At one end of the park the line of benches turned sharply in toward the city, and this shaded place, guarded by bushes and trees, was known as “Rounder’s Corner.” It was frequented by thieves, drug peddlers, sly, lacquered women and an occasional vagrant, and they gathered there from twilight on and drained the fierce insincerities of conversation and whiskey, with sometimes the lucid edge of cocaine. Since Carl came to this spot only during the afternoons, he did not see these people until, one evening, he managed to absent himself from the Edleman home on the pretense of desiring a trip on a river steamboat, and strolled into the park.
He sat on a bench and looked around him, trying to become interested in the immediate contortions of the fantasy. One glance told him the identity of the social circle into which he had dropped and he felt a jerk of attention, for the more openly rough and cruel people in life were to him reflections of his ghostly self, spied in a coarsely exaggerated mirror but none the less valid. Fresh from the lazy inanities of the Edleman house, he felt a little baffled vigor—the ghost lamenting its lack of exercise—and he longed to roll once more in that plastic phenomenon which men insist on calling mud. It was only through plastering himself with the concentrated moistness of earth that he could force himself to believe, for a time, in the reality of life, and he welcomed his chance to repeat this process. He scanned the whispering, laughing, loose-faced people around him and turned over in his mind different ways of approaching them, since he knew how easy it was to heap fuel upon their suspicions.
A woman dropped down beside him on the bench. She was young in actual years—not more than twenty-three—but her body had been slashed by a premature herald of middle age and her rounded face was too softly plump and wrinkled a little under the eyes and below the chin. Youth and age were stiffly twined about her in lines that protested against each other. Her body was short and held a slenderness that was unnaturally puffed a bit here and there, giving an impression of incongruous inflation rather than of solid flesh. Her black hair was a plentiful mass of artificial curls and pressed against a wide straw hat, festooned with tulips made of gaudy cloth, and she was clad in loosely white muslin with a crimson sash around her waist. The effect was that of a school girl playing the part of a street walker in an amateur theatrical and, if you looked at her clothes alone, the illusion remained. It was only destroyed by a glance at her face, for the outward costumes of reality are often unconsciously amateurish, as though they were striving to obliterate the professional aspect held by the faces of human beings—a psychic confession. Men and women can never quite memorize their parts in life and their clothes sometimes express this absent-mindedness.
As he looked at this woman Carl noticed that her eyes were not those of the usual flesh trader—shifting and infantile—but were filled with a tense distraction. The mere sullen aftermath of whiskey, or the departure of a man? No, it almost seemed that she was actually brooding over emotions that had removed her leagues from the bench against which her body was pressed. Eyes are often unwitting traitors and they tell the truth more readily than the rest of the face, or words, since human beings are not so conscious of what their eyes are announcing. The two holes in the mask of the face are often transparent or careless admissions, while the remainder of the face is immersed in a more successful deception. Carl was interested by the fact that this woman seemed to ignore his presence and was staring straight ahead of her. He began to believe that her indifference was genuine and he watched her more closely. Finally she tossed her head, with a gesture that expressed the defiant return of consciousness, and glanced at him. Then she threw him the usual “Hello, honey,” and with a disgusted grimace he dismissed a certain ghostly audience within him, telling it that the play would not begin. For a while he spoke to her, throwing slang pebbles at her with an oppressed exactitude and brushing aside her lustreless insinuations, a little weary of the unconvincing comedy. Suddenly the stunt nauseated him and he fled back to his own metaphoric tongue.
“Do you see that woman passing by?” he asked. “She has a face half like a twitching mouse and half like a poised cat. I have known such women. They are continually robbing certain men of emotions in order meekly to hand back their thefts to other men. With a mixture of cruelty and weak submission they entertain their own emptiness.”
He looked away from her, expecting a silence or the affront of cracked laughter and preparing to leave. Her answer swung his head toward her.
“You may be speaking to such a woman. Life has undressed me to all people except myself, and I don’t know what I am. I think that I was born to be a nun, but something kicked me down a dirty hallway and when I woke up there were many hands reaching for me and it didn’t seem important to me whether they took me or not. But I think that I was born to be a nun.... Does that interest you?”
He stared at her with his mouth almost describing a perfect O and his eyes opened to a wild uncertainty. For a moment he felt that they were both quite dead and that her spirit had been ravished by waiting words.
“In God’s name, what have you been doing?” he cried.
“Playing a part, with the assistance of your indifferent slang,” she said.
“Why?”
“I started out by talking to you as I do to most men. You broke into a rough speech and I parried as usual. The evening was commencing in its usual convincing manner. Then I began to see that you were acting. There was a strain on your face, and sometimes you stopped in the middle of a delicate simile.... I knew that I might be wrong, so I kept on talking as you expected me to talk.”
On her face was the smile of a beggar whose tinselled metaphors have been pummeled and disheveled by surface realities. The plump curves of her face seemed to fit less snugly beneath the flat deceit of rouge.
“I am a fool,” he said. “Your eyes told me something, but I spat upon it. I think that you had better leave me.”
“I have no intention of leaving you,” she said.
They sat and stared at each other.
“Do you give yourself to different men every night?” he asked, as though his sophistication, in an instant curve, had retreated to an anxious child long concealed within him.
“I give them what they are able to take, and that is little. They want to clutch me for a time, but I don’t feel them unless they stop my breathing. A man walks into a house, wipes his feet on the mat, spits into one of the cuspidors, and leaves with a vacant smile on his face.”
“Why do you want them to come in?”
“They give me money for whiskey and leisure time in which I can read. I’ve never been able to find a simpler way of getting these things.”
The explanation was clear and delicate to him.
“Of course, the whiskey makes you sneer like a queen, and the books bring you affairs with better men,” he said.
“All that I want to do is to pray to my thoughts with appropriate words, and every night until two in the morning I pay for the granting of this wish.... But I think that I was born to be a nun.”
“I think that I was born to be a monk, covering the walls of his cell with little images, all of them contorting his bright hatred for a world,” he said. “I think that something also kicked me into a mob of prattling marionettes, leaving me exposed to the shower of unintended blows. I have often looked behind me and vainly tried to see who this first enemy was, but I am afraid that he does not return until you die.”
With their silence they continued the dialogue for a time.
“Have you a man who takes your money and kicks you?” he asked.
“No. Every now and then some dope peddler pays me a visit, but I have a gun and I know how to use it. I sent one of them to a hospital once. They call me Crazy Georgie May and they’re always afraid of something that they can’t understand.”
“I have a proposition to make to you,” he said. “We’ll live together without touching each other and each of us will be the monk and nun that he should have been. I am a ghost who wants to return to life and you are a living person who wants to go back to the ghost that was kicked into an insincere ritual of flesh. We’ll erect a unique monastery of thought and emotion, and pay for it with the slavery of your hands or mine.... Will you live with me in this fashion?”
“Yes, if only to see whether it can be done,” she answered instantly.
They rose from the bench and walked away together—a noble rascal and an ascetic prostitute.