V. (54 page)

"Benny," she said, "I'm sorry." And later:

"You don't have to try not to hurt me. Only come home, with me, to bed . . ." And much later, at her apartment, facing the wall, "You don't even have to be a man. Only pretend to love me."

None of which made Profane feel any better. But it didn't stop him going to the Spoon.

One night at the Forked Yew, he and Stencil got juiced. "Stencil is leaving the country," Stencil said. He apparently wanted to talk.

"I wish I was leaving the country."

Young Stencil, old Machiavel. Soon he had Profane talking about his women problems.

"I don't know what Paola wants. You know her better. Do you know what she wants?"

An embarrassing question for Stencil. He dodged:

"Aren't you two - how shall one say."

"No," Profane said. "No, no."

But Stencil was there again, next evening. "Truth of it is," he admitted, "Stencil can't handle her. But you can."

"Don't talk," said Profane. "Drink."

Hours later they were both out of their heads. "You wouldn't consider coming along with them," Stencil wondered.

"I have been there once. Why should I want to go back."

"But didn't Valletta - somehow - get to you? Make you feel anything?"

"I went down to the Gut and got drunk like everybody else. I was too drunk to feel anything."

Which eased Stencil. He was scared to death of Valletta. He'd feel better with Profane, anybody else, along on this jaunt (a) to take care of Paola, (b) so he wouldn't be alone.

Shame, said his conscience. Old Sidney went in there with the cards stacked against him. Alone.

And look what he got, thought Stencil, a little wry, a little shaky.

On the offensive: "Where do you belong, Profane?"

"Wherever I am."

"Deracinated. Which of them is not. Which of this Crew couldn't pick up tomorrow and go off to Malta, go off to the moon. Ask them why and they'll answer why not."

"I could not care less about Valletta." But hadn't there been something after all about the bombed-out buildings, buff-colored rubble, excitement of Kingsway? What had Paola called the island: a cradle of life.

"I have always wanted to be buried at sea," said Profane.

Had Stencil seen the coupling in that associative train he would have gathered heart of grace, surely. But Paola and he had never spoken of Profane. Who, after all, was Profane?

Until now. They decided to rollick off to a party on Jefferson Street.

Next day was Saturday. Early morning found Stencil rushing around to his contacts, informing them all of a third tentative passage.

The third passage, meanwhile, was horribly hung over. His Girl was having more than second thoughts.

"Why do you go to the Spoon, Benny."

"Why not?"

She edged up on one elbow. "That's the first time you've said that."

"You break your cherry on something every day."

Without thinking: "What about love? When are you going to end your virgin status there, Ben?"

In reply Profane fell out of bed, crawled to the bathroom and hung over the toilet, thinking about barfing. Rachel clasped hands in front of one breast, like a concert soprano. "My man." Profane decided instead to make noises at himself in the mirror.

She came up behind him, hair all down and straggly for the night, and set her cheek against his back as Paola had on the Newport News ferry last winter. Profane inspected his teeth.

"Get off my back," he said.

Still holding on: "So. Only smoked pot once and already he's hooked. Is that your monkey talking?"

"It's me talking. Off."

She moved away. "How off is off, Ben." Things were quiet then. Soft, penitent, "If I am hooked on anything it's you, Rachel O." Watching her shifty in the mirror.

"On women," she said, "on what you think love is: take, take. Not on me."

He started brushing his teeth fiercely. In the mirror as she watched there bloomed a great flower of leprous-colored foam, out of his mouth and down both sides of his chin.

"You want to go," she yelled, "go then."

He said something but around the toothbrush and through the foam neither could understand the words.

"You are scared of love and all that means is somebody else," she said. "As long as you don't have to give anything, be held to anything, sure: you can talk about love. Anything you have to talk about isn't real. It's only a way of putting yourself up. And anybody who tries to get through to you - me - down."

Profane made gurgling noises in the sink: drinking out of the tap, flushing out his mouth. "Look," coming up for air, "what did I tell you? Didn't I warn you?"

"People can change. Couldn't you make the effort?" She was damned if she'd cry.

"I don't change. Schlemihls don't change."

"Oh that makes me sick. Can't you stop feeling sorry for yourself? You've taken your own flabby, clumsy soul and amplified it into a Universal Principle."

"What about you and that MG."

"What does that have to do with any -"

"You know what I always thought? That you were an accessory. That you, flesh, you'd fall apart sooner than the car. That the car would go on, in a junkyard even it would look like it always had, and it would have to be a thousand years before that thing could rust so you wouldn't recognize it. But old Rachel, she'd be long gone. A part, a cheesy part, like a radio, heater, windshield-wiper blade."

She looked upset. He pushed it.

"I only started to think about being a schlemihl, about a world of things that had to be watched out for, after I saw you alone with the MG. I didn't even stop to think it might be perverted, what I was watching. All I was was scared."

"Showing how much you know about girls."

He started scratching his head, sending wide flakes of dandruff showering about the bathroom.

"Slab was my first. None of those tweed jockstraps at Schlozhauer's got any more than bare hand. Don't you know, poor Ben, that a young girl has to take out her virginity on something, a pet parakeet, a car - though most of the time on herself."

"No," he said his hair all in clumps, fingernails gone yellow with dead scalp. "There's more. Don't try to get out of it that way."

"You're not a schlemihl. You're nobody special. Everybody is some kind of a schlemihl. Only come out of that scungille shell and you'd see."

He stood, pear-shaped, bags under the eyes, all forlorn. "What do you want? How much are you out to get? Isn't this -" he waved at her an inanimate schmuck - "enough?"

"It can't be. Not for me, nor Paola."

"Where does she -"

"Anywhere you go there'll always be a woman for Benny. Let it be a comfort. Always a hole to let yourself come in without fear of losing any of that precious schlemihlhood." She stomped around the room. "All right. We're all hookers. Our price is fixed and single for everything: straight, French, round-the-world. Can you pay it, honey? Bare brain, bare heart?"

"If you think me and Paola -"

"You and anybody. Until that thing doesn't work any more. A whole line of them, some better than me, but all just as stupid. We can all be conned because we've all got one of these," touching her crotch, "and when it talks we listen."

She was on the bed. "Come on baby," she said, too close to crying, "this one's for free. For love. Climb on. Good stuff, no charge."

Absurdly he thought of Hiroshima the electronics technician, reciting a mnemonic guide for resistor color-coding.

Bad boys rape our young girls behind victory garden walls (or "but Violet gives willingly"). Good stuff, no charge.

Could any of their resistances be measured in ohms? Someday, please God, there would be an all-electronic woman. Maybe her name would be Violet. Any problems with her, you could look it up in the maintenance manual. Module concept: fingers' weight, heart's temperature, mouth's size out of tolerance? Remove and replace, was all.

He climbed on anyway.

That night at the Spoon, things were louder than usual, despite Mafia's being in stir and a few of the Crew out on bail and their best behavior. Saturday night toward the end of the dog days; after all.

Near closing time, Stencil approached Profane, who'd been drinking all night but for some reason was still sober.

"Stencil heard you and Rachel are having difficulties."

"Don't start."

"Paola told him."

"Rachel told her. Fine. Buy me a beer."

"Paola loves you, Profane."

"You think that impresses me? What is your act, ace?" Young Stencil sighed. Along came a bartender's rinkydink, yelling "Time, gentlemen, please." Anything properly English like that went over well with the Whole Sick Crew.

"Time for what," Stencil mused. "More words, more beer. Another party, another girl. In short, no time for anything of importance. Profane. Stencil has a problem. A woman."

"Indeed," said Profane. "That's unusual. I never heard of anything like that before."

"Come. Walk."

"I can't help you."

"Be an ear. It's all he needs."

Outside, walking up Hudson Street: "Stencil doesn't want to go to Malta. He is quite simply afraid. Since 1945, you see, he's been on a private manhunt. Or womanhunt, no one is sure."

"Why?" said Profane.

"Why not?" said Stencil. "His giving you any clear reason would mean he'd already found her. Why does one decide to pick up one girl in a bar over another. If one knew why, she would never be a problem. Why do wars start: if one knew why there would be eternal peace. So in this search the motive is part of the quarry.

"Stencil's father mentioned her in his journals: this was near the turn of the century. Stencil became curious in 1945. Was it boredom, was it that old Sidney had never said anything of use to his son; or was it something buried in the son that needed a mystery, any sense of pursuit to keep active a borderline metabolism? Perhaps he feeds on mystery.

"But he stayed off Malta. He had pieces of thread: clues. Young Stencil has been in all her cities, chased her down till faulty memories or vanished buildings defeated him. All her cities but Valletta. His father died in Valletta. He tried to tell himself meeting V. and dying were separate and unconnected for Sidney.

"Not so. Because: all along the first thread, from a young, crude Mata Hari act in Egypt - as always, in no one's employ but her own - while Fashoda tossed sparks in search of a fuse; until 1913 when she knew she'd done all she could and so took time out for love - all that while, something monstrous had been building. Not the War, nor the socialist tide which brought us Soviet Russia. Those were symptoms, that's all."

They'd turned into 14th Street and were walking east. More bums came roving by the closer they got to Third Avenue. Some nights 14th Street can be the widest street with the tallest wind in the earth.

"Not even as if she were any cause, any agent. She was only there. But being there was enough, even as a symptom. Of course Stencil could have chosen the War, or Russia to investigate. But he doesn't have that much time.

"He is a hunter."

"You are expecting to find this chick in Malta?" Profane said. "Or how your father died? Or something? Wha."

"How does Stencil know," Stencil yelled. "How does he know what he'll do once he finds her. Does he want to find her? They're all stupid questions. He must go to Malta. Preferably with somebody along. You."

"That again."

"He is afraid. Because if she went there to wait out one war, a war she'd not started but whose etiology was also her own, a war which came least as a surprise to her, then perhaps too she was there during the first. There to meet old Sidney at its end. Paris for love, Malta for war. If so then now, of all times . . ."

"You think there'll be a war."

"Perhaps. You've been reading the newspapers." Profane's newspaper reading was in fact confined to glancing at the front page of the New York Times. If there was no banner headline on that paper then the world was in good enough shape. "The Middle East, cradle of civilization, may yet be its grave.

"If he must go to Malta, it can't be only with Paola. He can't trust her. He needs someone to - occupy her, to serve as buffer zone, if you will."

"That could be anybody. You said the Crew was at home anywhere. Why not Raoul, Slab, Melvin."

"It's you she loves. Why not you."

"Why not."

"You are not of the Crew, Profane. You have stayed out of that machine. All August."

"No. No, there was Rachel."

"You stayed out of it." And a sly smile. Profane looked away.

So they went up Third Avenue, drowned in the Street's great wind: all flapping and Irish pennants. Stencil yarned. Told Profane of a whorehouse in Nice with mirrors on the ceiling where he thought, once, he'd found his V. Told of his mystical experience before a plaster death-cast of Chopin's hand in the Celda Museo in Mallorca.

"There was no difference," he caroled, causing two strolling bums to laugh along with him: "that was all. Chopin had a plaster hand!" Profane shrugged. The bums tagged along.

"She stole an airplane: an old Spad, the kind young Godolphin crashed in. God, what a flight it must have been: from Le Havre over the Bay of Biscay to somewhere in the back country of Spain. The officer on duty only remembered a fierce - what did he call her - 'hussar,' who came rushing by in a red field-cape, glaring out of a glass eye in the shape of a clock: 'as if I'd been fixed by the evil eye of time itself.'

"Disguise is one of her attributes. In Mallorca she spent at least a year as an old fisherman who evenings, would smoke dried seaweed in a pipe and tell the children stories of gun-running in the Red Sea."

"Rimbaud," suggested one of the bums.

"Did she know Rimbaud as a child? Drift up-country at age three or four through that district and its trees festooned gray and scarlet with crucified English corpses? Act as lucky mascot to the Mahdists? Live in Cairo and take Sir Alastair Wren for a lover when she came of age?

"Who knows. Stencil would rather depend on the imperfect vision of humans for his history. Somehow government reports, bar graphs, mass movements are too treacherous."