“Bernice is a fuck … is a liar.”
“Not this time, boy, not this time! I was laying down beside Dots when I hear the phone ring and Dots get up angry as arse because Dots is one ignorant woman when she’s sleeping. Man, for instance, if I come close to Dots when she is sleeping and say I start kissing-up Dots, for instance, which is a thing I stop doing long long ago, man, be-Christ don’t you know Dots would start one big worthless screeling as if her own husband raping her? That is the kind o’ woman, the kind o’ stupid-arse woman Dots is when she’s sleeping. So that when Dots wake up in the night, every-blasted-body must know. And I telling you now, that on that particular night when Bernice call, late late, past one o’clock, Dots was cussing Bernice stink-stink-stink. And I heard Dots say, ‘But Bernice, Boysie right here ’side o’ me, snoring like a damn hog.’ So Bernice might be a liar, but not this time.”
“Bernice is a fool.”
“She may be that.”
“A blasted liar too!”
“Now, that she ain’t. Not in this instant, boy, not in this instance.” Boysie took another drink, a large one, because Henry had paid for the bottle, and he wanted to put a stiff financial lash in both Henry and the bottle. “It don’t matter, gorblummuh! It do not matter to me, at all, at all, that you was getting a piece offa Brigitte on the sly and behind my back. But the lies, man, the lies. The blasted fabrications, as it is called. You was telling me lies all the time you was embracing me in friendship.”
“I didn’ tell you no lies, Boysie. Goddamn, what I say to you, if it sound like a lie and even if it is a lie, it is not a lie to me because I want it to turn out exactly just as I tell you. You understand what I saying? A man sits down in his bed at night, or during the day, and he sees his whole goddamn upside-down life skin a fucking somersault before his eyes. Goddamn, it take a fucking strong son of a bitch to admit failure, that he is a failure, and continue living in the middle o’ that blasted failure. You is the first and only person living or goddamn dead that I ever had the guts to admit this much to. Goddamn, Boysie, a man don’t admit he is a failure to his wife. He does lie, he lies like hell. And she does have to find out for sheself. He tells her he’s working, that he’s drawing money every week from some job; goddamn, sometimes, if he is a real failure, he even invents a job and tells her every two months that he got a raise. That kind o’ man is me.
“It start with the bank accounts. I opened three, about two or three bank accounts with two dollars in each. That way I felt rich as shite. With all them bank books. And I would make my own deposits … every week I would write-in $1,000 with my own hand. One thousand! And it end-up with this. But it ain’t no lie, Boysie. As far as I understand my actions, and as far as my woman Agatha explain them to me, because she is the one schooled and educated in all these actions and things of the brain and mind, she is what she calls an amateur psychologist … and as far as I understand what she was telling me ’bout the way I been acting lately, goddamn, it is no lie! A man goes through these changes. Sometimes all the time, till he kicks the bucket and dies; sometimes, for a space o’ time, a short time. I invented things, she says, because my imagination is too powerful for my subconscious and for my social position at the present time. It is not simply telling lies, man. I intentionally invented these things because something out there is keeping me from getting at these very things, and that thing keeping me back isn’t powerful enough to keep back my imagination and my subconscious and convince me that I don’t already possess them things. I’s a goddamn failure. But I imagine that I ain’t no goddamn failure. I am a man with one hundred and forty thousand dollars in fucking imaginary bank accounts! That is me! An imaginary man. So, when I say that there wasn’t two police but three who throw them lashes in my backside that night, it means that I am so fucking strong that it would have take three police, not two o’ them, three o’ them fascist bastards to beat me. You understand?
“And I am going to tell you something now, even if this is a way of admitting that I did taste a piece o’ Brigitte, even if I have to admit this bitter truth in your presence, Boysie, you my real bosom friend; I tell you, that had I not been a bit shaky from doing the two things I did in that blasted woman’s room, namely, drinking and you-know-what, gorblummuh! them two sadistic bastards couldn’t have licked me. Oh no! I would have given one o’ them criminals a judo chop, blam!” (The bottle of rum bounced off when Henry struck the table. Boysie reached out and caught it. The rum did not fall: none was spilled. Boysie was frightened: and not only by the suddenness of the noise.) “You understand now?”
“I understand, and I don’t understand.”
“Long’s you understand.”
They poured themselves new drinks. And they drank in silence.
“You notice how fast this damn summer come and gone?” Boysie said, when the silence was too much for him. He was a very restless man. And silence to him was
