In Between the Sheets

fashionable place where waiting customers stood like hungry ghosts at the backs of those seated.

We went to a club where singers and stand-up comedians performed in the hope of being discovered. A thin girl with bright red hair and sequined T-shirt reached the end of her passionately murmured song on a sudden shrill, impossible top note. All conversation ceased. Someone, perhaps maliciously, dropped a glass. Halfway through, the note became a warbling vibrato and the singer collapsed on the stage in an abject curtsy, arms held stiffly in front of her, fists clenched. Then she sprang to her tiptoes and held her arms high above her head with the palms flat as if to forestall the sporadic and indifferent applause.

“They all want to be Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli,” George explained as he sucked a giant cocktail through a pink plastic straw. “But no one’s looking for that kind of stuff anymore.”

A man with stooped shoulders and wild curly hair shuffled onto the stage. He took the microphone out of its rest, held it close to his lips and said nothing. He seemed to be stuck for words. He wore a torn, muddied denim jacket over bare skin, his eyes were swollen almost to the point of closing and under the right there ran a long scratch which ended at the corner of his mouth and gave him the look of a partly made-up clown. His lower lip trembled and I thought he was going to weep. The hand that was not holding the microphone worried a coin and looking at that I noticed the stains down his jeans, yes, fresh wet vomit clung there. His lips parted but no sounds came out. The audience waited patiently. Somewhere at the back of the room a wine bottle was opened. When he spoke finally it was to his fingernails, a low, cracked murmur.

“I’m such a goddamn mess!”

The audience broke into fall-about laughter and cheering, which after a minute gave way to foot stamping and rhythmic clapping. George and I, perhaps constrained by each other’s company, smiled. The man reappeared by the microphone the moment the last clapping died away. Now he spoke rapidly, his eyes still fixed on his fingers. Sometimes he glanced worriedly to the back of the room and we caught the flash of the whites of his eyes. He told us he had just broken up with his girl friend, and how, as he was driving away from her house, he had started to weep, so much so that he could not see to drive and had to stop his car. He thought he might kill himself but first he wanted to say goodbye to her. He drove to a call box but it was out of order and this made him cry again. Here the audience, silent till now, laughed a little. He reached his girlfriend from a drugstore. As soon as she picked up the phone and heard his voice, she began to cry too. But she didn’t want to see him. She told him, “It’s useless, there’s nothing we can do.” He put the phone down and howled with grief. An assistant in the drugstore told him to leave because he was upsetting the other customers. He walked along the street thinking about life and death, it started to rain, he popped some amyl nitrate, he tried to sell his watch. The audience was growing restless, a lot of people had stopped listening. He bummed fifty cents off a bum. Through his tears he thought he saw a woman aborting a fetus in the gutter and when he got closer he saw it was cardboard boxes and a lot of old rags. By now the man was talking over a steady drone of conversation. Waitresses with silver trays circulated among the tables. Suddenly the speaker raised his hand and said, “Well, see you,” and he was gone. A few people clapped but most did not notice him leave.

Not long before I was due to leave Los Angeles George invited me to spend Saturday evening at his house. I would be flying to New York late the following day. He wanted me to bring along a couple of friends to make a small farewell party, and he wanted me to bring along my flute.

“I really want to sit,” said George, “in my own home with a glass of wine in my hand and hear you play that thing.” I phoned Mary first. We had been meeting intermittently since our weekend. Occasionally she had come and spent the afternoon at my apartment. She had another lover she more or less lived with, but she hardly mentioned him and it was never an issue between us. After agreeing to come, Mary wanted to know if Terence was going to be there. I had recounted to her Terence’s adventure with Sylvie, and described my own ambivalent feelings about him. Terence had not returned to San Francisco as he had intended. He had met someone who had a friend “in screen writing” and now he was waiting for an introduction. When I phoned him he responded with an unconvincing parody of Semitic peevishness. “Five weeks in this town and I’m invited out already?” I decided to take seriously George’s wish to hear me play the flute. I practised my scales and arpeggios, I worked hard at those places in the Sonata No. 1 where I always faltered and as I played I fantasized about Mary, George and Terence listening spellbound and a little drunk, and my heart raced.

Mary arrived in the early evening and before driving to pick up Terence we sat around on my balcony watching the sun and smoked a small joint. It had been on my mind before she came that we might be going to bed for one last time. But now that she was here and we were dressed for an evening elsewhere, it seemed more appropriate to talk. Mary asked me what I had been doing and I told her about the nightclub act. I was not sure whether to present the man as a performer with an act so clever it was not funny, or as someone who had come in off the street and taken over the stage.

“I’ve seen acts like that here,” said Mary. “The idea, when it works, is to make your laughter stick in your throat. What was funny suddenly gets nasty.” I asked Mary if she thought there was any truth in my man’s story. She shook her head.

“Everyone here,” she said, gesturing toward the setting sun, “has got some kind of act going like that.”

“You seem to say that with some pride,” I said as we stood up. She smiled and we held hands for an empty moment in which there came to me from nowhere a vivid image of the parallel bars on the beach; then we turned and went inside.

Terence was waiting for us on the pavement outside the house where he was staying. He wore a white suit and as we pulled up he was fixing a pink carnation to his lapel. Mary’s car had only two doors. I had to get out to let Terence in, but through a combination of sly maneuvering on his part and obtuse politeness on my own, I found myself introducing my two friends from the back seat. As we turned onto the freeway Terence began to ask Mary a series of polite, insistent questions and it was clear from where I sat directly behind Mary, that as she was answering one question he was formulating the next or falling over himself to agree with everything she said.

“Yes, yes,” he was saying, leaning forward eagerly, clasping together his long, pale fingers, “That’s a really good way of putting it.” Such condescension, I thought, such ingratiation. Why does Mary put up with it? Mary said that she thought Los Angeles was the most exciting city in the United States. Before she had even finished Terence was outdoing her with extravagant praise.

“I thought you hated it.” I interjected sourly. But Terence was adjusting his seat belt and asking Mary another question. I sat back and stared out the window, attempting to control my irritation.

A little later Mary was craning her neck trying to find me in her mirror. “You’re very quiet back there,” she said gaily.

I fell into sudden, furious mimicry. “That’s a really good way of putting it, yes, yes.” Neither Terence nor Mary made any reply. My words hung over us as though they were being uttered over and over again. I opened my window. We arrived at George’s house with twenty-five minutes of unbroken silence behind us.

The introductions over, the three of us held the center of George’s huge living room while he fixed our drinks at the bar. I held my flute case and music stand under my arm like weapons. Apart from the bar the only other furniture was two yellow plastic sag chairs, very bright against the desert expanse of brown carpet. Sliding doors took up the length of one wall and gave onto a small backyard of sand and stones in the center of which, set in concrete, stood one of those tree-like contraptions for drying clothes on. In the corner of the yard was a scrappy sagebrush plant, survivor of the real desert that had been here a year ago. Terence, Mary and I addressed remarks to George and said nothing to each other.

“Well,” said George when the four of us stood looking at each other with drinks in our hands, “Follow me and I’ll show you the kids.” Obediently we padded behind George in single file along a narrow, thickly carpeted corridor. We peered through a bedroom doorway at two small boys in a bunk bed reading comics. They glanced at us without interest and went on reading.

Back in the living room, I said, “They’re very subdued, George. What do you do, beat them up?” George took my question seriously and there followed a conversation about corporal punishment. George said he occasionally gave the boys a slap on the back of the legs if things got really out of hand. But it was not to hurt them, he said, so much as to show them he meant business. Mary said she was dead against striking children at all, and Terence, largely to cut a figure I thought, or perhaps to demonstrate to me that he could disagree with Mary, said that he thought a sound thrashing never did anyone any harm. Mary laughed, but George, who obviously was not taking to this faintly foppish, languid guest sprawled across his carpet, seemed ready to move onto the attack. George worked hard. He kept his back straight even when he sat in the sag chair.