No, not Beila. You had only to think about it to see how impossible it would be. Beila carried herself with the pride of the presiding woman, the wife. Her rights were maintained with Native American dignity. She was a gloomy person. (Victor had made her gloomy—one could understand that.) She was like the wife of a Cherokee chieftain, or again Catherine of Aragon. There was something of each type of woman in the gaudy-gloomy costumes she designed for herself. Tremendous, her silent air of self-respect. For such a proud person to experiment along lines suggested by a gay handbook was out of the question, totally. Still, Katrina felt the hurt of it. Disrespect. Ill will. It was disrespectful also of Beila. Beila was long-suffering. At heart, Beila was a generous woman. Katrina really did know the score.
“So there’s the new generation,” said Victor. “When you consider the facts, they seem sometimes to add up to an argument for abortion. My youngest child! The wildest of all three. Now she’s abandoned her plan to be a rabbi and she looks more Jewish than ever, with those twists of hair beside her ears.”
Curious how impersonal Victor could be. Categories like wife, parent, child never could affect his judgment. He could discuss a daughter like any other subject submitted to his concentrated, radiant consideration—with the same generalizing detachment. It wasn’t unkindness. It wasn’t ordinary egotism. Katrina didn’t have the word for it.
Anyway, they were together in the lounge, and to have him to herself was one of her best pleasures. He was always being identified on New York streets, buttonholed by readers, bugged by painters (and there were millions of people who painted), but here in this sequestered corner Katrina did not expect to be molested. She was wrong. A man appeared; he entered obviously looking for someone. That someone could only be Victor. She gave a warning signal—lift of the head—and Victor cautiously turned and then said in a low voice, somewhat morose, “It’s him—I mean the character who wrote me the note.”
“Oh-oh.”
“He’s a determined little guy…. That’s quite a fur coat he’s wearing. It must have been designed by F. A. O. Schwarz.” It seemed to sweeten his temper to have said this. He smiled a little.
It was a showy thing, beautifully made but worn carelessly. In circles of fur, something like the Michelin tire circles, it reached almost to the floor. Larry Wrangel was slight, slender, his bald head was unusually long. The grizzled side hair, unbrushed, looked as if he had slept on it when it was damp. A long soiled white scarf, heavy silk, drooped over the fur. Under the scarf a Woolworth’s red bandanna was knotted. The white fur must have been his travel coat. For it wouldn’t have been of any use in Southern California. His tanned face was lean, the skin stretched—perhaps a face-lift? Katrina speculated. His scalp was spotted with California freckles. The dark eyebrows were nicely arched. His mouth was thin, shy and also astute.
Victor said as they were shaking hands, “I couldn’t get back to you last night.”
“I didn’t really expect it.”
Wrangel pulled over one of the Swedish-modern chairs and sat forward in his rolls of white fur. Not removing the coat was perhaps his way of dealing with the difference in their sizes—bulk against height.
He said, “I guessed you would be surrounded, and also bushed by late evening. Considering the weather, you had a good crowd.”
Wrangel did not ignore women. As he spoke he inspected Katrina. He might have been trying to determine why Victor should have taken up with this one. Whole graduating classes of girls on the make used to pursue Victor.
Katrina quickly reconciled herself to Wrangel—a little, smart man, not snooty with her, no enemy. He was eager only to have a talk, long anticipated, a serious first-class talk. Victor, unwell, feeling damaged, was certainly thinking how to get rid of the man.
Wrangel was chatting rapidly, wanting to strike the right offering while avoiding loss of time. His next move was to try the Cedar Bar and the Artists’ Club on Eighth Street. He spoke of Baziotes and of Arshile Gorky, of Gorky’s loft on Union Square. He recalled that Gorky couldn’t get Walt Whitman’s name straight and that he spoke of him as “Vooterman.” He mentioned Parker Tyler, and Tyler’s book on Pavel Tchelitchew, naming also Edith Sitwell, who had been in love with Tchelitchew (Wulpy grimaced at Edith Sitwell and said, “Tinkle poems, like harness bells”). Wrangel laughed, betraying much tension in his laughter. Shyness and shrewdness made him seem to squint and even to jeer. He wished to become expansive, to make himself agreeable. But he didn’t have the knack for this. An expert in pleasing Victor, Katrina could have told him where he was going wrong. Victor’s attitude was one of angry restraint and thinly dissimulated impatience. Trina felt that he was being too severe. This Wrangel fellow should be given half a chance. He was being put down too hard because he was a celebrity.
On closer inspection, the white furs which should have been immaculate were spotted by food and drink; nor was there any reason (he was so rich!) why the silk scarf should be so soiled. She took a liking to Wrangel, though, because he made a point of including her in the conversation. If he mentioned a name like Chiaromonte or Barrett, he would say, aside, “A top intellectual in that circle,” or, “The fellow who introduced Americans to German phenomenology.”
But Victor wouldn’t have any of this nostalgia, and he said, “What are you doing in Buffalo anyway? This is a hell of a season to leave California.”
“I have a screwy kind of motive,” said Wrangel. “Clinical psychologists, you see, often send me suggestions for films, inspired by the fantasies of crazy patients. So once a year I make a swing of selected funny farms. And here in Buffalo I saw some young fellows who were computer bugs—now institutionalized.”
“That’s a new wrinkle,” said Victor. “I would have thought that you didn’t need to leave California, then.”
“The maddest mad are on the Coast? Do you think so?”
“Well, not now, maybe,” Victor said. Then he made one of his characteristic statements: “It takes a serious political life to keep reality real. So there are sections of the country where brain softening is accelerated. And Southern California from the first has been set up for the maximum exploitation of whatever goes wrong with the American mind. They farm the kinks as much as they do lettuces and oranges.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Wrangel.
“As for the part played by intellectuals… Well, I suppose in this respect there’s not much difference between California and Massachusetts. They’re in the act together with everybody else. I mean intellectuals. Impossible for them to hold out. Besides, they’re so badly educated they can’t even identify the evils. Even Vespasian when he collected his toilet tax had to justify himself:
“True, intellectuals are in shameful shape….”
Katrina observed that Wrangel’s eyes were iodine-colored. There was an iodine tinge even to the whites.
“The main money people despise the intelligentsia, I mean especially the fellows that bring the entertainment industry suggestions for deepening the general catalepsy. Or the hysteria.”
Wrangel took this meekly enough. He seemed to have thought it all through for himself and then passed on to further considerations. “The banks, of course…” he said. “It can take about twenty million bucks to make one of these big pictures, and they need a profit in the neighborhood of three hundred percent. But as for money, I can remember when Jackson Pollock was driving at top speed in and out of the trees at East Hampton while loving up a girl in his jeep. He wouldn’t have been on welfare and food stamps, if he had lived. He played with girls, with art, with death, and wound up with dollars. What do those drip canvases fetch now?” Wrangel said this in a tone so moderate that he got away with it. “Sure, the investment golems think of me as a gold mine, and they detest me. I detest them right back, in spades.” He said to Katrina, “Did you hear Victor’s lecture last night? It was the first time in forty years that I actually found myself taking notes like a student.”
Katrina couldn’t quite decide what opinion Victor was forming of this Wrangel. When he’d had enough, he would get up and go. No boring end-men would ever trap him in the middle. As yet there was no sign that he was about to brush the man off. She was glad of that; she found Wrangel entertaining, and she was as discreet as could be in working the band of her watch forward on her wrist. Tactful, she drew back her sleeve to see the time. Very soon now the kids would be having their snack. Silent Pearl, wordless Soolie. She had failed to get a rise out of them with the elephant story. A lively response would have helped her to finish it. But you simply couldn’t get them to react. Not even Lieutenant Krieggstein with his display of guns impressed them. Krieggstein may have confused them when he pulled up his trousers and showed the holster strapped to his stout short leg. Then, too, he
