And Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had risen and something curious too had happened; as if everyone in the city, simultaneously, had become sick of news of any kind; for thousands of newspaper pages blew through the small park on the way crosstown, blundered like pale bats against the trees, tangled themselves around the feet of Roony and Rachel, and of a bum sleeping across the way. Millions of unread and useless words had come to a kind of life in Sheridan Square; while the two on the bench wove cross-tally of their own, oblivious, among them.
And Stencil sat dour and undrunk, in the Rusty Spoon, while Slab's friend, another Catatonic Expressionist, harangued him with the Great Betrayal, told of the Dance of Death. While around them something of the sort was in fact going on: for here was the Whole Sick Crew, was it not, linked maybe by a spectral chain and rollicking along over some moor or other. Stencil thought of Mondaugen's story, The Crew at Foppl's, saw here the same leprous pointillism of orris root, weak jaws and bloodshot eyes, tongues and backs of teeth stained purple by this morning's homemade wine, lipstick which it seemed could be peeled off intact, tossed to the earth to join a trail of similar jetsam - the disembodied smiles or pouts which might serve, perhaps, as spoor for next generation's Crew . . . God.
'Wha,' said the Catatonic Expressionist.
'Melancholy,' said Stencil.
And Mafia Winsome, mateless, stood undressed before the mirror, contemplating herself and little else. And the cat yowled in the courtyard.
And who knew where Paola was?
In the past few days Esther had become more and more impossible for Schoenmaker to get along with. He began to think about breaking it off again, only this time permanently.
'It isn't me you love,' she kept saying. 'You want to change me into something I'm not.'
In return he could only argue a kind of Platonism at her. Did she want him so shallow he should only love her body? It was her soul he loved. What was the matter with her, didn't every girl want a man to love the soul, the true them? Sure, they did. Well, what is the soul. It is the idea of the body, the abstraction behind the reality: what Esther really was, shown to the senses with certain imperfections there in the bone and tissue. Schoenmaker could bring out the true, perfect Esther which dwelled inside the imperfect one. Her soul would be there on the outside, radiant, unutterably beautiful.
'Who are you,' she yelled back, 'to say what my soul looks like. You know what you're in love with? Yourself. Your own skill in plastic surgery, is what.'
In answer to which Schoenmaker rolled over and stared at the floor; and wondered aloud if be would ever understand women.
Eigenvalue the soul-dentist had even given Schoenmaker counsel. Schoenmaker was not a colleague, but as if Stencil's notion of an inner circle were correct after all, things got around. 'Dudley, fella,' he told himself, 'you've got no business with any of these people.'
But then, he did. He gave cut rates on cleaning, drilling and root-canal jobs for members of the Crew. Why? If they were all bums but still providing society with valuable art and thought, why that would be fine. If that were the case then someday, possibly in the next rising period of history, when this Decadence was past and the planets were being colonized and the world at peace, a dental historian would mention Eigenvalue in a footnote as Patron of the Arts, discreet physician to the neo-Jacobean school.
But they produced nothing but talk, and at that not very good talk. A few like Slab actually did what they professed; turned out a tangible product. But again, what? Cheese danishes. Or this technique for the sake of technique - Catatonic Expressionism. Or parodies on what someone else had already done.
So much for Art. What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted, they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
'Mathematically, boy,' he told himself, 'if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?' What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.
It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure.
V
McClintic, back for a weekend from Lenox, found August in Nueva York bad as he'd expected. Buzzing close to sundown through Central Park in the Triumph he saw all manner of symptoms: girls on the grass, sweating all over in thin (vulnerable) summer dresses; groups of boys prowling off on the horizon, twitchless, sure, waiting for night; cops and solid citizens, all nervous (maybe only in a business way; but the cops' business had to do with these boys and the coming of night).
He'd come back to see Ruby. Faithful, he'd sent her postcards showing different views of Tanglewood and the Berkshires once a week; cards she never answered. But he'd called long-distance once or twice and she was still there close to home.
For some reason one night he'd dashed lengthwise across the state (a tiny state considering the Triumph's speed), McClintic and the bass player; nearly missed Cape Cod and driven into the sea. But sheer momentum carried them up that croissant of land and out to a settlement called French Town, a resort.
Out in front of a seafood place on the main and only drag, they found two more musicians playing mumbledy- peg with clam knives. They were on route to a party. 'O yes,' they cried in unison. One climbed in the Triumph's trunk, the other, who had a bottle – rum, 150 proof – and a pineapple, sat on the hood. At 80 mph over roads which are ill-lit and near-unusable by the end of the Season, this happy hood-ornament cut open the fruit with a clam knife and built rum-and-pineapple- juices in paper cups which McClintic's bass handed him over the windscreen.
At the party McClintic's eye was taken by a little girl in dungarees, who sat in the kitchen entertaining a progress of summer types.
'Give me back my eye,' said McClintic.
'I haven't got your eye.'
