My eye, but I’ve been all over that ground — years and years ago. I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck any more what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le bel aujourd’hui!
He has one day a week off, Carl, and on that day he’s more miserable, if you can imagine it, than on any other day of the week. Though he professes to despise food, the only way he seems to enjoy himself on his day off is to order a big spread. Perhaps he does it for my benefit — I don’t know, and I don’t ask. If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of vices, let him — it’s O.K. with me. Anyway, last Tuesday, after squandering what he had on a big spread, he steers me to the Dôme, the last place in the world I would seek on my day off. But one not only gets acquiescent here — one gets supine.
Standing at the Dôme bar is Marlowe, soused to the ears. He’s been on a bender, as he calls it, for the last five days. That means a continuous drunk, a peregrination from one bar to another, day and night without interruption, and finally a layoff at the American Hospital. Marlowe’s bony emaciated face is nothing but a skull perforated by two deep sockets in which there are buried a pair of dead clams. His back is covered with sawdust — he has just had a little snooze in the water closet. In his coat pocket are the proofs for the next issue of his review, he was on his way to the printer with the proofs, it seems, when some one inveigled him to have a drink. He talks about it as though it happened months ago. He takes out the proofs and spreads them over the bar; they are full of coffee stains and dried spittle. He tries to read a poem which he had written in Greek, but the proofs are undecipherable. Then he decides to deliver a speech, in French, but the gérant puts a stop to it. Marlowe is piqued: his one ambition is to talk a French which even the garçon will understand. Of Old French he is a master; of the surrealists he has made excellent translations; but to say a simple thing like «get the hell out of here, you old prick!» — that is beyond him. Nobody understands Marlowe’s French, not even the whores. For that matter, it’s difficult enough to understand his English when he’s under the weather. He blabbers and spits like a confirmed stutterer … no sequence to his phrases. «You pay!» that’s one thing he manages to get out clearly.
Even if he is fried to the hat some fine preservative instinct always warns Marlowe when it is time to act. If there is any doubt in his mind as to how the drinks are going to be paid he will be sure to put on a stunt. The usual one is to pretend that he is going blind. Carl knows all his tricks by now, and so when Marlowe suddenly claps his hands to his temples and begins to act it out Carl gives him a boot in the ass and says: «Come out of it, you sap! You don’t have to do that with me!»
Whether it is a cunning piece of revenge or not, I don’t know, but at any rate Marlowe is paying Carl back in good coin. Leaning over us confidentially he relates in a hoarse, croaking voice a piece of gossip which he picked up in the course of his peregrinations from bar to bar. Carl looks up in amazement. He’s pale under the gills. Marlowe repeats the story with variations. Each time Carl wilts a little more. «But that’s impossible!» he finally blurts out. «No it ain’t!» croaks Marlowe. «You’re gonna lose your job … I got it straight.» Carl looks at me in despair. «Is he shitting me, that bastard?» he murmurs in my ear. And then aloud — «What am I going to do now? I’ll never find another job. It took me a year to land this one.»
This, apparently, is all that Marlowe has been waiting to hear. At last he has found someone worse off than himself. «They be hard times!» he croaks, and his bony skull glows with a cold, electric fire.
Leaving the Dôme Marlowe explains between hiccups that he’s got to return to San Francisco. He seems genuinely touched now by Carl’s helplessness. He proposes that Carl and I take over the review during his absence. «I can trust you, Carl,» he says. And then suddenly he gets an attack, a real one this time. He almost collapses in the gutter. We haul him to a bistro at the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and sit him down. This time he’s really got It — a blinding headache that makes him squeal and grunt and rock himself to and fro like a dumb brute that’s been struck by a sledge hammer. We spill a couple of Fernet-Brancas down his throat, lay him out on the bench and cover his eyes with his muffler. He lies there groaning. In a little while we hear him snoring.
«What about his proposition?» says Carl. «Should we take it up? He says he’ll give me a thousand francs when he comes back. I know he won’t, but what about it?» He looks at Marlowe sprawled out on the bench, lifts the muffer from his eyes, and puts it back again. Suddenly a mischievous grin lights up his face. «Listen, Joe,» he says, beckoning me to move closer, «we’ll take him up on it. We’ll take his lousy review over and we’ll fuck him good and proper.»
«What do you mean by that?»
«Why we’ll throw out all the other contributors and we’ll fill it with our own shit — that’s what!»
«Yeah, but what kind of shit?»
«Any kind … he won’t be able to do anything about it. We’ll fuck him good and proper. One good number and after that the magazine’ll be finished. Are you game, Joe?»
Grinning and chuckling we lift Marlowe to his feet and haul him to Carl’s room. When we turn on the lights there’s a woman in the bed waiting for Carl. «I forgot all about her,» says Carl. We turn the cunt loose and shove Marlowe into bed. In a minute or so there’s a knock at the door. It’s Van Norden. He’s all aflutter. Lost a plate of false teeth — at the Bal Nègre, he thinks. Anyway, we get to bed, the four of us. Marlowe stinks like a smoked fish.
In the morning Marlowe and Van Norden leave to search for the false teeth. Marlowe is blubbering. He imagines they are his teeth.
It is my last dinner at the dramatist’s home. They have just rented a new piano, a concert grand. I meet Sylvester coming out of the florist’s with a rubber plant in his arms. He asks me if I would carry it for him while he goes for the cigars. One by one I’ve fucked myself out of all these free meals which I had planned so carefully. One by one the husbands turn against me, or the wives. As I walk along with the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few months back when the idea first occurred to me. I was sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding ring which I had tried to pawn off on a garçon at the Dôme. He had offered me six francs for it and I was in a rage about it. But the belly was getting the upper hand. Ever since I left Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie. It was so much a part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it. It was one of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold. Worth a dollar and a half once, maybe more. For three years we went along without a wedding ring and then one day when I was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a jewelry window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was stuffed with wedding rings. When I got to the pier Mona was not to be seen. I waited for the last passenger to descend the gangplank, but no Mona. Finally I asked to be shown the passenger list. Her name was not on it. I slipped the wedding ring on my pinkie and there it stayed. Once I left it in a public bath, but then I got it back again. One of the orange blossoms had fallen off. Anyway, I was sitting there on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when suddenly someone clapped me on the back. To make it brief, I got a meal and a few francs besides. And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that
