I looked across the river to the Jersey shore. It looked desolate to me, more desolate even than the boulder bed of a dried-up river. Nothing of any importance to the human race had ever happened here. Nothing would happen for thousands of years perhaps. The Pygmies were vastly more interesting, vastly more illuminating to study, than the inhabitants of New Jersey. I looked up and down the Hudson River, a river I have always detested, even from the time when I first read of Henry Hudson and his bloody Half Moon. I hated both sides of the river equally. I hated the legends woven about its name. The whole valley was like the empty dream of a beer-logged Dutchman. I never did give a fuck about Powhatan or Manhattan. I loathed Father Knickerbocker. I wished that there were ten thousand black powder plants scattered on both sided of the river and that they might all blow up simultaneously….
14
A sudden decision to clear out of Cockroach Hall. Why? Because I had met Rebecca….
Rebecca was the second wife of my old friend Arthur Raymond. The two were now living in an enormous apartment on Riverside Drive; they wanted to let out rooms. It was Kronski who told me about it; he said he was going to take one of the rooms.
Why don’t you come up and meet his wife—you’ll like her. She could be Mona’s sister.» «What’s her name?» I asked. «Rebecca. Rebecca Valentine.»
The name Rebecca excited me. I had always wanted to meet a woman called Rebecca—and not Becky.
(Rebecca, Ruth, Roxanne, Rosalind, Frederika, Ursula, Sheila, Norma, Guinevere, Leonora, Sabina, Malvina, Solange, Deirdre. What wonderful names women had! Like flowers, stars, constellations….)
Mona wasn’t so keen about the move, but when we got to Arthur Raymond’s place and she heard him practising, she changed her tune.
It was Renee, the younger sister of Arthur Raymond, who opened the door. She was about nineteen, a spit-fire with heavy curly locks full of vitality. Her voice was like a nightingale’s—no matter what she said you felt like agreeing.
Finally Rebecca presented herself. She was right out of the Old Testament—dark and sunny clean through. Mona warmed to her immediately, as she would to a lost sister. They were both beautiful. Rebecca was more mature, more solid, more integrated. One felt instinctively that she always preferred the truth. I liked her firm hand-clasp, the direct flashing look with which she greeted one. She seemed to have none of the usual female pettinesses.
Soon Arthur joined us. He was short, muscular, with a hard, steely twang to his voice and frequently convulsed by explosive spasms of laughter. He laughed just as heartily over his own quips as over the other fellow’s. He was inordinately healthy, vital, jolly, exuberant. He had always been that way and in the old days, when Maude and I first moved into his neighborhood, I was very fond of him. I used to burst in on him all hours of the day and night and give him three and four hour resumes of the books I had just read. I remember spending whole afternoons talking of Smerdiakov and Pavel Pavlovitch, or General Ivolgin, or those angelic sprites which surrounded the Idiot, or of the Filipovna woman. He was married then to Irma, who later became one of my associates in the Cosmodemonic Telefloccus Company. In those early days, when I first knew Arthur Raymond, tremendous things occurred—in the mind, I should add. Our conversations were like passages out of The Magic Mountain, only more virulent, more exalted, more sustained, more provocative, more inflammable, more dangerous, more menacing—and much more, ever so much more, exhausting.
I was making a rapid throw-back as I stood watching him talk. His sister Renee was trying to keep up a waning conversation with Kronski’s wife. (The latter always went dead on you, no matter how absorbing the theme might be.) I wondered how we would get along, the lot of us, under one roof. Of the two vacant rooms Kronski had already preempted the larger one. The six of us were now huddled together in the other room which was nothing more than a cubby-hole.
«Oh, it’ll do,» Arthur Raymond was saying. «God, you don’t need much room—there’s the whole house. I want you to come. We’re going to have a great time here. God!» He exploded with laughter again.
I knew he was desperate. Too proud, however, to admit that he needed money. Rebecca looked at me expectantly. I read very clearly what was written in her face. Mona spoke up suddenly: «Of course we’ll take it.» Kronski rubbed his hands gleefully. «Sure you will! We’re going to make a grand stew of it, you’ll see.» And then he fell to haggling with them about the price. But Arthur Raymond wouldn’t talk about money. «Make your own terms,» he said, wandering off to the big room where the piano stood. I heard him pounding the piano. I tried to listen but Rebecca stood in front of me and kept plying me with questions.
A few days later we were installed. The first thing we noticed about our new domicile was that everybody was trying to use the bathroom at once. You got to know who the last occupant was by the smell he left behind. The sink was always clogged up with long hairs and Arthur Raymond, who never owned a toothbrush, would use the first one that came to hand. There were too many females about, for another thing. The older sister, Jessica, who was an actress, came frequently and often stayed the night. There was Rebecca’s mother, too, who was always in and out of the place, always wreathed in sorrow, always dragging herself along like a corpse. And then there were Kronski’s friends and Rebecca’s friends and Arthur’s friends and Renee’s friends, to say nothing of the pupils who came at all hours of the day and night. At first it was charming to hear the piano going: snatches of Bach, Ravel, Debussy, Mozart and so on. Then it became exasperating, especially when Arthur Raymond himself was practising. He went over and over a phrase with the tenacity and persistence of a madman. First with one hand, firmly and slowly; then with the other hand, firmly and slowly. Then two hands, very firmly, very slowly; then more and more rapidly, until he reached the normal tempo. Then twenty times, fifty times, a hundred times. He would advance a little—a few more measures. Ditto. Then back again, like a crab, from the very beginning. Then suddenly he’d scrap it, begin something new, something he liked. He’d play it with all his heart, as if he were giving a concert. But maybe a third of the way through he’d stumble. Silence. He’d go back a few measures, break it down, build it up, slow, fast, one hand, two hands, all together, hands, feet, elbows, knuckles, moving forward like a tank corps, sweeping everything before him, mowing down trees, fences, barns, hedges, walls. It was agonizing to follow him. He was not playing for enjoyment—he was playing to perfect his technique. He was wearing his fingers-tips off, rubbing his ass smooth. Always advancing, progressing, attacking, conquering, annihilating, mopping up, realigning his forces, throwing out sentries and sentinels, covering his rear, digging himself in, charging in prisoners» segregating the wounded, reconnoitering, ambushing his men, sending up flares, rockets, exploding ammunition plants, railway centers, inventing new torpedoes, dynamos, flame-throwers, coding and decoding the messages that came in….
A grand teacher, though. A darling teacher. He moved about the room in his khaki shirt, always open at the neck, like a restive panther. He would stand in a corner listening, with his chin in the palm of his hand and the other hand supporting his elbow. He’d walk to the window and look out, humming softy as he followed the pupil’s manful attempts to live up to that perfection which Arthur demanded of all his pupils. If it were a very young pupil he could be as tender as a lamb; he would make the child laugh, would pick her up in his arms and lift her off the stool. «You see…?» and he would very slowly, very gently, very carefully, indicate the way it should be done. He had infinite patience with his young pupils—a beautiful thing to watch. He looked after them as if they were flowers. He tried to reach their souls, tried to soothe them or inflame them, as the case might be. With the older ones it was still more thrilling to observe his technique. With these he was all attention, alert as a porcupine, his legs stanced, swaying, balancing himself, raising and lowering himself on the balls of his feet, the muscles of his face moving rapidly as he followed with glittering eagerness the transition from passage to passage. To these he spoke as if they were masters already. He would suggest this or that manipulation, this or that interpretation. Often interrupting the performance for ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, he would launch into brilliant expositions of commanding techniques, comparing one with another, evaluating them, comparing a score with a book, one writer with another writer, a palette with a texture, a tone with a personal idiom, and so
