The answer was No! Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow —NO! Positively no! Her whole physical, mental, moral and spiritual development had brought her to that great moment when she could answer triumphantly: NO! Positively No!
If she had only said to me: «Listen, you can’t ask me to do a thing like that! It’s mad, don’t you see? How would we get along, the three of us? I know you’d like to help her—so would I… but….»
If she had spoken that way I would have gone to the mirror, taken a long cool look at myself, laughed like a broken hinge and agreed that it was utterly mad. Not that only, but more… I would have given her credit for really desiring to do something which I knew her meagre spirit was incapable of imagining. Yes, I’d have chalked up a white mark for her and topped it off with a quiet insane fuck a la Huysmans. I’d have taken her on my lap, as her father in heaven used to do, and cooing and billing, and pretending that 986 plus 2 makes minus 69 I’d have delicately lifted her organdy cover-all, and put the fire out with an ethereal fire extinguisher.
However, and instead of which, pissing in vain against a wall of fire-proofed sheet metal, I got so infuriated that I burst out of the house in the middle of the night and started walking to Coney Island. The weather was mild and when I got to the boardwalk I sat down on a ramp and began to laugh. I got to thinking of Stanley, of the night I met him after his release from Fort Oglethorpe, of the open barouche we hired and the beer bottles piled up on the seat opposite. After four years in the cavalry Stanley was a man of iron. He was tough inside and out, as only a Pole can be. He would have bitten my ear off, if I had dared him to, and perhaps spat it in my face. He had a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket and he wanted to spend it all that night. And before the night was over I remember that we had just enough between us to share a room together in some broken-down hotel near Borough Hall. I remember too that he was so stinking drunk that he wouldn’t get out of bed to relieve his bladder—just turned over and pissed a steady stream against the wall.
The next day I was still furious. And the following day and the day after. That NO! was eating me up. It would take a thousand Yes-es to bury it. Nothing vital occupied me at the time. I was making a pretense of earning a living by selling a shelf of books which were supposed to contain «the world’s best literature». I hadn’t yet sunk to the encyclopaedia stage. The rat who had put me on to the game had hypnotized me. I sold everything in a post-hypnotic trance. Sometimes I awoke with bright ideas, that’s to say, slightly criminal or definitely hallucinatory. Anyway, still hopping mad, still furious, I awoke one day with that NO! still reverberating in my ears. I was eating breakfast when I suddenly recalled that I had never canvassed cousin Julie. Maude’s cousin Julie. Julie was married now, just long enough, I figured, to want a change of rhythm. Julie would be my first call. I’d take it easy, pop in just a little before lunch, sell her a set of books, have a good meal, get my end in and then go to a movie.
Julie lived at the upper end of Manhattan in a wall-papered incubator. Her husband was a dope, as near as I could make out. That’s to say he was a perfectly normal specimen who earned an honest living and voted the Republican or Democratic ticket according to mood. Julie was a good-natured slob who never read anything more disturbing than the Saturday Evening Post. She was just a piece of ass, with about enough intelligence to realize that after a fuck you have to take a douche and if that doesn’t work then a darning needle. She had done it so often, the darning needle stunt, that she was an adept at it. She could bring on a haemorrhage even if it had been an immaculate conception. Her main idea was to enjoy herself like a drunken weasel and get it out of her system as quick as possible. She wouldn’t flinch at using a chisel or a monkey wrench, if she thought either would do the trick.
I was a bit flabbergasted when she came to the door. I hadn’t thought of the change a year or so can work in a female, nor had I thought how most females look at eleven in the morning when they are not expecting visitors. To be cruelly exact, she looked like a cold meat loaf that had been spattered with catsup and put back in the ice box. The Julie I had last seen was a dream by comparison. I had to make some rapid transpositions to adjust myself to the situation.
Naturally I was more in the mood to sell than to fuck. Before very long, however, I realized that to sell, I would have to fuck. Julie just couldn’t understand what the hell had come over me—to walk in on her and try to dump a load of books on her. I couldn’t tell her it would improve her mind because she had no mind, and she knew it and wasn’t the least embarrassed to admit it.
She left me alone for a few minutes in order to primp herself up. I began reading the prospectus.
I found it so interesting that I almost sold myself a set of books. I was reading a fragment about Coleridge, what a wonderful mind he had, (and I had always thought him a bag of shit!), when I felt her coining towards me. It was so interesting, the passage, that I excused myself without looking up and continued reading. She knelt behind me, on the couch, and began reading over my shoulder. I felt her sloshy boobs joggling me but I was too intent on pursuing the ramifications of Coleridge’s amazing mind to let her vegetable appendages disturb me.
Suddenly the beautifully bound prospectus went flying out of my hand.
«What are you reading that crap for?» she cried, swinging me around and holding me by the elbows. «I don’t understand a word of it, and neither do you, I’ll bet. What’s the matter with you—can’t you find yourself a job?»
A witless-shitless sort of grin slowly spread over her face. She looked like a Teutonic angel doing a real think. I got up, recovered the prospectus, and asked what about lunch.
«Jesus, I like your crust,» said she. «What the hell do you think I am any way?»
Here I had to pretend that I was only joking, but after putting my hand down her bosom and twiddling the nipple of her right teat a while, I deftly brought the conversation back to the subject of food.
«Listen, you’ve changed,» she said. «I don’t like the way you talk—or act.» Here she firmly stuck her teat back, as if it were a ball of wet socks going into a laundry bag. «Listen, I’m a married woman, do you realize that? Do you know what Mike would do to you if he caught you acting this way?»
«You’re a bit changed yourself,» said I, rising to my feet and sniffing the air in search of provender. All I wanted now was food. I don’t know why, but I had made up my mind that she would dish me up a good meal—that was the least she could do for me, lop-sided moron that she was.
The only way to get anything out of her was to handle her. I had to pretend to get passionate mauling the cheeks of her tumorous ass. And yet not too passionate, because that would mean a quick fuck and maybe no lunch. If the meal were good I might do a hit and run job—that’s what I was thinking to myself as I foozled around.
«Jesus Christ, all right, I’ll get you a meal,» she blurted out, reading my thoughts like a blind bookworm.
«Fine,» I almost shouted. «What have you got?» «Come and see for yourself,» she answered, dragging me to the kitchen and opening the icebox.
I saw ham, potato salad, sardines, cold beets, rice pudding, apple sauce, frankfurters, pickles, celery stalks, cream cheese and a special dish of puke with mayonnaise on it which I knew I didn’t want.
«Let’s bring it all out,» I
