Crackpot, page 38
Inside of her Hoda felt as though she didn’t ever want to see any of those kids again, not that way, not to come near her. Why was she saying these placatory things, then, as though everything was still the same? “You should get yourself some friends more your type. It’s not going to do you any good hanging around wasting your money on whores. Hell, the way that Ralphie carries on, I’ve seen the type, he’ll end up a pimp, I’m telling you. That kind of kid lets himself get carried away working the angles; I can’t stand pimps, and he’s just the type to end up a nooky bookie living off somebody else’s arse. Mind you I like the kid. But I look around and I see all these kids, the world’s still in a mess, everybody’s suffering, everything’s all fouled up, and all a kid like that thinks of is his own cushy tushy. Sure I’m a communist, and I’ll let the whole world know it. I’m with them one hundred percent, if only they’d lay off free enterprise. I don’t mean the big capitalist bloodsuckers, but small little businesses like mine, where you give value for money. I wouldn’t care so much about that either, if it was for the good of everybody, only I have responsibilities.”
In the end, he had a hard time getting away. Every time he made to go she seemed to think of something to ask, or something to suggest or advise. Pipick had been through a lot this evening and he was getting very tired. He began to suspect something of the drawbacks in pleasing a woman too well. But he was generous in response to her gratitude, and even tolerated her solicitude over his open shirt buttons; in her way she was just like Mrs. Tize; it amused him how much all these older dames were alike, even though Mrs. Tize was a lot older, even. But there was something more about the way this one was acting towards him now, something much more, and whichever way he looked at it he could think of only one explanation, and no matter how often he rejected it he had to come back to it again in the end. She’s nuts about me.
He could hardly believe it, but look how she was acting. Well, he wasn’t going to worry about it now. All he wanted now was to hit the old sack. And when the guys came to wake him in the morning he’d shake them off and they’d have to leave him to sleep in. He could already hear them; “Okay boy, okay Prince Charming, okay Golden Boy, okay, okay!” He gloated in advance at the envy in their voices as they faded from the dorm. “Lucky bastard!” And they were right, goddamit; for once they were absolutely right!
Finally, Hoda realized that she was holding him not simply for tenderness and the hunger to be with him yet awhile longer, but because she was afraid to be left alone. She forced herself to loose her grip. She allowed him, finally, to swagger off into the pallid end of night. And she lay down alone. And she touched, that night, the outermost boundary of aloneness that can be reached by a human being who is yet denied that privilege of loss of responsibility in suffering, which is the gift of madness. For though her mind stumbled and floundered helplessly amid the painful fragments and the bizarre ironies of her life, and she felt that truly she must be going mad, she arose that morning, without having experienced the intercession of sleep, and brought Daddy his ginger and honey mixture that was the best thing to take for his chest, and fussed over him, and felt for the first time in what seemed like a long time, an acute and tender awareness of his existence.
TWELVE
The trouble is, though you’ve had enough and more than enough, time won’t stop of its own accord; it won’t hold still or even pause a moment to ease you in the travel sickness of your life. So with Hoda, morning came again, and noon and night, and ebb and slack and flood, and sun and clouds and moon, and Hoda thanked God for ginger and honey to ease what she didn’t know how to cure. It would be an exaggeration to say that she contemplated suicide. It passed through her mind, but as a self-indulgence not relevant to the terms of her existence. Sure, knock herself off and who would look after Daddy? Who would help the boy, in whatever other way that is, that he might need her help? It was all very well to think about death and how nice it would be to be out of things, finished, through, away. And she did think of it now, thought of it often, thought of how everything dies, thought of all that had died around her in her lifetime already, and all that would continue to die. But when it came to the actual details of how she might take steps to end her life, to crush that existence which had been so proudly presented to her; no, she thought of Daddy and she couldn’t see how dying would make anything better at all. Even if you were stripped down to the core, you must wrap yourself around your life and just hang on. And if she had no core? What if she was like the layer-locked onion, and had no core, only function? Very well then, Hoda too would continue to function, as best she could. Lucky onion that is not required to know itself and weep as well.
Oh, she wept. She couldn’t stop herself, night after night, and sometimes, to Daddy’s distress, for no apparent reason, she burst out in broad daylight, without warning, even to herself, and was unable to stop, unable to bear his blind words of comfort, shaking him off, turning away. And one day he said to her, hesitantly, “Hodaleh, if it’s someone who’s hurting you, don’t worry. Your time will come. Your destined one will come. Believe me, I know. Who should know as well as I? He’ll come.”
He was so serious. He really meant it! Oh sure he’ll come, Daddy! They’ll all come! In a glass slipper they’ll come, up your elbow, in your armpit; blow your nose and they’ll think you’re making room.
“Who needs him?” That much burst out of her. “Who wants him? I wish they’d all leave me alone!” Which was a laugh, considering, and she gave a little laugh in spite of herself.
“You’ll see,” Daddy repeated softly, “you’ll see.”
“It’s too late, Pa. I should have written to the Prince of Wales a long time ago and told him he was making a terrible mistake. If he was going to marry a commoner and disappoint his whole Empire he should have looked a little harder and really done the job. To give up my Em-pieah,’” she mimicked, “‘foh-wah the woman I love.’” Oh sure she was jealous that she would never know such love; no one would ever give up a seat on a bus for Hoda, let alone an Em-pie-ah. But was that a job for a grown man, to sit and admire some dame all day long? There were a few more important things that needed doing in this world. What about this Hitler? And that Mussolini? Shouldn’t somebody up there be doing something, somehow, and soon? She didn’t believe that was all there was to it anyway, this great love stuff. Who knew what really went on among the Highnesses?
“We yearn for the Leviathan,” remarked her father thoughtfully, “but in our great hunger we’ll even worship shmaltz herring from afar.”
“What?” said Hoda. “What are you talking about, Pa?”
“You and the Prince of Wales,” said Danile apologetically, “and it made me think…”
She couldn’t help laughing, through wet eyes. You sometimes forgot how funny Daddy could be, if you really listened to him.
Pleased, Danile laughed too, adding that of course he intended no disrespect to shmaltz herring.
“I think they call them kippers.” Hoda couldn’t remember when she had last heard him laugh that way, like a little boy.
At some point, she hadn’t even noticed when, Danile had stopped even trying to tell her the old stories, so effectively had she learned to cut them off over the years. And she realized now, with fear, that she was in danger of forgetting how they went, not their general outlines, of course, but the sequence, the rhythm of them, the inside secrets, the series of surprises and revelations by which they evolved, and the way they held you with wonder and the feeling that they were true, and the truth had a terrible tenderness in it as though it were holding in fierce but incredibly compassionate hands all the aching fragments of all the aching lives, not because it was going to heal them, because perhaps even those cupped hands were powerless to do so much, and the tears you wanted to weep had nothing to do with feeling better afterwards, but to reveal them to you, so that knowing nothing really, you could still for a moment know a compassion and a dignity beyond your pain. Perhaps in the old stories she would find some surcease from the wringing of hands, and from the need she had to throw out fruitless challenges to her fate, when, feeling all wrenched apart and broken into a thousand thousand pieces, she would demand with bitter, logical rigour, If I’m broken, why hasn’t all feeling leaked away? If I’m broken at least let me be empty. Was that too much to ask, that she become as empty as the silence seemed to be, to which she addressed herself? Apparently. All right then, if she must continue to feel, she would demand something from those feelings too, that they be true for instance, that they correspond to what was, what really was in her life.
That was why she had been afraid, at first, to ask Daddy to repeat the old stories to her, because she remembered her own unadmitted disbelief that had inspired the boredom with which she had eventually silenced him. And she remembered, with an absolute memory, her childhood intuition that her mother, too, had somehow refused to share the spirit of the stories, though she had never denied their factual truth. What if they too should arouse in her this savage disdain that most of the movies she saw nowadays, and the magazines she read and the way people talked about life, too, now inspired in her? She would have to control herself then, and prevent herself from giving way to the urge to mock him. Why did she want to hear them again anyway? Didn’t a part of her want to destroy them, too, once and for all? That was something the nicey stories never told you about, how with pain and tenderness and all those other goody nicey things went a savage desire to destroy what you loved, and a terrible fear that somehow you would succeed, or even that you would discover that you had already done so. Didn’t she really hate those stories? Hadn’t they betrayed her again and again in her life, and made her the butt of laughter and contempt?
It was with great fear, as of a terrible, impending loss, that she began once again to coax her father to tell her all about themselves. And it was a hesitant Danile who fumbled forth his treasures, rusty, not from neglect, for they had never ceased to be the central subjects of his rumination, but because he had been telling them to himself so soundlessly for so long that it was something of an effort to give them vocal weight again. And also, the load in his chest was particularly heavy this winter, and it was often easier not to try to speak at all; but he was eager to please her and to share once more the great moments of his life. Hoda listened intently, and his words took on a curious resonance inside of her. She interrupted sometimes; sometimes she nodded “oh yes,” as though impatiently, because the sequence of words itself was connected now to feelings of impatience, but she no longer tried to stop him, and listened instead with extraordinary attention, as though trying to draw his words more completely into herself by this means.
If she had hoped to hear those stories once again as a child hears, she was disappointed. But she was not aware of such a hope, nor of the disappointment of being barred from a return to innocence. She simply felt the old stories, felt her emptiness filled with resonance, transformed to resonance. She saw the old stories, saw through the old stories, saw beyond the old stories to what the man her father was and what the woman her mother must have been; she heard the stories and knew them all, and gathered them back into herself and knew herself as well, not as she had once known herself, in a sudden, comprehensive flash of revelation, a simultaneity of multiple Hodas, but as she flowed in the sequence of her days. And when she returned to the contemplation of her immediate existence, that restless human impulse which will not hold still any more than time holds still, conceived for her the notion that somehow the boy, protected though he must be from personal knowledge, must learn what was important in the stories still. It was all very confused in her head, but she knew it had to be possible somehow to change things between herself and the boy, lest she herself, for all the tenacious way she was gripping her sanity between her teeth, should let go suddenly, unable to bear any longer the foul taste of her life. That was her greatest fear, that she might become like one of those mad ones in the stories, who wander the streets, objects of stones and hoots and barking dogs, or get locked behind big red brick walls to scream their lives away. What of Daddy then? And the boy? What if she went mad and it all came streaming out of her, the whole unbelievable story, and she went on and on, puking it out in the neutral zone of madness and leaving them to drown in the filth? Oh no! she thought. Oh no! You don’t catch me going bugs! And she guarded herself against the living presence of madness, and to her burden was added the task of evaluating each impulse, monitoring every word, assessing all laughter, lest among them be the giveaway traitor that would release the chaos within.
Somehow she must convince the boy, somehow persuade him, turn him from a client to a friend. She did not delude herself that this would change what had already happened, but it might enable her to pass on to him something that was precious of themselves at least. Even if he never did know how or why it had come about, maybe she could still achieve a proper, loving friendship with him in which she could work for him as she did for Daddy, and teach him their stories, and protect him and help him avoid all those traps that she knew were waiting for him in life. Oh they were waiting for him all right, traps that a kid like him was incapable of conceiving even, for all he thought he was so grown-up a young man who visited a whore already. She could tell, from the way he acted with her, something of the danger he was in. She had good and sufficient proof, in terms she understood only too well, of the kind of boy he was.
Every now and then, in Hoda’s business, she met a guy who got his fun mainly out of trying to please her. It was so rare as to be practically a perversion; no, much more rare, more like a miracle. Hitherto it had been a prized experience, one of those occasional surprises that toned up her faith in human nature, which normally did not get too much encouragement where she lay. She could just about count off the guys it had happened with on one hand, give or take a finger. They had generally become friends of hers, almost like lovers, more personal and indeed more passionate friends than was usual in the business way. And once or twice she had even let herself dream foolish dreams about them. But now, dammit, as if things weren’t bad enough, just her luck, her own kid had to go and turn out to be that way. She had to become an actress on the mattress for him. And she had to be so careful. It was so easy to shake his confidence, to make him doubt.
“You’re a nice boy,” she kept telling him, after those tender and loathsome encounters, avoiding his warm and gratified eyes, afraid that even into this innocent phrase her voice had loaded uncontainable secrets that would somehow seep into his understanding and blight him too, forever. Astonishingly, he did not appear to understand anything beyond the words and their encouragement. She was relieved, but upset, too, that it must still go on. “I like you anyway,” she persisted. “I’d rather just be your friend. Honest David, you should be saving your money for school books and stuff for next year. This kind of thing can wait. Listen, I know guys, they started out too young and went at it too strong; by the time they were thirty-four–five years old, they were all shot, not a bang left in them. They come around to see me now like to show me their souvenirs. We have tea and they tell me what they used to be like. Save it, kid, don’t waste it. Someday you’ll really want it for someone special.” But no matter how earnestly she tried to dissuade him, the boy was disinclined to turn aside and ascend to higher things in her company. It had become a part of the game for him, this having to talk her into it anew each time, and in fact gave him the habit of persistence over reluctance which was to stand him in very good stead with women later on.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll have plenty left,” he replied confidently.
“It’s not good for you,” she nagged. “You start with your mind on whores and it’s bad for your studies and you’ll go from bad to worse. Before you know it you’ll end up with your whole life wasted, like me.”
“Your life’s not wasted,” he replied gallantly. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me,” he added, and was immediately sorry he’d said it. You never knew how she’d take it. Sometimes she got too serious, and he didn’t quite know where she was trying to lead him.
“A young kid like you fooling around like this. It’s not the real thing anyway. The real thing a kid like you shouldn’t have to pay for.”
Again he knew he shouldn’t say it, but he couldn’t resist. “You can give it to me for free if you like,” suggested David, daringly.
“Like a pimp?” said Hoda sharply. “Or you want we should get engaged, maybe?” she added quickly, because she knew that in the mythology of adolescent boys, older women were always desperate to get married, and would snatch from any cradle. She had long ago learned to bear the appalled faces, and even to be amused, eventually, when she teasingly hinted to her younger clients that she was like other girls and might even want to get married too.
“I’m too young to marry,” protested David, a little frightened. Was she serious? Was she practically proposing to him or something? Why did she keep on telling him how much she liked him? “I just said that because you said that,” he added lamely. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Did she realize how young he was? He couldn’t even get a licence. He’d have to lie about his age! How did he get himself into this? “I can’t get engaged. I don’t even have a trade yet or anything.”
