V. Read online

  Say a man is no good

  For anything but jazzing around.

  He’ll go live in a cathouse,

  He’ll jazz it all over town.

  And all kinds of meanness

  To put a good woman down.

  Now I am a good woman

  Because I’m telling you I am

  And I sure been put down

  But honey, I don’t give a damn.

  You going to have a hard time

  Finding you a kind hearted man.

  Because a kind hearted man

  Is the kind who will . . .

  Presently the light in Paola’s room began to leak out the window, up the air shaft and into the sky, accompanied by clinking bottles, running water, flushing toilet in the bathroom. And then the almost imperceptible sounds of Rachel fixing her long hair.

  When she left, turning off all the lights, the hands on an illuminated clock near Paola Maijstral’s bed stood near six o’clock. No ticking: the clock was electric. Its minute hand could not be seen to move. But soon the hand passed twelve and began its course down the other side of the face; as if it had passed through the surface of a mirror, and had now to repeat in mirror-time what it had done on the side of real-time.

  II

  The party, as if it were inanimate after all, unwound like a clock’s mainspring toward the edges of the chocolate room, seeking some easing of its own tension, some equilibrium. Near its center Rachel Owlglass was curled on the pine floor, legs shining pale through black stockings.

  You felt she’d done a thousand secret things to her eyes. They needed no haze of cigarette smoke to look at you out of sexy and fathomless, but carried their own along with them. New York must have been for her a city of smoke, its streets the courtyards of limbo, its bodies like wraiths. Smoke seemed to be in her voice, in her movements; making her all the more substantial, more there, as if words, glances, small lewdnesses could only become baffled and brought to rest like smoke in her long hair; remain there useless till she released them, accidentally and unknowingly, with a toss of her head.

  Young Stencil the world adventurer, seated on the sink, waggled his shoulderblades like wings. Her back was to him; through the entrance to the kitchen he could see the shadow of her spine’s indentation snaking down a deeper black along the black of her sweater, see the tiny movements of her head and hair as she listened.

  She didn’t like him, Stencil had decided.

  “It’s the way he looks at Paola,” she’d told Esther. Esther of course had told Stencil.

  But it wasn’t sexual, it lay deeper. Paola was Maltese.

  Born in 1901, the year Victoria died, Stencil was in time to be the century’s child. Raised motherless. The father, Sidney Stencil, had served the Foreign Office of his country taciturn and competent. No facts on the mother’s disappearance. Died in childbirth, ran off with someone, committed suicide: some way of vanishing painful enough to keep Sidney from ever referring to it in all the correspondence to his son which is available. The father died under unknown circumstances in 1919 while investigating the June Disturbances in Malta.

  On an evening in 1946, separated by stone balusters from the Mediterranean, the son had sat with one Margravine di Chiave Lowenstein on the terrace of her villa on the western coast of Mallorca; the sun was setting into thick clouds, turning all the visible sea to a sheet of pearl-gray. Perhaps they may have felt like the last two gods—the last inhabitants—of a watery earth; or perhaps—but it would be unfair to infer. Whatever the reason, the scene played as follows:

  MARG: Then you must leave?

  STEN: Stencil must be in Lucerne before the week is out.

  MARG: I dislike premilitary activity.

  STEN: It isn’t espionage.

  MARG: What then?

  (Stencil laughs, watching the twilight.)

  MARG: You are so close.

  STEN: To whom? Margravine, not even to himself. This place, this island: all his life he’s done nothing but hop from island to island. Is that a reason? Does there have to be a reason? Shall he tell you: he works for no Whitehall, none conceivable unless, ha, ha, the network of white halls in his own brain: these featureless corridors he keeps swept and correct for occasional visiting agents. Envoys from the zones of human crucified, the fabled districts of human love. But in whose employ? Not his own: it would be lunacy, the lunacy of any self-appointed prophet. . . . (There is a long pause, as the light reaching them through the clouds weakens or thins out to wash over them enervated and ugly.)

  STEN: Stencil reached his majority three years after old Stencil died. Part of the estate that came to him then was a number of manuscript books, bound in half-calf and warped by the humid air of many European cities. His journals, his unofficial log of an agent’s career. Under “Florence, April, 1899” is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: “There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report.”

  MARG: A woman.

  STEN: Another woman.

  MARG: It is she you are pursuing? Seeking?

  STEN: You’ll ask next if he believes her to be his mother.

  The question is ridiculous.

  Since 1945, Herbert Stencil had been on a conscious campaign to do without sleep. Before 1945 he had been slothful, accepting sleep as one of life’s major blessings. He’d spent the time between wars footloose, the source of his income then, as now, uncertain. Sidney hadn’t left much in the way of pounds and shillings, but had generated good will in nearly every city in the western world among those of his own generation. This being a generation which still believed in The Family, it meant a good lookout for young Herbert. He didn’t freeload all the time: he’d worked as croupier in southern France, plantation foreman in East Africa, bordello manager in Greece; and in a number of civil service positions back home. Stud poker could be depended on to fill in the low places—though an occasional mountain or two had also been leveled.

  In that interregnum between kingdoms-of-death Herbert just got by, studying his father’s journals only by way of learning how to please the blood-conscious “contacts” of his legacy. The passage on V. was never noticed.

  In 1939 he was in London, working for the Foreign Office. September came and went: it was as if a stranger, located above the frontiers of consciousness, were shaking him. He didn’t particularly care to wake; but realized that if he didn’t he would soon be sleeping alone. Being the sociable sort, Herbert volunteered his services. He was sent to North Africa, in some fuzzily defined spy/interpreter/liaison capacity and seesawed with the rest from Tobruk to El Agheila, back through Tobruk to El Alamein, back again to Tunisia. At the end of it he had seen more dead than he cared to again. Peace having been won he flirted with the idea of resuming that prewar sleepwalk. Sitting at a café in Oran frequented largely by American ex-GIs who’d decided not to return to the States just yet, he was leafing through the Florence journal idly, when the sentences on V. suddenly acquired a light of their own.

  “V. for victory,” the Margravine had suggested playfully.

  “No.” Stencil shook his head. “It may be that Stencil has been lonely and needs something for company.”

  Whatever the reason, he began to discover that sleep was taking up time which could be spent active. His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to—if not vitality, then at least activity. Work, the chase—for it was V. he hunted—far from being a means to glorify God and one’s own godliness (as the Puritans believe) was for Stencil grim, joyless; a conscious acceptance of the unpleasant for no other reason than that V. was there to track down.

  Finding her: what then? Only that what love there was to Stencil had become directed
entirely inward, toward this acquired sense of animateness. Having found this he could hardly release it, it was too dear. To sustain it he had to hunt V.; but if he should find her, where else would there be to go but back into half-consciousness? He tried not to think, therefore, about any end to the search. Approach and avoid.

  Here in New York the impasse had become acute. He’d come to the party at the invitation of Esther Harvitz, whose plastic surgeon Schoenmaker owned a vital piece of the V.-jigsaw, but protested ignorance.

  Stencil would wait. He’d taken over a low-rent apartment in the Thirties (East Side), temporarily vacated by an Egyptologist named Bongo-Shaftsbury, son of an Egyptologist Sidney had known. They had been opponents once, before the first war, as had been Sidney and many of the present “contacts”; which was curious, certainly, but lucky for Herbert because it doubled his chances of subsistence. He had been using the apartment for a pied-à-terre this last month; snatching sleep between interminable visits among his other “contacts”; a population coming more and more to comprise sons and friends of the originals. At each step the sense of “blood” weakened. Stencil could see a day when he would only be tolerated. It would then be he and V. all alone, in a world that somehow had lost sight of them both.

  Until such time there were Schoenmaker to wait for; and Chiclitz the munitions king and Eigenvalue the physician (epithets characteristically stemming from Sidney’s day though Sidney had known neither of the men personally) to fill up the time. It was dithering, it was a stagnant period and Stencil knew it. A month was too long to stay in any city unless there were something tangible to investigate. He’d taken to roving the city, aimlessly, waiting for a coincidence. None came. He’d snatched at Esther’s invitation, hoping to come across some clue, trace, hint. But the Whole Sick Crew had nothing to offer.

  The owner of this apartment seemed to express a prevailing humor common to them all. As if he were Stencil’s prewar self he presented to Stencil a horrifying spectacle.

  Fergus Mixolydian the Irish Armenian Jew and universal man laid claim to being the laziest living being in Nueva York. His creative ventures, all incomplete, ranged from a western in blank verse to a wall he’d had removed from a stall in the Penn Station men’s room and entered in an art exhibition as what the old Dadaists called a “ready-made.” Critical comment was not kind. Fergus got so lazy that his only activity (short of those necessary to sustain life) was once a week to fiddle around at the kitchen sink with dry cells, retorts, alembics, salt solutions. What he was doing, he was generating hydrogen; this went to fill a sturdy green balloon with a great Z printed on it. He would tie the balloon by a string to the post of the bed whenever he planned to sleep, this being the only way for visitors to tell which side of consciousness Fergus was on.

  His other amusement was watching the TV. He’d devised an ingenious sleep-switch, receiving its signal from two electrodes placed on the inner skin of his forearm. When Fergus dropped below a certain level of awareness, the skin resistance increased over a preset value to operate the switch. Fergus thus became an extension of the TV set.

  The rest of the Crew partook of the same lethargy. Raoul wrote for television, keeping carefully in mind, and complaining bitterly about, all the sponsor-fetishes of that industry. Slab painted in sporadic bursts, referring to himself as a Catatonic Expressionist and his work as “the ultimate in non-communication.” Melvin played the guitar and sang liberal folk songs. The pattern would have been familiar—bohemian, creative, arty—except that it was even further removed from reality, Romanticism in its furthest decadence; being only an exhausted impersonation of poverty, rebellion and artistic “soul.” For it was the unhappy fact that most of them worked for a living and obtained the substance of their conversation from the pages of Time magazine and like publications.

  Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.

  The party itself, tonight, was divided in three parts. Fergus, and his date, and another couple had long retreated into the bedroom with a gallon of wine; locked the door, and let the Crew do what they could in the way of chaos to the rest of the place. The sink on which Stencil now sat would become Melvin’s perch: he would play his guitar and there would be horahs and African fertility dances in the kitchen before midnight. The lights in the living room would go out one by one, Schoenberg’s quartets (complete) would go on the record player/changer, and repeat, and repeat; while cigarette coals dotted the room like watchfires and the promiscuous Debby Sensay (e.g.) would be on the floor, caressed by Raoul, say, or Slab, while she ran her hand up the leg of another, sitting on the couch with her roommate—and on, in a kind of love feast or daisy chain; wine would spill, furniture would be broken; Fergus would awake briefly next morning, view the destruction and residual guests sprawled about the apartment; cuss them all out and go back to sleep.

  Stencil shrugged irritably, rose from the sink and found his coat. On the way out he touched a knot of six: Raoul, Slab, Melvin and three girls.

  “Man,” said Raoul.

  “Scene,” said Slab, waving his arm to indicate the unwinding party.

  “Later,” Stencil said and moved on out the door.

  The girls stood silent. They were camp followers of a sort and expendable. Or at least could be replaced.

  “Oh yes,” said Melvin.

  “Uptown,” Slab said, “is taking over the world.”

  “Ha, ha,” said one of the girls.

  “Shut up,” said Slab. He tugged at his hat. He always wore a hat, inside or outside, in bed or dead drunk. And George Raft suits, with immense pointed lapels. Pointed, starched, non-button-down collars. Padded, pointed shoulders: he was all points. But his face, the girl noticed, was not: rather soft, like a dissolute angel’s: curly hair, red and purple rings slung looped in twos and threes beneath the eyes. Tonight she would kiss beneath his eyes, one by one, these sad circles.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured, drifting away toward the fire escape. At the window she gazed out toward the river, seeing nothing but fog. A hand touched her spine, exactly in that spot every man she ever knew had been able to find, sooner or later. She straightened up, squeezing her shoulderblades together, moving her breasts taut and suddenly visible toward the window. She could see his reflection watching their reflection. She turned. He was blushing. Crew cut, suit, Harris tweed. “Say, you are new,” she smiled. “I am Esther.”

  He blushed and was cute. “Brad,” he said. “I’m sorry I made you jump.”

  She knew instinctively: he will be fine as the fraternity boy just out of an Ivy League school who knows he will never stop being a fraternity boy as long as he lives. But who still feels he is missing something, and so hangs at the edges of the Whole Sick Crew. If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever have been a line, or even if there is a line at all. He will learn how to be a twinned man and will go on at the game, straddling until he splits up the crotch and in half from the prolonged tension, and then he will be destroyed. She assumed ballet fourth position, moved her breasts at a 45 degree angle to his line-of-sight, pointed her nose at his heart, looked up at him through her eyelashes.

  “How long have you been in New York?”

  Outside the V-Note a number of bums stood around the front windows looking inside, fogging the glass with their breath. From time to time a collegiate-looking type, usually with a date, would emerge from the swinging doors and they would ask him, one by one in a line down that short section of Bowery sidewalk, for a cigarette, subway fare, the price of a beer. All night the February wind would come barreling down the wide keyway of Third Avenue, movi
ng right over them all: the shavings, cutting oil, sludge of New York’s lathe.

  Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if it were part of the skull: every vein and whisker on that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache.

  He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4½ reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of one and a half sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. “I am still thinking,” they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look.

  At the end of the bar in the V-Note is a table which is normally used by customers to put empty beer bottles and glasses on, but if somebody grabs it early enough nobody minds and the bartenders are usually too busy anyway to yell at them to get off. At the moment the table was occupied by Winsome, Charisma and Fu. Paola had gone to the ladies’ room. None of them were saying anything.

  The group on the stand had no piano: it was bass, drums, McClintic and a boy he had found in the Ozarks who blew a natural horn in F. The drummer was a group man who avoided pyrotechnics, which may have irritated the college crowd. The bass was small and evil-looking and his eyes were yellow with pinpoints in the center. He talked to his instrument. It was taller than he was and didn’t seem to be listening.

  Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and when this happened it was like a knife fight or tug of war: the sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception, they said, and some of them said: “Bird Lives.”