Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation Page 8

  The girl had sprawled, would not move. Jeff slipped to the floor and fell asleep once more, his head propped against the front of the sofa. They snored in the same key.

  Ivor Balmi returned to his room, closed the door tightly, and turned to his bed. The woman was sitting on the side, still smoking, her legs crossed, her skirt primly over her knees.

  “I’m going to sleep,” he said. “Get out.”

  “I want to talk to you,” the woman said. She had very grey eyes. They were constantly being lost in the shadows.

  “Out,” he said, slipping past her on the bed. He lay down, removed his sandals, and placed his street-dirty feet well within range of her.

  “I’m Meg’s mother. I want to talk to you.”

  For a long time he lay there staring at the water scum on the ceiling. Then he remembered who Meg was. “She isn’t here, go away, I’m tired, I’ve got a painting to finish tomorrow. Scram.”

  The woman snubbed out the cigarette on the orange crate serving Ivor Balmi as an end table, and said, very softly, “Either we talk, or I go to the police tomorrow. Meg is only sixteen.”

  Ivor Balmi shut his eyes very tightly. The woman did not go away, the evening did not get cooler, the faint smell of kitty litter somewhere in the room did not disperse. “You don’t really think I give a damn, do you?” he said.

  “Jail?” the woman offered. An hors d’oeuvre.

  Balmi shrugged. “I’ve been there.”

  The woman turned halfway on the bed, looking down at him now. “Mr. Balmi, when my husband died, he left me a great deal of money. I’ve been unable to find things to do with it except to indulge myself and my daughter.” Balmi saw that was so: her suntan was the sort enjoyed only by wealthy women able to afford the time and locale for sun-reflectors behind the ears; an all-over tan; it fitted her like a golden warmth. “I would consider it in the nature of a public service to hire the sort of men who would forever put you out of Meg’s—and anyone else’s—way. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Balmi? I will have you killed.

  “Without compunction, Mr. Balmi.” He considered what she said, weighed it against the expression on her face, and decided it would do no harm to listen. Still, nothing more than a desire to go back to sleep suffused Ivor Balmi.

  The ennobling capacity for not caring is one that must be nurtured in Man (the caring animal), and once full-grown, like milkweed, is hard to kill.

  “All right, Meg’s mother,” Ivor said, sitting up, “we’ll talk. You talk first.”

  “I want you to stop seeing Meg, I want her to stop coming here, I want—”

  Ivor Balmi threw up a hand. Exceedingly flamboyant, Alfred Drake-poised, the hand silenced the woman instantly. “You want, you want, you want,” he chided her severely. “Meg’s mother, you are a pain in my royal rumper room. Your precious daughter Meg—sixteen and all of her—came jouncing in here one night, made a sloppy mess of herself and proceeded to deposit her can in my bed. While I am not known far and wide as a lofty example to young womanhood of the contemporary knight in shining armor, I am not that depraved that I rob cradles.

  “Your daughter, lady, had me. I was filled, and still am filled, if you must know, with a monumental disinterest in your daughter, her rutting habits, and such nonsense as her continued appearance at my door. She wakes me when I want to sleep.

  “Very much like her mother.

  “Good night.” He rolled over, sliding down, and closed his eyes.

  “You are unbelievable!” the woman cried. She hit him in the back with her fist. Ivor Balmi leaped up and grabbed her wrists before she had a chance to strike again.

  “I don’t want to have to heave you down six flights of stairs on your ass, lady, so please get off my bed, out of my studio, and split!” His voice was still even, unruffled, carrying the message with a tinge of ennui.

  “Balmi!” She almost spat the word, watching him with a peculiar coldness. “You are the most amoral animal I have ever met.”

  Ivor Balmi released her wrists.

  “Do you love Meg?” she asked.

  He stared at her amazed. “You’re kidding,” he said simply. “You’ve got to be kidding.” She stared back at him. A tiny tableau, with nuances of deepness. “You don’t seem to get the message. Your daughter paraded herself around here, I was horny and laid her and that, believe me, was that. The half a dozen times she’s been back, I’ve almost had to boot her. I don’t need her, I’m not interested in her and, frankly, the role of enraged parent doesn’t suit you.

  “You’re better-looking than your daughter. Probably a better lay, too.”

  The woman’s face went white. His words had been delivered as a necrologist would gather details for his obituary column—dispassionately, analytically. She slapped his face. He hauled back after a moment and rammed his fist into her jaw. The woman sprawled off the bed.

  “Lady, one you get for free, the second has to cost.”

  She lay at the side of the bed, her skirt disarrayed about her thighs, and as the red spot began to swell, she began to cry. Ivor Balmi, cursing softly, stepped over her, marched into the living room, through it, and into the plywood-partitioned studio beyond. He snapped on the light over the easel and stood staring at the painting in progress.

  Black rocks flew up into a mourning sky. Birds, whose eyes had seen the ash of solemn hopelessness, age and despair wrought, wheeled in that mourning sky. The world was a mass of turquoise pulsation, bordering and verging on the assimilation of air by darkness. A stricken man, arms flung Earthward with crying need, carried a hump of peat guilt on his warped back. He made for a city whose structure was Mondrian-as-a-psychopath. It was a very bad painting.

  For twenty minutes he worked at it, striking it as a desert wanderer strikes a snake, smiting it with color in broad, insensitive strokes. He worked with a fervor, a fury of touching brush to canvas that was more gymnastic than artistic. He lunged at the painting, he deployed his strength and hurled it shotlike at the work already there. Sweat glinted brightly across his upper lip, caught up by the light over the easel, by the insane reds, the deranged oranges, the lunatic yellows of the fire raging in his city-there-in-paint.

  After twenty minutes, he threw down the palette, let the brushes sink exhausted into their jelly jar of turpentine.

  When he turned, he realized at once that she had been watching him. He had no idea how long she had been there. For the first time since he had struck his father in the face with the volume of Spinoza, that forenoon so long ago, his fury built, stoked, flamed, blazed, consumed him. “You dizzy bitch,” he snarled, starting for her, “what the hell do you mean watching me—”

  “Are all your paintings as bad as that?”

  It stopped him frozen tight cold hard empty there.

  What was this woman? Some sort of Punch-and-Judy clown half-filled with idiocies (“Do you love Meg?”), half-filled with ice-water realities too true, too penetrating to be expressed? He was stopped, and she knew it. There, at that point, his observation of her altered.

  He nodded slowly, with resignation. “Yes, they’re all that bad. I’m a very bad artist…consequently all my paintings are worthless.”

  She came into the room, studied the canvas. “That isn’t so. It isn’t worthless.”

  Her jaw was swollen where he had hit her. It would soon turn black and blue. But the outside beauty was still present. He wanted to say something to her, but had said it all in silence many times before.

  He turned away from her and went back to the bedroom. She followed him, and now there was not the disinterested, bothered detachment that was Ivor Balmi, but a feeling of becoming terribly, inextricably involved with her. Meg’s mother, who are you? What do you want from me…

  (My name is Ivor Balmi, I have black dead eyes. My soul is a heap of autumn leaves ready to be burned. I await only the coming of the burner’s long match, on the Night of the Long Matches. I am alone, I have always been alone, I like being alone. Once I loved a girl, for a very
short time, and when I no longer loved her, or she no longer loved me—what does it matter, it’s all the same, really—I looked again at her face and saw only a shadow of someone I had once known. It was easy to walk away from this stranger. Strangers, I decided then, can never hurt you. So I know only strangers, and care nothing for them. My name is Ivor Balmi, I am alone, I live with my sadness and my self-pity and I like them, love them, adore them for they give me the way to go, the way to see, the way to work. They are the status quo and with that bland, egocentric sameness I can never feel pain, can never feel the frustration and inadequacy, the terror of wanting to do things but not being quite good enough to know them as they should be known, but always flawed, error-filled like reject socks sold by a greasy man on a street corner in bundles of eight packed with a butcher’s paper band. I am Ivor Balmi and you will let me cling tightly, cuddling, to my ways. No one will touch me, and I will paint badly if I want to paint badly, and that way I do not have to struggle.)

  (My name is Ivor Balmi. Let me sleep!)

  She sat down on the edge of the bed again, and looked at the mass of black hair that hid his expressions by cast of unneeded shadow. “When I learned from Meg who she had been seeing, when I learned that she had slept with you, I knew I had to do something.” She twisted the air in nervous hands.

  Then she went on. “When I saw you—I managed to get your address, this party tonight, from Meg—I couldn’t see what she saw in you. You have many women here, don’t you?”

  He did not answer. He stared at the wall as if unable to tear his eyes away.

  “Yes, of course you do. They must bother you terribly. It’s the distance you put between yourself and everyone. It’s the farawayness of you. That’s very appealing. I can see why Meg—you’re right, I know she’s wild, I didn’t want anyone capitalizing on that, she’s all I’ve got since Bert died—I can see why she came here. Your painting…why do you do it? You really aren’t very good, but the way you do it, the way…I watched. It was frightening. I had to watch.”

  Ivor Balmi turned to her, lipped hesitatingly at his words, then said desperately, “Please. Go away. Go now. I don’t want you here. I want…”

  Then he reached for her, she came to him, and from that moment their affair began its downhill slide.

  At first, she came irregularly, once, perhaps twice a week. But as her intensity of feeling mounted for him, she found it more and more difficult to stay away. Then came the difficulties, the subterfuges, the guilt—for Meg knew something was afoot. Just what, she was unable to tell, but to Meg’s mother—whose name, Ivor Balmi learned almost a week later, was Christina—it was apparent that her daughter might soon begin to suspect the truth.

  She mentioned it to Ivor one night, as they sat at his chipped, wobble-legged kitchen table.

  “So what if she finds out?” he said, taking a bite from the fried chicken leg. She pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders; there was a great deal of Ivor Balmi in the expression, the movement.

  “Meg would be very hurt. I really think she loves you, Ivor.” She arched her eyebrows at him. He continued eating. “You’re so alone, Ivor. You’re always alone…and you don’t have to be that way. There are people who care about you, who love you, who just wait for a little return of that love…”

  He had been listening imperiously, still eating. Now he threw down the chicken leg and glared at her. Once more she had spoken an unpleasant, piercing truth.

  “Love; that’s just fine, just fine; love, is it?” Ivor Balmi chuckled. “You use that word like it was a dust mop—it’ll clean everything up. Love! You’ve got the wrong guy for that. Hate is more in my line. I know all about hate. Really I do. But I don’t know a damn thing about love.

  “Love is some kind of pigeonhole label; you feel need, you feel lust, you feel the boost to your ego, you feel lonely—call it love. Lump it all together; none of it makes the word. The word’s a label, a phoney, like ‘middle class’ or ‘beatnik’ or ‘the right way to do things.’ It doesn’t exist, except for people with clichés for synapses.

  “But if you want to know about hate, that I can tell you. I can expound for hours. I had a father who was simple; no, I mean really simple. He got into the Communist Party after the Depression, so you can’t even rationalize him on grounds of pie in the sky. He was pure and simple a humanitarian; he gave a damn about his fellow man. There’s room enough in the world for everyone, good or bad, he used to tell me, and he thought the Commies could do it. Maybe that’s one reason why I don’t want to get involved with people: you care too much, you’ll always get your throat stepped on. Yeah, he cared. What an ass. So when McCarthy cut loose, there was my old man, sitting in a chair in front of the committee, playing God. ‘What is your occupation?’ McCarthy asked him, and you know what he answered? ‘I’m a pedagogue.’ That was brilliant. It made all the eggheads watching the witch hunts on TV very happy. It also lost my old man his job. Hate? I know it inside and out. Hate was what I breathed on my block. No one talked to us. The grocer stopped giving credit, and that was that. Every night the ice cream man came by with his bells ringing, and I stood watching the other kids getting theirs; we couldn’t afford a five-cent ice cream sucker. Have you any idea what it is to be shunned? We were those Red Balmis. I used to have to fight my way home for lunch every day. It was lovely.

  “Hate? You bet your ass I know it. So don’t talk to me about love. I hated my old man—you had to hate anyone that stupid—and I hated the world and I hated myself most of all. So don’t come sucking around me looking for little bird-leavings of love. They’ve all been gobbled by the vultures.

  “And that’s what I’ll do to you if you hang around. Fair warning. Hate is a kind of dry rot; it’s catching.” He had been talking so fast, so intensely, his face had grown red, and around the jawbones quite white. His eyes were heavy and frosted over. He looked inward, seeing things.

  After that discussion, she avoided making mental demands on him, in ways he might construe to mean attachments. She was in love with him—she needed no more involved diagnosis than that—and though she knew he was an incomplete man, in many ways a hollow man, she felt the need to be near him, even when he reverted to his former manner and excluded her completely from his world.

  But there was change in Ivor Balmi. It showed in unsuspected ways, but most obviously in his painting:

  A scene of intense light. Distantly the golden-belled trumpets blare heralding the appearance of the Straight Man, his hair almost paper-white. Columns of marauding starshine pour down, lighting the plain across which he walks. Gates within gates within gates open to him and the look on his face as he advances (four behind him, watching to see if he gets through, joyful to see he will) transfigures his basic homeliness. The apotheosis of simple man. The deification of groundlings.

  Ivor Balmi sold the painting for two hundred and fifty dollars to the third person who viewed it at the Kulten Galleries, where Christina had taken it. It had taken her three days to convince Ivor that she should take it for display. He acquiesced to her wishes with a shy smile, finally.

  The night they celebrated receipt of the check for the sale of the painting, Meg came to call.

  It was a bad scene, filled with the sort of true-confession bathos that Ivor Balmi reviled with all his heart, yet was drawn into like a maelstrom. When it was over, and Meg had called her mother a whore and had steamed out of the loft (“Never to be seen again, good God!” said Christina), they sat staring at one another emptily.

  This is ridiculous, thought Ivor Balmi.

  “Get out,” he said to her. She jerked her head up as though stabbed with an electrically charged wire. Her grey eyes were filled with ash, and the youthful look of her face aged in an instant. Old, old, old as Nineveh and Babylon; old as the first woman who had ever been sent away. Old, that old, very old, terror-old.

  “Ivor…” she said.

  “I don’t want it. I don’t want it at all,” he cried. His face was falling ba
ck into those lines they had held when first she had met him. He was independent, lonely Ivor Balmi; she saw him slip away as she watched.

  “Go back to your daughter, lady. Go back and tell her what a bastard I am. That way you can both nurse the same images, you’ll cleave together, have something to belong to: The Society of Ivor Balmi Haters. Go on. Beat it, I don’t want all this feeling and needing and being one with one. That’s too much responsibility for me, it’s too much worry, too much anguish every day, caring what happens to someone else. I don’t want it. You’re making me fight, you’re throwing me into the struggle in the streets. I have to paint now…I have to be good…I have to succeed…I don’t need it…let me alone…!”

  “You’ve started painting with meaning, Ivor; what you do now has quality, it’s good…” she argued.

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s good and that’s bad. I was content before. I did it, it was stinking, and I knew it. I didn’t have to struggle. Now it’s too much…too much…get out!”

  But she would not go. So he forced her to go.

  He used those subtle instruments of torture known only to men and women who have lived with each other for a time. Those weapons of word and inflection and facial expression that cut so much deeper than knives. He used them, and he used them ruthlessly for this was his survival he fought to retain, slashing at her, calling her names he tasted like salt as he spoke them.

  “Stop playing with me, Meg’s mother,” he ordered. “You came here to play at love, and now you’ve had your game, so get out of my life. I don’t need you, or what you want, or what you offer.

  “Lady bug, lady bug, fly away home,” he said, “your children are losers, your house is on fire.”

  And when the heavy fire door on the first floor had slammed behind her with a metallic clang, Ivor Balmi went to the window and stared out at the street.

  The grey patina of dust and city soot that covered the glass lent everything a ghostly pallor.

  The city had died once more. A cadaver stretched out at his feet, beginning to smell bad, as it once had, now that all the spring flowers were ash.