All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are different, are veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is different. This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different from the usual skyscraper a 1’americaine. In this sky” scraper there are no elevators, no 73rd story windows to jump from. If you get tired of climbing you are shit out of luck. There is no slot directory in the main lobby. If you are search-ing for somebody you will have to search. If you want a drink you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths. All the other skyscrapers have what you want! this one contains nothing but what I want, what I like. And somewhere in this skyscraper Valeska has her being, and we’re going to get to her when the spirit moves me. For the time being she’s all right, Valeska, seeing as how she’s six feet under and by now perhaps picked dean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked dean too, by the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a different tint, a different odour.
The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in her veins. It was depressing for everybody around her. She made you aware of it whether you wished to be or not. The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact that her mother was a trollop. The mother was white of course. Who the father was nobody knew, not even Valeska herself.
Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little Jew from the vice-president’s office happened to espy her. He was horrified, so he informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a coloured person as my secretary. He spoke as though she might contaminate the messengers. The next day I was put on the carpet. It was exactly as though I had committed sacrilege. Of course, I pretended that I hadn’t observed anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely intelligent and extremely capable. Finally the president himself stepped in. There was a short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically proposed to give her a better position in Havana.
No talk of the blood taint. Simply that her services had been altogether remarkable and that they would like to promote her – to Havana. Valeska came back to the office in a rage. When she was angry she was magnificent. She said she wouldn’t budge. Steve Romero and Hymie were there at the time and we all went out to dinner together. During the course of the evening we got a bit tight. Valeska’s tongue was wagging. On the way home she told me that she was going to put up a fight; she wanted to know if it would endanger my job. I told her quietly that if she were fired I would quit too. She pretended not to believe it at first. I said I meant it, that I didn’t care what happened. She seemed to be unduly impressed, she took me by the two hands and she held them very gently, the tears rolling down her cheeks.
That was the beginning of things. I think it was the very next day that I slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her. She read the note sitting opposite me and when she was through she looked me square in the eye and said she didn’t believe it. But we went to dinner again that night and we had more to drink and we danced and while we were dancing she pressed herself against me lasciviously. It was just the time, as luck would have it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion. I was telling Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said – “why don’t you let me lend you a hundred dollars?” The next night I brought her home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed how well the two of them got along. Before the evening was over it was agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house the day of the abortion and take care of the kid. The day came and I gave Valeska the afternoon off. About an hour after she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the afternoon off also. I started towards the burlesque on Fourteenth Street. When I was about a block from the theatre I suddenly changed my mind. It was just the thought that if anything happened – if the wife were to kick-off- I wouldn’t feel so damned good having spent the afternoon at the burlesque. I walked around a bit, in and out of the penny arcades, and then I started homeward.
It’s strange how things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child. You take the dominoes and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull the tablecloth on which the battleships are floating until they come to the edge of the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall on to the floor. We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got so sleepy that she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep. The dominoes were lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor too. Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down my throat, my hand between her legs.
As I laid her back on the table she twined her legs around me. I could feel one of the dominoes under my feet – part of the fleet that we had destroyed a dozen times or more. I thought of my grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day that I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as he pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought of the attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture of: Teddy .charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which I used to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship Maine that floated over my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral Dewey and of Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy Yard which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered that we had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the doctor’s office I didn’t have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings … We had hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the slaughter house. I was still buttoning my fly as I went through the hall to open the gate. She was as white as flour. She looked as though she’d never be able to go through another one. We put her to bed and then we gathered up the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on the table. Just the other night in a bistrot, as I was going to the toilet, I happened to pass two old fellows playing dominoes. I had to stop a moment and pick up a domino. The feeling of it immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they made when they fell on the floor. And with the battleships my lost tonsils and my faith in human beings gone.
So that every time I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and looked down towards the Navy Yard I felt as though my guts were dropping out. Way up there, suspended between the two shores, I felt always as though I were hanging over a void; up there everything that had ever happened to me seemed unreal, and worse than unreal – unnecessary. Instead of joining me to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge seemed to break all connections. If I walked towards the one shore or the other it made no difference: either way was hell. Somehow I had managed to sever my connection with the world that human hands and human minds were creating. Perhaps my grandfather was right, perhaps I was spoiled in the bud by the books I read. But it is ages since books have claimed me. For a long time now I have practically ceased to read. But the taint is still there. Now people are books to me. I read them from cover to cover and toss them aside. I devour them, one after the other. And the more I read, the more insatiable I become. There is
