“Listen,” says Jill, “who the hell was that? You were pretty smooth with her. Oui, madame … non, madame! Did she promise to buy you a drink too?” Turning to us-“Can you imagine it, he has an actress up here yesterday while I’m taking a bath … some trollop from the Casino de Paris … and she takes him out and gets him soused….”
“You don’t tell that right, Jill. It’s this way … I’m showing her a lovely apartment-with a dumbwaiter in it-and she says to me won’t you show me your poetry —poesie … sounds better in French … and so I bring her up here and she says I’ll have them printed for you in Belgian.”
“Why Belgian, Jab?”
“Because that’s what she was, a Belgian-or a Belgianess. Anyway, what difference does it make what language they’re printed in? Somebody has to print them, otherwise nobody will read them.”
“But what made her say that-so quick like?”
“Ask me! Because they’re good, I suppose. Why else would people want to print poems?”
“Baloney! “
“See that! She doesn’t believe me.”
“Of course I don’t! If I catch you bringing any prima donnas up here, or any toe dancers, or any trapeze artists, or anything that’s French and wears skirts, there’s going to be hell to pay. Especially if they offer to print your poems!”
“There you are,” says Jabberwhorl, glaucous and glowbry. “That’s why I’m in the real estate business…. Go ahead and eat, you people…. I’m watching.”
He mixes another dose of cognac and pepper.
“I think you’ve had enough,” says Jill. “Jesus, how many of them have you had today?”
“Funny,” says Jabberwhorl, “I fixed her up all right a few moments ago-just before you came-but I can’t fix myself up….”
“Jesus, where’s that goose!” says Jill. “Excuse me, I’m going inside and see what the girls are doing.”
“No you don’t!” says Jab, pushing her back into her seat. “We’re gonna sit right here and wait … wait and see what happens. Maybe the goose’ll never come. We’ll be sitting here waiting … waiting forever … just like this, with the candles and the empty soup plates and the curtains and … I can just imagine us sitting here and some one outside plastering a wall around us…. We’re sitting here waiting for Elsa to bring the goose and time passes and it gets dark and we sit here for days and days…. See those candles? We’d eat ‘em. And those flowers over there? Them too. We’d eat the chairs, we’d eat the sideboard, we’d eat the alarm clock, we’d eat the cats, we’d eat the curtains, we’d eat the bills and the silverware and the wallpaper and the bugs underneath … we’d eat our own dung and that nice new fetus Jill’s got inside her … we’d eat each other….”
Just at this moment Pinochinni comes in to say good night. She’s hanging her head like and there’s a quizzical look in her eye.
“What’s the matter with you tonight?” says Jill. “You look worried.”
“Oh, I don’t know what it is,” says the youngster. “There’s something I want to ask you about… . It’s awfully complicated. I don’t really know if I can say what I mean.”
“What is it, snookums?” says Jab. “Say it right out in front of the lady and the gentleman. You know him, don’t you? Come on, spit it out!”
The youngster is still holding her head down. Out of the corner of her eye she looks up at her father slyly and then suddenly she blurts out: “Oh, what’s it all about? What are we here for anyway? Do we have to have a world? Is this the only world there is and why is it? That’s what I want to know.”
If Jabberwhorl Cronstadt was somewhat astonished he gave no sign of it. Picking up his cognac nonchalantly, and adding a little cayenne pepper, he answered blithely: “Listen, kid, before I answer that question if you insist on my answering that question-you’ll have to first define your terms.”
Just then there came a long shrill whistle from the garden.
“Mowgli!” says Cronstadt. “Tell him to come on up.91
“Come up!” says Jill, stepping to the window.
No answer.
“He must have gone,” says Jill. “I don’t see him any more.”
Now a woman’s voice floats up. “Il est saoul … completement saoul.”
“Take him home! Tell her to take him home!” yells Cronstadt.
“Mon mari dit qu’il faut rentrer chez vous … oui, chez vous.”
“Y’en a pas!” floats up from the garden.
“Tell her not to lose my copy of Pound’s Cantos,” yells Cronstadt. “And don’t ask them up again … we have no room here. Just enough space for German refugees.”
“That’s a shame,” says Jill, coming back to the table.
“You’re wrong again,” says Jab. “It’s very good for him.”
“Oh, you’re drunk,” says Jill. “Where’s that damned goose anyhow? Elsa! Elsa!”
“Never mind the goose, darling! This is a game. We’re going to sit here and outlast ‘em. The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday-but never jam today…. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you people sat here just like you are and I began to grow smaller and smaller … until I got to be just a tiny, weeny little speck … so that you had to have a magnifying glass to see me? I’d be a little spot on the tablecloth and I’d be saying-Timoor … Ti-moor! And you’d say where is he? And I’d be saying-Timoor, logodaedaly, glycophos-phates, Billancourt, Ti-moor … 0 timbus twaddle down the brawkish brake … and you’d say….”
“Jesus, Jab, you’re drunk!” says Jill. And Jabberwhorl glausels with gleerious glitter, his awbrous orbs atwit and atwitter.
“He’ll be getting cold in a minute,” says Jill, getting up to look for the Spanish cape.
“That’s right,” says Jab. “Whatever she says is right. You think I’m a very contrary person. You,” he says, turning to me, “you with your Mongolian verbs, your transitives and intransitives, don’t you see what an affable being I am? You’re talking about China all the time … this is China, don’t you see that? This… this what? Get me the cape, Jill, I’m cold. This is a terrible cold … sub-glacial cold. You people are warm, but I’m freezing. I can f eel the ice caps coming down again. A fact. Everything is rolling along nicely, the dollar is falling, the apartments are rented, the refugees are all refuged, the piano is tuned, the bills are paid, the goose is cooked and what are we waiting for? For the next Ice Age! It’s coming tomorrow morning. You’ll go to the window and everything’ll be frozen tight. No more problems, no more history, no more nothing. Settled. We’ll be sitting here like this waiting for Anna to bring in the goose and suddenly the ice will roll over us.
I can feel the terrible cold already, the bread all icicled, the butter blenched, the goose gazzled, the walls wildish white. And that little angel, that bright new embryo that Jill’s got under her belt, that’ll be frozen in the womb, a glairy gawk with ice-cold wings and the lips of a snail. Jugger, jugger, and everything’ll be still and quiet. Say something warm! My legs are frozen. Herodotus says that on the death of its father the phoenix embalms the body in an egg made of myrrh and once every five hundred years or so it conveys the little egg embalmed in myrrh from the desert of Arabia to the temple of the sun at Heliopolis. Do you like that? According to Pliny there is only one egg at a time and when the bird perceives that its end is near it builds a nest of cassia twigs and frankincense and dies upon it. From the body of the nest is born a little worm which becomes the phoenix. Hence bennu, symbol of the resurrection. How’s that? I need something hotter. Here’s another one…. The firewalkers in Bulgaria are called Nistingares. They dance in the fire on the twentyfirst of May during the feast of Saint Helena and Saint Constantine. They dance on the red-hot embers until they’re blue in the face, and then they utter prophecies.”
“Don’t like that at all,” says Jill.
“Neither do I,” says Jab. “I like the one about the little soul-worms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection. Jill’s got one inside her too … it’s sprouting and sprouting. Can’t stop it. Yesterday it was a tadpole, tomorrow it’ll be a honeysuckle vine. Can’t tell what it’s going to be yet … not eventually. It dies in the nest every day and the next day it’s born again. Put your ear to her belly … you can hear the whirring of its wings. Whirrrr … whirrrr. Without a motor. Wonderful! She’s got millions of
