What her face was like I hardly remember any more. I have a faint recollection that her nose was retrousse. One would never recognize her with her clothes on, that’s a cinch. You concentrated on the torso, in the center of which was a huge painted navel the color of carmine. It was like a hungry mouth, this navel. Like the mouth of a fish suddenly stricken with paralysis. I’m sure her cunt wasn’t half as exciting to look at. It was probably a pale bluish sliver of meat that a dog wouldn’t even bother to sniff. She was alive in her mid-riff, in that sinuous fleshy pear which domed out from under the chest bones. The torso reminded me always of those dressmaker’s model whose thighs end in a framework of umbrella ribs. As a child I used to love to run my hand over the umbilical swell. It was heavenly to the touch. And the fact that there were no arms or legs to the model enhanced the bulging beauty of the torso. Sometimes there was no wickerwork below—just a truncated figure with a little collar of a neck which was always painted a shiny black. They were the intriguing ones, the lovable ones. One night in a side show I came upon a live one, just like the sewing machine models at home. She moved about on the platform with her hands, as if she were treading water. I got real close to her and engaged her in conversation. She had a head, of course, and it was rather a pretty one, something like the wax images you see in hairdressing establishments in the chic quarters of a big city. I learned that she was from Vienna; she had been born without legs. But I’m getting off the track…. The thing that fascinated me about her was that she had that same voluptuous swell, that pear-like ripple and bulge. I stood by her platform a long time just to survey her from all angles. It was amazing how close her legs had been pared off. Just another slice off her and she would have been minus a twat. The more I studied her the more tempted I was to push her over. I could imagine my arms around her cute little waist, imagine myself picking her up, slinging her under my arm and making off with her to ravish her in a vacant lot.
During the intermission, while the girls went to the lavatory to see dear old mother, Ned and I stood on the iron stairway which adorns the exterior of the theatre. From the upper tiers one could look into the homes across the street, where the dear old mothers fret and stew like angry roaches. Cosy little flats they are, if you have a strong stomach and a taste for the ultra-violet dreams of Chagall. Food and bedding are the dominant motifs. Sometimes they blend indiscriminately and the father who has been selling matches all day with tubercular frenzy finds himself eating the mattress. Among the poor only that which takes hours to prepare is served. The gourmet loves to eat in a restaurant which is odorous; the poor man gets sick to the stomach when he climbs the stairs and gets a whiff of what’s coming to him. The rich man loves to walk the dog around the block—to work up a mild appetite. The poor man looks at the sick bitch lying under the tubs and feels that it would be an act of mercy to kick it in the guts. Nothing gives him an appetite. He is hungry, perpetually hungry for the things he craves. Even a breath of fresh air is a luxury. But then he’s not a dog, and so nobody takes him out for an airing, alas and alack. I’ve seen the poor blighters leaning out of the window on their elbows, their heads hanging in their hands like Jack-o’-Lanterns: it doesn’t take a mind-reader to know what they’re thinking about. Now and then a row of tenements is demolished in order to open up ventilating holes. Passing these blank areas, spaced like missing teeth, I’ve often imagined the poor, bleeding blighters to be still hanging there on the window-sills, the houses torn down but they themselves suspended in mid-air, propped up by their own grief and misery, like torpid blimps defying the law of gravitation. Who notices these airy spectres? Who gives a fuck whether they’re suspended in the air or buried six feet deep? The show is the thing, as Shakespeare says. Twice a day, Sundays included, the show goes on. If it’s short of provender you are, why stew a pair of old socks. The Minsky Brothers are dedicated to giving entertainment. Hershey Almond Bars are always on tap, good before or after you jerk off. A new show every week—with the same about old cast and the same old jokes. What would really be a catastrophe for the Minsky gents would be for Cleo to be stricken with a double hernia. Or to get pregnant. Hard to say which would be worse. She could have lockjaw or enteritis or claustrophobia, and it wouldn’t matter a damn. She could even survive the menopause. Or rather, the Minskys could. But hernia, that would be like death— irrevocable.
What went on in Ned’s mind during this brief intermission I could only conjecture. «Pretty horrible, isn’t it?» he remarked, chiming in with some observation I had made. He said it with a detachment that would have done credit to a scion of Park Avenue. Nothing anyone could do about it, is what he meant. At twenty-five he had been the art director in an advertising concern; that was five or six years ago. Since then he had been on the rocks, but adversity had in no way altered his views about life. It had merely confirmed his basic notion that poverty was something to be avoided. With a good break he would once again be on top, dictating to those whom he was now fawning upon.
He was telling me about a proposition he had up his sleeve, another «unique» idea for an advertising campaign. (How to make people smoke more— without injuring their health.) The trouble was, now that he was on the other side of the fence nobody would listen to him. Had he still been art director everybody would have accepted the idea immediately as a brilliant one. Ned saw the irony of the situation, nothing more. He thought it had something to do with his front—perhaps he didn’t look as confident as he used to. If he had a better wardrobe, if he could lay off the booze for a while, if he could work up the right enthusiasm…. and so on. Marcelle worried him. She was taking it out of him. With every fuck he gave her he felt that another brilliant idea had been slaughtered. He wanted to be alone for a while so that he could think things out. If Marcelle were on tap only when he needed her and not turn up at odd hours—just when he was in the middle of something—it would be ducky.
«You want a bottle opener, not a woman,» I said.
He laughed, as though he were slightly embarrassed.
«Well, you know how it is,» he said. «Jesus, I like her all right… she’s fine. Another girl would have ditched me long ago. But—.»
«Yes, I know. The trouble is she sticks.»
«It sounds rotten, doesn’t it?»
«It is rotten,» said I. «Listen, did it ever occur to you that you may never again be an art director, that you had your chance and you muffed it? Now you’ve got another chance—and you’re muffing it again. You could get married and become… well, I don’t know what… any damned thing… what difference does it make? You have a chance to lead a normal, happy life—on a modest plane. It doesn’t seem possible to you, I suppose, that you might be better off driving a milk wagon? That’s too dull for you, isn’t it? Too bad! I’d have more respect for you as ditch digger than as president of the Palm Olive Soap Company. You’re not burning up with original ideas, as you imagine, you’re simply trying to retrieve something that’s lost. It’s pride that’s goading you, not ambition. If you had any originality you’d be more flexible: you’d prove it in a hundred different ways. What gripes you is that you failed. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to you. But you don’t know how to exploit your misfortunes. You were probably cut out for something entirely different, but you won’t give yourself a chance to find out what. You revolve your obsession like a rat in a trap. If you ask me, it’s pretty horrible… more horrible than the sight of these poor doomed bastards hanging out of the windows. They’re willing to tackle anything; you’re not willing to lift your little finger. You want to go back to your throne and be the king of the advertising world. And if
