Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (25 page)

Luther’s father was a muscular and massive man, which made his timidity even more than customarily unendurable. It was his mother, though slight of figure and dainty of manner, who would chastise workmen for poor performance, or return mislabeled goods, or complain to the waiter that her cutlet was overcooked. Secure in his car, the windows rolled up, behind the covers of a book, in movie darkness, then father would freely comment, for he, Jerome Penner, was never taken in, no sir, no illegal allurements, no bites from the hated apple for him, he already knew what John L. Lewis was up to, that Bette Davis hadn’t a decent bone in her body, that Father Coughlin was a fascist.

It is possible—one must not idly discount such simple solutions—that Penner’s conception of a pure revenge reflected his father’s habit of swearing in secret, damning images, and cursing
a commentator who existed only as a voice. It would not be the first time that a father’s habit had lodged itself in a son’s psyche in some transformed yet symbolic fashion.

But the true source of Penner’s inspiration, I think, is not to be found in such familiar family failings, from which we have all received our own wounds, but from his observation of the habits of his playmates and his school companions; an investigation which led to the disclosure of their “dirty persons,” and a revelation, as he remarks himself in a rare moment of candor, equal in importance, though not in dignity, to the discovery by Socrates of the soul.

We must set aside, with the greatest respect, of course, Descartes’ overly linear view of rational explanation, because revelations are rarely the result of the mind’s climbing a ladder, each clear and definitely placed rung surmounted foot after foothold like a fireman performing a rescue; they are achieved more in the devious way cream rises to the top of its container: everywhere the thin milk is sinking while simultaneously countless globules of fat are floating free and slipping upward, each alone and as independent of one another as Leibniz’ monads, until gradually, nearly unnoticed, the globs form a mass which forces the blue milk beneath, whereupon the sweet cream crowns the carton, waiting to be skimmed.

When young Luther Penner, in all innocence of theory, was wiping his aunt’s sterling with the socks he had taken from his tennis shoes and removed from his feet (actually running pieces between his toes came later, and was, you might say,
le coup de patte
), he was acting with heedless enthusiasm. As a result he did not count on his prank having consequences which might discomfit him later. His aunt, he ought to have remembered, did not entertain often, and then only relatives, of whom Penner’s family was nearest and dearest, so there was a distinct possibility that the silver Luther found himself using a few months later
had lain unmolested in its velvet chest while a more plebeian plate performed daily duties, hence he might have then been buttering his bread, as he wryly noted, with his own toe jam.

Luther Penner filed away this lesson with the many others he would learn, either from experience, as in this case, or from his extensive reading. Each was like a little blob of butterfat rising to meet the others. For instance, he realized that, although his childish prank had been, for him, impulsive, it had nevertheless been in its own way appropriate, because his Aunt Spatz was a fanatical housekeeper. She walked about with a rag in her hand, sweeping it over sills and the seats of chairs, caressing the globes of lamps, and rubbing the light out of small panes of window glass, of which her house had many. She had nurtured this virtue so successfully it had become a vice, and she felt she was improving Luther’s character by delegating her authority and enlisting his assistance in washing up and putting away the dishes and the silver after dinner (a service which was given reluctantly at the signal of his mother’s glare). Luther particularly remembered disliking the floury white apron little larger than a loincloth his aunt wore around her waist over the severe dark dresses she fancied, protection more symbolic than practical and giving her the appearance of a maid in the movies—a comparison wholly cultural in origin since Penner had never seen a maid anywhere else.

He also realized in due course how risky running knives and forks between your toes was, and how vulnerable to apprehension he had become, barefoot in the butler’s pantry.

The punishment should be suitable to the crime—like an iron maiden, cut to fit—that was the ancient principle, and properly interpreted, it would certainly prove itself over and over again. If Aunt Spatz was pretty twitty about dirt and germs, she nevertheless had not deserved Luther’s mean and unclean joke, since she had never, by look, or word, or deed, dishonored
her nephew, nor did she call him “nephew” or treat him with the usual familial contempt. In sum, and on account of his ignorance and youth, Luther had been unjust; he had put himself at risk in more than one way; he had been careless in his employment of the powers he now saw were his; and consequently he had stained the shirt of the self well above the cuff.

Later, when Penner read George Orwell’s
Down and Out in Paris and London
, he would recognize many of the tricks cooks and waiters played on their customers as belonging to the same dubious class of requitals as his sock-wiping did: cooks would spit in the soup, handle raw steak with dirty fingers, and lick its juice with their lascivious tongues. Waiters were worse, using gravy to grease their hair, because a proper revenge was supposed to be a response to some dishonor, and what honor did waiters have, who were expected to “sir” and “ma’am” and bow to anyone who could pay the tab? The waiter, when treating his wife and kids to an ice on a Sunday, could be haughty to the help without concern, since, on Sunday, in the company of his kids, and with Louise on his arm like a fancy cane, he was a customer, and therefore a king; but on work nights, in the diner or the café, he was worse than dirt on the floor, earning tips by showing his teeth, groveling by bending his backbone, sucking up to customers with his solicitous-servant’s voice, not even in a whore’s place to give pleasure with her person, but in the pimp’s position of one who merely conveys the goose to the table.

Looking clean, Penner remembers Orwell writing, was dirty work.

Thomas Hobbes insisted that the state of nature was a state of war, of every man against every man; however, with due respect, this statement was true of the schoolyard too. At recess, Penner would run to a corner of the yard and try to hide behind a bush or a tree, sometimes one, sometimes the other, but it was no use, his tormentors would be hot on his heels, taunting
and snickering and threatening till finally they did pinch his arm and pull his ear, singing horrid songs like Suck my dick, it is so thick, I’ll come quick, and you’ll be sick—stuff like that—while Luther tried to keep the trunk of the tree at his back, though that never worked because Cy would wrap his long arms around both Luther’s trunk and the tree’s, and then some sneak, bearing the name of little fairy Larry, would punch him in the stomach until Luther (who had, as he told them, a real religious name, unlike Cy and Syph and Larry, names of diseases) learned to take a drink from the fountain just before recess and hold his cheeksful so he could pretend to upchuck when struck, spewing his amalgamated spit all over Larry’s surprised face, because by gagging and pretending to an involuntary vomit, it would not appear to be an act of purposeful aggression but a slavish response to pain and fear, and therefore wouldn’t stimulate retaliation.

My name ain’t the name of a disease. Syph is too the name of a disease. It’s the name of a disease you catch by fucking. But my name ain’t Syph. That’s what everybody calls you: Syph Syph Syph. You break out in pimples, Luther assured him, which was an appropriate improvisation because Syph suffered from acne. Eventually you go mad because those pimples have covered your brain.

Cy is short like Syph is short and it’s short for Cybernetics, a disease of the balls. They swell. Like balloons. You can’t stop them. Aaah, that’s just what you say. It’s in all the books. Aaah. The books about bad things. Eventually your balls burst. These cybers, see, they grow inside, get thicker and bigger till bang. Naah. They grow like potatoes in their hidden hills. Cy waved a dismissive paw and said naah, but Cy wasn’t so sure anymore.

While you were tormenting me, I prayed to Lord Jesus to forgive you. That’s what little Rainer the Rilke says he said when he was bullied at military school. And earned a further beating.
Because turning the other cheek is a first-class revenge, and wholly infuriating.

Larry is so a sickness. Oh yeah. Larrygitis. You get it and you stop making any noise. You can’t talk, you can’t burp, you can’t snivel, your knuckles won’t crack, your farts don’t blat or hiss or burble, you can’t snore, your body, when it moves, doesn’t make a single sound, like you were overoiled, your teeth, when you eat, are like colliding cottons. Ah nuts, I ain’t named for that. You are though, Larry—larrygitis—you are.

Larry complained to his pa, who was more than firm in denial—loud and long—ridiculing his own kid for being such a stupid, which made Larry exceedingly wroth, so that the next time Cy grabbed Luther, suddenly and from behind, but without including the tree, Larry kicked Luther once in the shins, kneed him twice in the groin, and punched him three quick ones to the stomach. Syph, Cy, and Larry were at last observed by a teacher administering this beating, and all four were hauled before the principal and asked for explanations. Cy couldn’t bring himself to talk about ballooning balls to a person of such dignity, and since he was commanded to speak first, his reluctance put a damper on the others, who decided it was going to be manly to say nothing no matter what. The “what” was that they were all roundly paddled, including Luther, whom the principal (one Horace McDill) felt must have done something to provoke the attack.

And what had Luther done, what was Penner doing, to deserve such a series of injustices? He led a superior existence. That was his crime. Though this was Luther’s first thought, he soon faced up to the fact that he did not lead a superior existence. His existence was inferior in almost every way. Which accounted for his many smirks of superiority, and his delight in words which rarely had a use, like
tantamount
and
parse
and
diapason
. His studied aloofness didn’t help either, especially when
it had to be expressed through hasty concealments behind the leaves and branches of a bush. The correct formula would have it that Luther Penner was a superior person forced to lead an inferior life. That was his crime.

The next day, still sore in so many ways, Luther had his first vision. He saw a white splotch, about the size of Aunt Spatz’s apron, appear on Cy’s apple-red shirtfront. That meant it was more pink than white, the apparition, but Luther’s impression was he was seeing something white behind or under or immersed in something red … apple red. John Locke had mistakenly argued, although with the best of intentions—not to gainsay such a noble if boring thinker—that the human mind, at birth, was a tabula rasa, and that experience wrote, like chalk taken to a slate, upon it. Locke had, however, got hold of the wrong spiritual organ. It was not the mind that was blank at birth, but the moral soul, white as bond paper, bleached as desert bone, and it was this that Luther saw, of a sudden. He must have looked at Cy very strangely, for Cy was struck dumb, as if by larrygitis, and merely returned Luther’s stare, a stare in his case without significance.

The splotch moved a little like a flag—undulant. And on that white area there were small droplets, black as India’s ink, flecks scattered like pollen might be from a poisonous plant. Luther’s vision, as we know now, was of Cy’s dirty interior person, already dotted with a bully’s dark deeds and secret fears. We are born morally pure, Luther Penner realized, but life dirties us, and we darken over time, so a self that might have been once radiant within, lightening our skin and shining through our eyes, becomes besmirched by anger, fright, and pride, by pettiness and mean designs. Over time our inner sun will dim, we shall be less and less morally alive, and one day night will pull down its blind, we shall do a Dirty which leaves us at last with no more guilt or remorse than a squirrel feels for stealing the birds’ seed, and we
shall find ourselves finally without humor or indignation or passion or desire or any inner heat whatever. It was what was meant by “the dark night of the soul.” We shall be zombies of the spirit. Like politicians too cynical to bother feeling the cynic’s superiority or even showing the cynic’s sneer.

You have beshat your soul’s shirt, Luther cried, quite involuntarily. No one knew what
beshat
meant, or
soul’s shirt
either, so no one took umbrage.

Yet it was not clear, then, as it is not clear now, whether those spots were like dark stars, present all the time but obscured by clouds which opened now and then to reveal them, or whether over time the soul became soiled like a shirt, as Penner initially believed, tattered like a battle flag.

In one case, it would mean that the white area Luther had seen was hypocrisy’s fog, concealing a constant and continuing deep meanness, while in the other it would suggest we earn our bad characters and bear them like bruises. Healing, cleansing, might then be possible.

Beyond his single exclamation, Luther Penner told no one of his vision, which he wanted to believe was an aberration anyway, because the sight of the sheet or shirt had unnerved him. Blake, as a boy, had seen angels in the trees, but Blake had made the mistake of mentioning his vision to his father, who promptly beat him for telling lies. Neither of Penner’s parents would have beaten him. They weren’t the beating kind. But his father’s heavy eyebrows would have risen like a pair of startled birds, and absence would have occupied his face. His mother’s mouth would have become pursed as if glued shut and her eyes would have fixed him fiercely, as if to see from where inside him this silliness was coming.

I found out you get the syph from toilet seats, Syph said, so you’re a liar, Luther. Luther saw Syph’s soul show like a long white scarf worn through a snowfall of soot. His jaw dropped as
jaws are supposed to do, but Syph misunderstood the reaction. Yeah, caught you out, lout, you lying Luther. It wasn’t as if Luther were seeing through them like Superman by exercising moral X-ray vision; it was as if their natures were rising to the surface like hungry carp. The sheets, shirts—whatever they were—were in motion, flags in a wind, mufflers in a breeze, towels on a line. They didn’t resemble ghostly stage smoke; there were no ethical ethers here either; but what Luther saw each time had a linenlike character. Even silk. Nor were the shapes the same, or their sizes either. A few were ragged, one as rectangular as a room, Syph’s was shawly, and then, as Luther was registering these differences—between Clarence Pewly’s “conscience” caught coming down the school stairs like a pattern woven in his sweater, and Brownie Burks’, holding his books to his chest (his soul shone though the covers like something laid on by the sun)—two questions rose: had he noticed how long the images lasted? and were there any manifestations from the girls?