A Gay and Melancholy Sound (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online

  I agreed, cherished the blasphemy, and waited for more, but there was no more.

  (2) The list

  Then I started a list.

  I am a great list-maker. This habit comes from the fact that at an early age I became aware that whatever other qualities my mind might or might not have, its analytic ability was limited.

  Yesterday on a piece of memo paper I wrote, Item Number One, and under that, Benny the Philosopher.

  I’ll tell about Benny first because he happened first. Monday week. This is a Saturday.

  I was coming out of one of those restaurants in the East Fifties where they know how to attract celebrities and to overcharge but where they know nothing whatever about food.

  Just outside the door, I was stopped by a sad, slack-jawed little derelict, male, pimpled, and no chin. At nine or thereabouts he had had life, and life had had him.

  He pushed his underfed body against my leg, holding a stub of a pencil at the ready, keeping his black-rimmed thumb between the pages of a dilapidated autograph book.

  “Hi, mister,” he said, looking hopefully at me. “You anybody?”

  Two girls, one of whom had blackheads on her forehead, leaned toward me, not expecting much.

  “I’m afraid not,” I said, and then, the look on the boy’s face being so disappointed, I added, “I’m sorry,” and I walked on.

  Behind me, I heard one of the girls say, “Benny, with a beard like that if he was anybody, you’d know.”

  And the voice of Benny said, “I know, but you have to be careful. Van Johnson almost got away from me that time.”

  Benny’s question has been haunting me ever since. Socrates couldn’t have put it more succinctly.

  I have kept answering Benny’s question, too. I have kept saying to myself, “No, Benny. Nobody. Nobody at all.”

  I have said, “Nobody here but us nobodies, Benny.”

  Item Number Two. A week ago yesterday—on Friday afternoon—a young woman came to the apartment I keep on East Sixty-third. She is on the staff of a high-fashion magazine for girls which contains a small amount of editorial matter to separate a few of the advertisements.

  She is not a pretty girl; they almost never are. She is too large and does not know how to handle it; she wore a suit that was well-cut but was too masculine, and her hair was too short, the hornrimmed glasses too large. She gave the impression that if she hadn’t been able to get into publishing, she could certainly have found an opening in professional wrestling.

  She asked a great many questions, and a great many pictures were taken by another girl who was almost the same girl. The latter kept taking all kinds of crotch shots of me, and I kept thinking she was going to ask me to show her a little more leg.

  The magazine was taking another look at six men—I was one—whose photographs had appeared in its pages shortly after the end of the Second World War; we had called ourselves The Crusaders, and if you stick around there’ll be more about that. The magazine—this was in early 1946—called us, “Today’s Hopefuls—Tomorrow’s Leaders.”

  Anyway, Miss Callous—if that’s what her name is—leaned toward me and, in a voice that reminded me of my neighbor Arthur Grayson calling in the cows for milking, she said, “Mr. Bland, how do you explain the fact that you didn’t live up to your early promise?”

  I doubt that that magazine will print my answer, but I see no reason why that girl shouldn’t go straight to the top in the magazine business. She’s got what I’d call one of the prime requirements, no empathy.

  Item Number Three, which will take a little longer. This one has to do with saints.

  On Monday of this week I got a letter from Jim Harkus, M.D., something, something Main Street, Niles, Michigan, and I thought, seeing it, who is Jim Harkus, and I thought the only person I ever heard of who came from Niles, Michigan, was Ring Lardner, who also did not live up to his early promise.

  When I opened the letter, I remembered.

  It said:

  My wife and I and ye-gods five (count them) small Harkuses, three female, two male, are coming to New York in a couple of weeks. We are on our way to Tanganyika. No, not on vacation. We’re going to live there. The why will take some telling, but right now all I can say is that I’ve given up my practice here in Niles and am going to try to help out there. I gather the natives are in desperate need of a doctor. Fortunately, I have an amenable wife and adventurous kids. As I say, I’ll tell you all about it when I see you—if I see you. May I? Despite the fact that (I warn you) I’m coming begging? By the way, I immodestly assume you’ll remember me. Do you?

  As ever,

  Jim Harkus

  On Monday, after I read Jim’s letter, I sat for a long time thinking about the day he and I met.

  I was nine years old. Jim must have been eighteen or nineteen.

  I had just become the Iowa winner of something I’m going to call the Harvey Jordan O’Connor Cranium Derby. Believe me, the real name was even more preposterous.

  There were photographers in the living room of our house on Riverdale Avenue in New Athens, Iowa.

  Mother was momentarily out of the room. I can’t imagine why. She almost never left the room when there were photographers around.

  Anyway, one of the photographers, from the Cedar Rapids Gazette, I believe, said to me, “You’ll wear your brains out before you’re eighteen, sonny boy.”

  People were always telling me I’d wear my brains out before I grew up, and it always seemed to make them happy.

  Another photographer said, “The kid’s probably a nance. They always are.”

  I had a vocabulary of nearly twelve thousand words at that time, but nance was not among them. I forget how I found out what it meant, but I did.

  An extremely tall boy from the newspaper of a college I’m calling Pegasus leaned down from an immense height and winked at me. He looked at the other photographers and said, “You leave this kid alone. He’s got more I.Q. in his little finger than the rest of us put together’ve got in our heads.” Then he placed a large, reassuring hand on my shoulder. He said his name was Jim Harkus, and he said, “They’re just envious.”

  After that, he smiled again and said, “But knowing people’s motivations for being cruel is rather cold comfort, isn’t it?”

  I said that it was, and I looked carefully at him. He must have been six-three, and he had a smallish head on top of a long, awkward body. The neck made him look like an uneasy giraffe. Occasionally, his eyes glanced down at his lanky body as if to make sure it was still there.

  His hair was thick and stubborn, and it grew like prairie grass all over the back of his neck.

  His mouth was too small for the size of his face; his nose was too large, but when you penetrated beneath the jungle of his thick, joined eyebrows and the long lashes, you saw that his eyes were compassionate. And his smile—well, I have known only one other like it. Charley’s. Both always momentarily convinced me that there was nobody else in the world so deserving of warmth and affection and understanding as I was.

  Jim played the bassoon in the college orchestra, and his voice was rather like the instrument. You heard it rarely, but when you did, the sound surprised and pleased you. Me anyway.

  However, when I was nine years old, I at first noticed only that Jim was ugly. Naturally, I said so. I said, “You’re really quite unattractive, aren’t you?”

  Jim admitted it. “Does it bother you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Ugly people are nicer than good-looking people as a general rule. You seem nice, but it’s too early to tell. It’s been my experience that contrary to the popular belief, first impressions are wrong more often than not.”

  Jim laughed, his eyes first and then his mouth, almost as an afterthought. I was impressed with that because I’d already noticed that with most people it was the other way around, if, in fact, their eyes joined in at all.

  “Oh my, oh my,” said Jim. “How is it that somebody didn’t slug you years ago?”

>   “More than a few have considered it,” I said. “Many more than a few.”

  “What’re you going to do with all that I.Q.?” he asked.

  People often asked me questions like that, usually because they felt they had to say something to me, and it wasn’t easy to know just what.

  But I felt Jim Harkus really wanted to know.

  I said, “I’d like very much to become a saint. I’ve been reading Lives of the Saints and The Varieties of Religious Experience. The latter is by William James. He’s a philosopher.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Jim.

  I blushed. I often blushed in those days.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s one of my worst faults, assuming everybody else is an ignoramus. Forgive me.”

  Jim said that he would.

  “At the moment, I happen to believe in God,” I said, “incredible as that may seem.”

  Jim said that that didn’t seem incredible to him, and he asked if there was any saint I wanted to be like.

  “I think Saint Francis,” I said, “although I have to admit his hygienic habits leave a great deal to be desired.”

  Jim must have said something to that. I can’t remember what, though. I do remember that he asked if I went to church.

  “Not really,” I said. “I’ve shopped around a lot, but none of them seems to give me much. The Catholics seem to me the most spiritual, but I don’t approve of most things they have stood for politically through the ages. I like the Unitarian minister quite a bit, Dr. Worthy, but he hardly ever talks about Jesus or God. It’s usually about William Howard Taft or Senator LaFollette or somebody like that.”

  “I’m president of the Methodist Epworth League,” said Jim. “Would you like to come on Sunday?”

  I said that I would, and I did, but my friendship with the League didn’t last long. The members of both sexes all wore steel-rimmed glasses, or so it seems to me now, and the glasses were often bent; the League members either looked at you from above their glasses or from below them. Either gave me the heebie jeebies. The girls were as ignorant of the use of the comb as the girls I came across many years later sitting around those lackluster coffeehouses in San Francisco. The boys in the Epworth League all wore a plentiful supply of dandruff. A few were planning to be ministers, and they were already working on their ecclesiastical monotones. Moist palms seemed to be a requirement of membership—Jim Harkus being the exception. These people were the kind of dolts who would have thought the books written by my enemy and neighbor (you’ll meet him) were spiritual books, which they are not.

  Jim Harkus would have spotted my neighbor as a flatulent fraud on first meeting, but Jim would have suffered him. Jim suffered many fools when I knew him, not gladly but with patience. Jim suffered little children, and he suffered me, whatever I was.

  My friendship with Jim lasted until he was graduated and went back to Michigan. I remember I cried. I believe I knew then that in my whole life I’d never meet anybody nearly as kind as he was.

  I saw him once more, in Germany, shortly after the war ended, at an army installation near Nuremberg. Jim and I had dinner at the officers’ mess. Jim was a major in the medics; he had been with the First Division through Africa, Sicily, and all the way across from Normandy.

  After dinner, we went outside to take a walk through the town. There was a long line of Germans, mostly old women and children, waiting near the garbage dump. The mess sergeant looked at them and then, with slow deliberation, poured gasoline over the garbage and lighted it. When a little boy tried to reach his hands into the flame, the mess sergeant started kicking at him, but Jim was there by then.

  That evening in Nuremberg was the last I knew or heard of Jim for more than fourteen years, until his letter arrived last Monday.

  I sent him a check of some size and dictated a letter to him, wishing him and his family well in Africa. I said that, unfortunately, I would be out of the city while they were there, and so on.

  “Too bad you can’t see him,” said my secretary Pan when I finished dictating the letter. “He sounds nice.”

  “Goddamn it, Pan,” I said. “If I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.”

  I saw the sudden sparkle of tears in Pan’s eyes, and I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “You haven’t,” said Pan. “You haven’t hurt my feelings for quite a long time now.”

  So much for Item Three, which has to do with Jim Harkus and sainthood. Jim isn’t a saint, of course, but for this place and this time, he comes close enough.

  What ever happened to me, do you suppose? Where am I?

  Item Number Four. This one has to do with the lunch I had day before yesterday with George Banning, artists’ representative. I’ve known George since the far-off days when he was George Bansky the agent.

  As usual, George bought the lunch, which was at Chambord.

  While we were eating the magnificent food, George said, “Have you made up your mind about Shawn’s play?”

  I shook my head.

  “What’d you think of it?” asked George.

  “George,” I said. “Stop it.”

  “All right, I’ve stopped. I just thought maybe you’d given up this—temporary insanity.”

  …I should explain here that for fourteen years now I have been in The Theater; I have been a producer. At least five years ago I realized that I was going through motions and that the motions were familiar and fatiguing. I realized that inertia, fatigue, and an increasing degree of hostility had taken the place of what at best had been no more than a mild enthusiasm for the way I made my living. It took me five years to do anything about it, and then after a series of disasters that were neither estimable nor profitable, and after Charley left me—which took the last of what was left of the juices in me—I announced that I was taking a sabbatical. A polite way of saying that I was through with the whole bloody mess. Russell Grierson, a man I once befriended in a desperate hour—an act for which he will understandably never forgive me—is taking over Joshua Bland Enterprises, Inc., and he is welcome to them. They deserve each other. And that’s enough about the background of the lunch George and I had on Thursday….

  “…insanity,” said George. “There’s no other word to describe it.”

  I said, “The papers will be drawn up on the fifteenth; and I am signing them that afternoon, and then I am taking off like a big-assed bird. But tomorrow is my last day at the office. So henceforth you will be dealing with my present partner and my successor.”

  “Grierson a producer,” said George.

  “Oh, indeed. He has every qualification. I remember exactly what you said those qualifications were when I got back from the wars in August 1945. I asked you what a producer did—and you said—”

  “Please,” said George. “There are certain past mistakes of yours I could mention.”

  “I think Russell will be a perfect producer. You’ll both get very rich.”

  “Russell Grierson is a client of mine,” said George, “so don’t quote me, but—Russell Grierson is stupid, insensitive, and utterly without taste.”

  “That’s exactly it,” I said. “He will be a perfect producer. He will produce plays about nuns and Negroes and God and about how nuns and Negroes and God are just like anybody else once you get to know them; many of these plays will be in blank verse, and since you can’t knock Negroes, nuns, God, or plays in blank verse I predict he will win all of the critics’ awards. I see no reason at all—”

  “Stop it,” said George.

  “Okay. I’ve stopped.”

  “And you still persist in this Nepal foolishness.”

  I nodded; you see, I have passage on a jet for India next Saturday, the 15th; I have always wanted to go to Nepal, which I am told is the most beautiful spot on earth. I wanted to see it before the end came (its and mine)—but I won’t be on that plane on the 15th.

  As I’ve said, I decided yesterday that I shall be taking off on a somewhat longer
trip of indefinite duration.

  “You’ll be back in a week,” said George. “A month. Six weeks at most.”

  I just sat there, and after a while George said, “Your trouble was you approached the theater as a shrine.”

  “If there is one thing I have never done, it is approach the theater as a shrine,” I said. “An overpriced bordello, yes; a shrine, no.”

  “A shrine,” said George. “All these plays by the German—what’s-his-name. I never could remember. German names keep slipping my mind. All this how the world’s going to hell in a breadbasket. No wonder you lost money hand over fist. What people want in the theater is a lot of girls or a lot of boys taking off their clothes. Am I right?”

  “Indeed, yes,” I said. “There’s enough trouble in the world without having to go to the theater to see it.”

  George reached across and patted my hand. “You sonofabitch, I love you,” he said.

  “But you don’t understand me.”

  “Not even remotely,” said George, “though I understand this. You’ve always wanted to run away. When I first met you, when you were in the Army—how old were you? Eighteen? Twenty? You had New York at your feet, so to speak, but you couldn’t wait to get back to Camp Whatyoumacallit in North Carolina. And when you got back from whatever you were doing in Europe, fighting or something, you got that play on the stage and right away you want to go straight back to Iowa, Ohio, whatever it’s called. You spoke of getting yourself a doctor of philosophy degree. I brought you to this very restaurant for dinner, and I said, ‘Josh, dear boy, what’s your hurry? You’re twenty-three years old. First make yourself a little cash money while the iron is still hot. Wait a year, maybe two.’ You remember?”

  “No, but if you want to remember it that way, I think it’s fine.”

  “Well,” said George, “the truth of the matter is you hadn’t any intention of going in for a Ph.D. You were already hooked. You had on that cashmere jacket and a sea-island cotton shirt and tailormade shoes, and I knew that you were not about to take off for someplace where you might work up to a salary of ninety-eight cents a year by the time you were sixty-five.”