By Christopher Isherwood 8 страница

 

The Starboard Side has been here since the earliest days of the colony.

Its bar, formerly a lunch counter, served the neighbors with their first post-Prohibition beers, and the mirror behind it was sometimes honored by the reflection of Tom Mix. But its finest hours came later. That summer of 1945! The war as good as over. The blackout no more than an excuse for keeping the lights out at a gangbang. A sign over the bar said, "In case of a direct hit, we close immediately." Which was meant to be funny, of course.

And yet, out across the bay, in deep water under the cliffs of Palos Verdes, 76

 

 

lay a real Japanese submarine full of real dead Japanese, depth-bombed after they had sunk two or three ships in sight of the California coast.

 

You pushed aside the blackout curtain and elbowed your way through a jam-packed bar crowd, scarcely able to breathe or see for smoke. Here, in the complete privacy of the din and the crowd, you and your pickup yelled the preliminary sex advances at each other. You could flirt but you couldn't fight; there wasn't even room to smack someone's face. For that, you had to one-night stands. And, though the charcoal remnants of those barbarian orgy-fires have long since been ground into the sand, this stretch of the shore is still filthy with trash; high-school gangs still daub huge scandalous words on its beach-wall; and seashells are still less easy to find here than discarded rubbers.

 

The glory has faded, too, from The Starboard Side; only a true devotee like George can still detect even a last faint gleam of it. The place has been stripped of its dusty marine trophies and yellow group photographs.

Right after the New Year it's to be what they dare to call redecorated: that's to say, desecrated, in readiness for next summer's mob of blank-faced strangers. Already there is a new jukebox; and a new television fixed high up on the wall, so you can turn half right, rest your elbow on the bar and go into a cow-daze, watching it. This is what most of the customers are doing, as George enters.

 

He makes unsteadily but purposefully for his favorite little table in the corner, from which the TV screen is invisible. At the table next to him, two other unhypnotized nonconformists, an elderly couple who belong to the last handful of surviving colonists, are practicing their way of love: a mild quarrelsome alcoholism which makes it possible for them to live in a play-relationship, like children. You old bag, you old prick, you old bitch, you old bastard: rage without resentment, abuse without venom. This is how it will be for them till the end. Let's hope they will never be parted, but die in the same hour of the same night, in their beer-stained bed.

 

And now George's eyes move along the bar, stop on a figure seated alone at the end nearest the door. The young man isn't watching the TV; indeed, he is quite intent upon something he is writing on the back of an envelope. As he writes, he smiles to himself and rubs the side of his large nose with his forefinger. It is Kenny Potter.

 

At first, George doesn't move; seems hardly to react at all. But then a slow intent smile parts his lips. He leans forward, watching Kenny with the delight of a naturalist who has identified a rosy finch out of the high sierras on a tree in a city park. After a minute he rises, crosses almost stealthily to the bar and slips onto the stool beside Kenny.

 

"Hello, there," he says.

 

Kenny turns quickly, sees who it is, laughs loudly, crumples the envelope and tosses it over the bar into a trash container. "Hello, sir."

 

"What did you do that for?"

 

"Oh. Nothing."

 

"I disturbed you. You were writing."

 

"It was nothing. Only a poem."

 

"And now it's lost to the world!"

 

"I'll remember it. Now I've written it down."

 

"Would you say it for me?"

 

This sends Kenny into convulsions of laughter. "It's crazy. It's"--he gulps down his giggles--"it's a--a haiku!"

 

"Well, what's so crazy about a haiku?"

 

"I'd have to count the syllables first."

 

But Kenny obviously isn't going to count them now. So George says,

"I didn't expect to see you in this neck of the woods. Don't you live over on the other side of town, near campus?"

 

"That's right. Only sometimes I like to get way away from there."

 

"But imagine your happening to pick on this particular bar!"

 

"Oh, that was because one of the kids told me you're in here a lot."

 

"You mean, you came out here to see me?" Perhaps George says this a little too eagerly. Anyhow, Kenny shrugs it off with a teasing smile.

 

"I thought I'd see what kind of a joint it was."

 

"It's nothing now. It used to be quite something, though. And I've gotten accustomed to coming here. You see, I live very close."

 

"Camphor Tree Lane?"

 

"How in the world did you know that?"

 

"Is it supposed to be a secret?"

 

"Why no--of course not! I have students come over to see me now and then. I mean, about their work--" George is immediately aware that this sounds defensive and guilty as hell. Has Kenny noticed? He is grinning; but then he has been grinning all the time. George adds, rather feebly, "You seem to know an awful lot about me and my habits. A lot more than I know about any of you--"

 

"There isn't much to know about us, I guess!" Kenny gives him a teasing, challenging look. "What would you like to know about us, sir?"

 

"Oh, I'll think of something. Give me time. Say, what are you drinking?"

 

"Nothing!" Kenny giggles. "He hasn't even noticed me yet." And, indeed, the bartender is absorbed in a TV wrestling match.

 

"Well, what'll you have?"

 

"What are you having, sir?"

 

"Scotch."

 

"Okay," Kenny says, in a tone which suggests that he would have agreed just as readily to buttermilk. George calls the bartender--very loudly, so he can't pretend not to have heard--and orders. The bartender, always a bit of a bitch, demands to see Kenny's I. D. So they go through all of that.

George says stuffily to the bartender, "You ought to know me by this time.

Do you really think I'd be such an idiot as to try to buy drinks for a minor?"

 

"We have to check," says the bartender, through a skin inches thick.

He turns his back on them and moves away. George feels a brief spurt of powerless rage. He has been made to look like an ass--and in front of Kenny, too.

 

While they are waiting for the drinks, he asks, "How did you get here?

In your car?"

 

"I don't have one. Lois drove me."

 

"Where is she now, then?"

 

"Gone home, I guess."

 

George senses something not quite in order. But, whatever it is, Kenny doesn't seem worried about it. He adds vaguely, "I thought I'd walk around for a while."

 

"But how'll you get back?"

 

"Oh, I'll manage."

 

(A voice inside George says, You could invite him to stay the night at your place. Tell him you'll drive him back in the morning. What in hell do you think I am? George asks it. It was merely a suggestion, says the voice.) The drinks arrive. George says to Kenny, "Look, why don't we sit over there, at the table in the corner? That damned television keeps catching my eye."

 

"All right."

 

It would be fun, George thinks, if the young were just a little less passive. But that's too much to ask. You have to play it their way, or not at all. As they take their chairs, facing each other, George says, "I've still got my pencil sharpener," and, bringing it out of his pocket, he tosses it down on the table, as though shooting craps.

 

Kenny laughs. "I already lost mine!"

 

 

 

AND now an hour, maybe, has passed. And they are both drunk: Kenny fairly, George very. But George is drunk in a good way, and one that he seldom achieves. He tries to describe to himself what this kind of drunkenness is like. Well--to put it very crudely--it's like Plato; it's a dialogue. A dialogue between two people. Yes, but not a Platonic dialogue in the hair-splitting, word-twisting, one-up-to-me sense; not a mock-humble bitching match; not a debate on some dreary set theme. You can talk about anything and change the subject as often as you like. In fact, what really matters is not what you talk about, but the being together in this particular relationship. George can't imagine having a dialogue of this kind with a woman, because women can only talk in terms of the personal. A man of his own age would do, if there was some sort of polarity; for instance, if he was a Negro. You and your dialogue-partner have to be somehow opposites.

Why? Because you have to be symbolic figures--like, in this case, Youth and Age. Why do you have to be symbolic? Because the dialogue is by its nature impersonal. It's a symbolic encounter. It doesn't involve either party personally. That's why, in a dialogue, you can say absolutely anything. Even the closest confidence, the deadliest secret, comes out objectively as a mere metaphor or illustration which could never be used against you.

 

George would like to explain all of this to Kenny. But it is so complicated, and he doesn't want to run the risk of finding that Kenny can't understand him. More than anything, he wants Kenny to understand, wants to be able to believe that Kenny knows what this dialogue is all about. And really, at this moment, it seems possible that Kenny does know. George can almost feel the electric field of the dialogue surrounding and irradiating them. He certainly feels irradiated. As for Kenny, he looks quite beautiful.

Radiant with rapport is the phrase which George finds to describe him. For what shines out of Kenny isn't mere intelligence or any kind of switched-on charm. There the two of them sit, smiling at each other--oh, far more than that--fairly beaming with mutual insight.

 

"Say something," he commands Kenny.

 

"Do I have to?"

 

"Yes."

 

"What'll I say?"

 

"Anything. Anything that seems to be important, right now."

 

"That's the trouble. I don't know what is important and what isn't. I feel like my head is stopped up with stuff that doesn't matter--I mean, matter to me."

 

"Such as--"

 

"Look, I don't mean to be personal, sir--but--well, the stuff our classes are about--"

 

"That doesn't matter to you?"

 

"Jesus Christ, sir--I said I wasn't being personal! Yours are a whole lot better than most; we all think that. And you do try to make these books fit in with what's going on nowadays, only, it's not your fault, but--we always seem to end up getting bogged down in the past; like this morning, with Tithonus. Look, I don't want to pan the past; maybe it'll mean a whole lot to me when I'm older. All I'm saying is, the past doesn't really matter to most kids my age. When we talk like it does, we're just being polite. I guess that's because we don't have any pasts of our own--except stuff we want to forget, like things in high school, and times we acted like idiots--"

 

"Well, fine! I can understand that. You don't need the past, yet.

You've got the present."

 

"Oh, but the present's a real drag! I just despise the present--I mean, the way it is right now--I mean, tonight's an exception, of course--What are you laughing at, sir?"

 

"Tonight-4! The present--no!" George is getting noisy. Some people at the bar turn their heads. "Drink to tonight!" He drinks, with a flourish.

 

"Tonight--si!" Kenny laughs and drinks.

 

"Okay," says George. "The past--no help. The present--no good.

Granted. But there's one thing you can't deny; you're stuck with the future.

You can't just sneeze that off."

 

"I guess we are. What's left of it. There may not be much, with all these rockets--"

 

"Death."

 

"Death?"

 

"That's what I said."

 

"Come again, sir. I don't get you."

 

"I said death. I said, do you think about death a lot?"

 

"Why, no. Hardly, at all. Why?"

 

"The future--that's where death is."

 

"Oh--yeah. Yeah--maybe you've got a point there." Kenny grins. "You know something? Maybe the other generations before us used to think about death a lot more than we do. What I mean is, kids must have gotten mad, thinking how they'd be sent out to some corny war and killed, while their folks stayed home and acted patriotic. But it won't be like that any more.

We'd all be in this thing together."

 

"You could still get mad at the older people. Because of all those extra years they'll have had before they get blown up."

 

"Yes, that's right, I could, couldn't I? Maybe I will. Maybe I'll get mad at you, sir."

 

"Kenneth--"

 

"Sir?"

 

"Just as a matter of the purest sociological interest, why do you persist in calling me sir?"

 

Kenny grins teasingly. "I'll stop if you want me to."

 

"I didn't ask you to stop. I asked you why."

 

"Why don't you like it? None of you do, though, I guess."

 

"You mean, none of us old folks?" George smiles a no-hard-feelings smile. Nevertheless, he feels that the symbolic relationship is starting to get out of hand. "Well, the usual explanation is that we don't like being reminded--"

 

Kenny shakes his head decisively, "No."

 

"What do you mean, 'No'?"

 

"You're not like that."

 

"Is that supposed to be a compliment?"

 

"Maybe. The point is, I like calling you sir."

 

"You do?"

 

"What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?"

 

He does understand, George thinks, delighted. "But two young people can be friends, surely?"

 

"That's something else again. They can, yes, after a fashion. But there's always this thing of competition, getting in the way. All young people are kind of competing with each other, do you know that?"

 

"Yes, I suppose so--unless they're in love."

 

"Maybe they are even then. Maybe that's what's wrong with--" Kenny breaks off abruptly. George watches him, expecting to hear some confidence about Lois. But it doesn't come. For Kenny is obviously following some quite different train of thought. He sits smiling in silence for a few moments and--yes, actually--he is blushing! "This sounds as corny as hell, but--"

 

"Never mind. Go ahead."

 

"I sometimes wish--I mean, when you read those Victorian novels--I'd have hated living in those days, all except for one thing--oh, hell--I can't say it!" He breaks off, blushing and laughing.

 

"Don't be silly!"

 

"When I say it, it's so corny, it's the end! But--I'd have liked living when you could call your father sir."

 

"Is your father alive?"

 

"Oh, sure."

 

"Why don't you call him sir, then? Some sons do, even nowadays."

 

"Not my father. He isn't the type. Besides, he isn't around. He ran out on us a couple of years ago... Hell!"

 

"What's the matter?"

 

"Whatever made me tell you all that? Am I drunk or something?"

 

"No more drunk than I am."

 

"I must be stoned."

 

"Look--if it bothers you--let's forget you told me."

 

"I won't forget."

 

"Oh yes, you will. You'll forget if I tell you to forget."

 

"Will I?"

 

"You bet you will!"

 

"Well, if you say so--okay."

 

"Okay, sir."

 

"Okay, sir!" Kenny suddenly beams. He is really pleased--so pleased that his own pleasure embarrasses him. "Say, you know--when I came over here--I mean, when I thought I might just happen to run into you this evening--there was something I wanted to ask you. I just remembered what is was"--he downs the rest of his drink in one long swallow--"it's about experience. They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?"

 

"What kind of experience?"

 

"Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years."

 

"Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can't speak--

but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier--and that's a fact."

 

"No kidding, sir? You can't mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?"

 

"Much, much sillier."

 

"I'll be darned. Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?"

 

"No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of mar-velous."

 

"Let's go swimming," says Kenny abruptly, as if bored by the whole conversation.

 

"All right."

 

Kenny throws his head right back and laughs wildly. "Oh--that's terrific!"

 

"What's terrific?"

 

"It was a test. I thought you were bluffing, about being silly. So I said to myself, I'll suggest doing something wild, and if he objects--if he even hesitates--then I'll know it was all a bluff. You don't mind my telling you that, do you, sir?"

 

"Why should I?"

 

"Oh, that's terrific!"

 

"Well, I'm not bluffing--so what are we waiting for? You weren't bluffing, were you?"

 

"Hell, no!"

 

They jump up, pay, run out of the bar and across the highway, and Kenny vaults the railing and drops down, about eight feet, onto the beach.

George, meanwhile, is clambering over the rail, a bit stiffly. Kenny looks up, his face still lit by the boardwalk lamps: "Put your feet on my shoulders, sir." George does so, drunk-trustful, and Kenny, with the deftness of a ballet dancer, supports him by ankles and calves, lowering him almost instantly to the sand. During the descent, their bodies rub against each other, briefly but roughly. The electric field of the dialogue is broken. Their relationship, what ever it now is, is no longer symbolic. They turn and begin to run toward the ocean.

 

Already the lights seem far, far behind. They are bright but they cast no beams; perhaps they are shining on a layer of high fog. The waves ahead are barely visible. Their blackness is immensely cold and wet. Kenny is tearing off his clothes with wild whooping cries. The last remaining minim of George's caution is aware of the lights and the possibility of cruise cars and cops, but he doesn't hesitate, he is no longer able to; this dash from the bar can only end in the water. He strips himself clumsily, tripping over his pants. Kenny, stark naked now, has plunged and is wading straight in, like a fearless native warrior, to attack the waves. The undertow is very strong.

George flounders for a while in a surge of stones. As he finally struggles through and feels sand under his feet, Kenny comes body-surfing out of the 84

 

 

night and shoots past him without a glance--a water-creature absorbed in its element.

 

As for George, these waves are much too big for him. They seem truly tremendous, towering up, blackness unrolling itself out of blackness, mysteriously and awfully sparkling, then curling over in a thundering slap of foam which is sparked with phosphorus. George has sparks of it all over his body, and he laughs with delight to find himself bejeweled. Laughing, gasping, choking, he is too drunk to be afraid; the salt water he swallows seems as intoxicating as whiskey. From time to time he catches tremendous glimpses of Kenny, arrowing down some toppling foam-precipice. Then, intent upon his own rites of purification, George staggers out once more, wide-open-armed, to receive the stunning baptism of the surf. Giving himself to it utterly, he washes away thought, speech, mood, desire, whole selves, entire lifetimes; again and again he returns, becoming always cleaner, freer, less. He is perfectly happy by himself; it's enough to know that Kenny and he are the sole sharers of the element. The waves and the night and the noise exist only for their play. Meanwhile, no more than two hundred yards distant, the lights shine from the shore and the cars flick past up and down the highway, flashing their long beams. On the dark hillsides you can see lamps in the windows of dry homes, where the dry are going dryly to their dry beds. But George and Kenny are refugees from dryness; they have escaped across the border into the water-world, leaving their clothes behind them for a customs fee.

 

And now, suddenly, here is a great, an apocalyptically great wave, and George is way out, almost out of his depth, standing naked and tiny before its presence, under the lip of its roaring upheaval and the towering menace of its fall. He tries to dive through it--even now he feels no real fear--but instead he is caught and picked up, turned over and over and over, flapping and kicking toward a surface which may be either up or down or sideways, he no longer knows.

 

And now Kenny is dragging him out, groggy-legged. Kenny's hands are under George's armpits and he is laughing and saying like a nanny,

"That's enough for now!" And George, still water-drunk, gasps, "I'm all right," and wants to go straight back into the water. But Kenny says, "Well, I'm not--I'm cold," and nanny-like he towels George, with his own shirt, not George's, until George stops him because his back is sore. The nanny-relationship is so convincing at this moment that George feels he could curl up and fall immediately asleep right here, shrunk to child-size within the safety of Kenny's bigness. Kenny's body seems to have grown gigantic since they left the water. Everything about him is larger than life: the white teeth 85

 

 

of his grin, the wide dripping shoulders, the tall slim torso with its heavy-hung sex, and the long legs, now beginning to shiver.

 

"Can we go back to your place, sir?" he asks.

 

"Sure. Where else?"

 

"Where else?" Kenny repeats, seeming to find this very amusing. He picks up his clothes and turns, still naked, toward the highway and the lights.

 

"Are you crazy?" George shouts after him.

 

"What's the matter?" Kenny looks back, grinning.

 

"You're going to walk home like that? Are you crazy? They'd call the cops!"

 

Kenny shrugs his shoulders good-humoredly. "Nobody would have seen us. We're invisible--didn't you know?"

 

But he gets into his clothes now, and George does likewise. As they start up the beach again, Kenny puts his arm around George's shoulder.

"You know something, sir? They ought not to let you out on your own, ever.

You're liable to get into real trouble."

 

 

THEIR walk home sobers George quite a lot. By the time they reach the house, be no longer sees the two of them as wild water-creatures but as an elderly professor with wet hair bringing home an exceedingly wet student in the middle of the night. George becomes self-conscious and almost curt.

"The bathroom's upstairs. I'll get you some towels."

 

Kenny reacts to the formality at once. "Aren't you taking a shower, too, sir?" he asks, in a deferential, slightly disappointed tone.

 

"I can do that later. I wish I had some clothes your size to lend you.

You'll have to wrap up in a blanket, while we dry your things on the heater.

It's rather a slow process, I'm afraid, but that's the best we can do."

 

"Look,

don't want to be a nuisance. Why don't I go now?"

 

"Don't be an idiot. You'd get pneumonia."

 

"My clothes'll dry on me. I'll be all right."

 

"Nonsense! Come on up and I'll show you where everything is."

 

George's refusal to let him leave appears to have pleased Kenny. At any rate, he makes a terrific noise in the shower, not so much singing as a series of shouts. He is probably waking up the neighbors, George thinks, but who cares? George's spirits are up again; he feels excited, amused, alive. In his bedroom, he undresses quickly, gets into his thick white terry-cloth bathrobe, hurries downstairs again, puts on the kettle and fixes some tuna 86

 

 

fish and tomato sandwiches on rye. They are all ready, set out on a tray in the living room, when Kenny comes down, wearing the blanket awkwardly, saved-from-shipwreck style.

 

Kenny doesn't want coffee or tea; he would rather have beer, he says.

So George gets him a can from the icebox and unwisely pours himself a biggish Scotch. He returns to find Kenny looking around the room as though it fascinates him.

 

"You live here all by yourself, sir?"

 

"Yes," says George, and adds with a shade of irony, "Does that surprise you?"

 

"No. One of the kids said he thought you did."

 

"As a matter of fact, I used to share this place with a friend."

 

But Kenny shows no curiosity about the friend. "You don't even have a cat or a dog or anything?"

 

"You think I should?" George asks, a bit aggressive. The poor old guy doesn't have anything to love, he thinks Kenny is thinking.

 

"Hell, no! Didn't Baudelaire say they're liable to turn into demons and take over your life?"

 

"Something like that. This friend of mine had lots of animals, though, and they didn't seem to take us over. Of course, it's different when there's two of you. We often used to agree that neither one of us would want to keep on the animals if the other wasn't there...."