“WHY DID YOU do a thing like that?” Sidone screamed at the ashen Katz, who sat with his head back on an armchair, so that the blue-red welts on his neck were displayed. “Do you know what a thing like that does to me? Are you crazy completely?”
“You’re now my worst enemy,” Katz said hoarsely, staring at the light fixture, from which dangled the piece of severed rope he had tried to hang himself with. “For two hours I worked at it, and when I finally managed to . . . you had to come along and . . .”
“You’re inhuman and lousy, do you know that?” Sidone shouted. “You were my friend. I trusted you. I lived with you for three years, more than I could stand to live with anyone, including my mother. I said, ‘Katz is my buddy, we get along. He knows how ridiculous everything is, and we can laugh together.’ Then I have to come back from sleeping with that broad, all set to tell you how funny it was, and what do I find? You, gurgling and twitching on the end of a rope! Is that your idea of a joke?”
“I’ve been a failure all my life. I failed at being a baby, I failed at being a son, I failed at being a musician. I almost had it made as a suicide. There’s no hope for me any more. My father is laughing at me from Hell.” Katz was dressed in a neat blue suit and had a handkerchief in his breast pocket, and except for the fact of his speaking, he could have been a professionally prepared corpse.
Norman, coated with shellac and porous with exhaustion, stood in the morning sunlight looking from one to the other. “Now now,” he said with a weak smile, not expecting them to pay any attention, although his rate of growth had accelerated and he was, on some level, nearly six feet tall now.
“Yeah, yeah, don’t make excuses,” Sidone snarled. “You betrayed me. You were always smiling and full of fun. But now it all comes out. All the time, on the sly, you were moody!”
“It was my father,” Katz croaked wretchedly at the ceiling, his face all welded together with pain.
“Yah yah, don’t start all that Freudian shit! You were my friend and you turned out to be a scheming Jewish fink!”
“I loved him,” Katz went on. “And he loved me, he did. But he couldn’t say it, he couldn’t say it even at the very end. I used to help him in the hardware store. We hardly talked, and when we did, it was nasty. He’d yell, ‘What for did you mark the saucepans sixty-nine cents? I told you seventy-nine. Hey, musician, you stupid bum, if you’d stop with the bluhsin, stop with the whores and the shnapps, maybe you’d be able to hear something. Stanley, Stanley, you retarded bum, you shmegeggy . . .’ But I’d catch him looking at me from the darkness where he was bent down under a shelf, and he’d be staring at me like he could eat me up, like a starving man. And I’d try, I’d try to say something that would make him . . . But I never could, and he never could. He died a failure and cursed me with failure. Maybe this was my last chance to succeed. For eternity we’ll sit across that big campfire of Hell and he’ll say cruel things to me and it will be his torture and mine. Ooooooooo-ooooo . . .”
“Goddamn it, Katz, do you know what you’re doing to my nerves? Haven’t you got the least bit of consideration? Don’t try to make excuses. The fact is, you were trying to pull a nasty trick on me.”
“Don’t you have any pity, Sidone?” Katz wailed, pulling out of the long-diving “oooo-ooo” just in time.
“I have plenty of pity, even compassion,” Sidone cried indignantly. “You’re the one, you’re the one with no pity. You’re the intolerant one.”
“Me?” Katz said, astounded. He sat up and began rubbing his bruised neck. “Me?”
Sidone turned to Norman. “Tell him, tell him,” he demanded.
“How can he say I’m the one?” Katz asked, both hands pointed toward his wounded neck and face. “Does it make any sense?”
“Don’t listen to him,” Sidone said angrily, as Norman turned back and forth trying to choose. “I had a horrible childhood too. Everyone had a horrible childhood. My father deserted us, my sister was mental, all my teachers hated me, I’m a latent hemophiliac. Do I try to take it out on others? No, not me. I drink whisky, I make ficky-fick with the girls to give them pleasure, I take an occasional reefer just to be social, I drum diligently for money, I tell jokes. Why can’t he live wholesome too?”
“But my father,” pleaded Katz.
Norman contemplated. He looked at the drumstick capped with a condom, he looked at the woman’s stocking on the light fixture with the severed rope, at all the burned grooves in the furniture. The sun felt warm on him and he felt like collapsing and he felt very strong. The building burbled and mumbled and made ready for the day. Jim Sprague’s voice called through the hallway, “What do you mean, Janey?” and his wife answered tenderly, “When?” The two musicians stared at him with haggard faces.
“It’s all very strange,” Norman said, looking to them smaller than ever. “The point is, I’d appreciate if you fellas would kind of push the furniture into the center of the rooms.”
Sidone made a face of incredulous bewilderment and leaned forward. Katz seemed to become slightly more animated by curiosity.
“You see, I’m going to paint your walls. I’m painting everybody’s walls.”
“Oh,” Sidone said, holding his hands out, palms upward, a crooked, dazed smile on his mustached mouth. “Naturally, nothing could be more reasonable.”
Katz just put his head back on the chair and began to cry quietly, his features relaxing as though for sleep.
And Norman left them, walking on the great wooden stilts that made him so tall, and as he went out into the brilliant cold morning, his fingers felt unutterably weary and cold. But he was filled with excitement; there was no doubt in his mind that the summit was very near. Moonbloom, in his massive, soiled fedora, his thick, black overcoat, his blue suit with its old, old Red Cross pin in the lapel and shellac and paint stains all over it, traveled through the city, aspiring.