Eleven

Fortunately he could throw himself into his work, which steadily advanced his study of human folly. When Raymond was not along, traipsing without trouble in his wake, he was an ideal companion to come home to, after a day of selling tins of fresh air. The table would be set, ready for the steak Tattersall would broil outside or the beef Stroganoff he would cook inside. The boy was eleven or twelve, but like his kind could easily have been confused with twenty or thirty. He could get the table ready and clear it, he could be trusted to turn the stove off and on, and would fetch what you pointed to, gargling unintelligibly as he waddled over with it. It suited Tattersall’s purpose at this juncture to treat him as an equal.

“Joyce used to say that the only true colors are to be found in a grocery store,” he chatted as he unpacked the day’s shopping. “And he was right. Look at that orange, that peach, those string beans. They quite undermine the assumption that there are three primary colors, don’t you think? There are dozens! Fruit and vegetables I find more exhilarating than flowers, for color. More genuinely satisfying.”

The idiot washed the provisions at the sink, making mouths and chewing his tongue as he worked, occasionally giving out some guttural, gurgling noise which Tattersall would take up and develop.

“Yes, I quite agree. The present status of Joyce is rather a mixed one. The farther you get into his epic works the more, it seems to me, the more you’re confronted with something to be admired rather than enjoyed. You remember Mary Colum’s remark after his famous Paris reading from Finnegans Wake. ‘It’s outside literature,’ she told Joyce, shaking in her shoes though she was. Incidentally, Hemingway was in that audience. It would be interesting to know what he said, if anything. Well, as I was saying, I enjoy Finnegans Wake less than I do Ulyssess, Ulysses less than the Portrait. So there you have it. I’m not a true Joycean any more than I am a true Jamesian, I fear. I prefer his early novels to the Late Great Phase. All that upholstery! And in all those miles of criticism, I don’t think there’s a line that sums James up better than his aunt’s remark. That he chewed more than he bit off.”

The vegetables went into a casserole called Chicken Haute Loire, which Tattersall baked in a bedpan. He had found one in an upstairs cabinet, never so far put to any purpose, judging from the label he had had to scrape off before sterilizing it in the dishwasher, and it struck him as ideal for culinary purposes, certainly a waste not to use, especially as there was no casserole among the jumble of pots and pans under the kitchen sink. The dish simmered succulently in its juices, and in the white wine later added. With it, he drank the rest of the bottle, a Corton Charlemagne of an unimpeachable year. He grew more expansive at table.

“While I’m not prepared to say of Joyce what is often said of Eliot, namely that he is a good writer but a bad influence, anyone who has ever taught knows the evidence for either charge.” He paused to hold his glass up by the stem and study its deep gold contents appreciatively. The idiot ate lustily, bent over his plate and snuffling into the chicken which he picked up with his fingers. Tattersall decided that he loved him. And that they both alike loved the poorly trained dog whom the idiot paused to smile down at, and who, oddly nameless as yet, wheezed and slobbered ruefully as he watched the banqueters from below. “Lazarus,” Tattersall said, baptizing him with a dollop of white wine, which the dog thirstily licked from his coat. He tossed him a gobbet of meat. Then he returned to his point.

“Now, that may be universally true of the really original artist, that he becomes a headache in his imitators. He thins out, you see, turns into a cliché. Christ becomes his disciples, the disciples the apostles, the apostles the church, and the church—yicch! Still, getting back to the subject, you can’t, you know, expect from talent what you do from genius. Talent—how shall I put it?” He paused again to sip his Burgundy. “Genius gives us a vision, talent merely a view. Something like that. I’m sure you’ve thought all this out for yourself long ago, so I shan’t bore you any longer by laboring the obvious, my dear Raymond.”

The boy took out a handkerchief to blow his nose.

“Oh, indubitably. And I agree absolutely that we must always bear that end of it in mind. But to get back to what we were discussing. The paradox here is that genius often learns from talent, as well as the other way around. I’m thinking of the interesting phenomenon of the forerunner. Freud had his Janet, Eliot his Laforgue, and it is supposedly the ‘ethereally divided violins’ of the Lohengrin Prelude, as well as some of Wagner’s other aching near-dissonances, that put the bug in Schönberg’s bonnet for the twelve-tone scale.”

He finished off his wine and rose, stretching. The discussion had put him in the mood for music. He set some Schönberg going on the phonograph. The sound whetted rather than slaked his thirst for discord. With the Schönberg going full blast, he sat down at the piano and played something else, next singing at the top of his voice something altogether different again. The house reverberated with a cacophony that shook the walls. Keeping Schönberg for a background, he pounded out Little Gray Home in the West while singing the words of I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You. He rose a moment to turn the radio on, getting some rock and roll, then went back to the piano and combined Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam with It Ain’t No Sin to Take Off Your Skin and Dance Around in Your Bones, thumping the keys and singing the words with all his might. By now the racket was so deafening that he did not for some time notice that the jangle of the telephone had been added to it. The caller was a neighbor bleating, “Could you turn it down a little? My wife is dying.”

The idiot could not be entirely entrusted with the dishwasher, so Tattersall stacked the dishes in the sink for the time being to muck about a bit. Cockroaches on which he could not personally lay hands and against which he neglected to pit an exterminator traversed the kitchen in growing numbers. He would brush them away with a whisk broom, saying to an occasional scuttler, “Gimme a break, will ya!” The centuries brought really little change in what man had to put up with, or what he devised to make the remainder coherent or tolerable. Even speech styles on which the acutely contemporary preened themselves were not all that new, or without precedent. Mod youngsters able to bear that antiquated fuddy-duddy, Carlyle, long enough to read The French Revolution would be rewarded with the sentence: “Dandoins stands with folded arms, and what look of indifference and disdainful garrison-air a man can, while the heart is like leaping out of him.” Christ, how grotesque things could be, how unexpectedly and in what unlikely quarters one could be getting his hacks!

Tattersall sucked on a bottle of beer as he mucked about. Scraping some leftovers into the dog’s dish, he. remembered how eagerly it had lapped up the wine. He poured the rest of his beer into the empty water pan. He did so in a playful spirit, but also out of a certain whimsical curiosity. It amused him to see the dog lap it up greedily. He opened another bottle and split it with him. Having drunk his fill, the dog proceeded to wobble and stagger around the house, its stubby legs buckling under it. It stumbled against the furniture and slid about on the linoleum floor. It hiccuped. Tattersall was by that time three sheets to the wind himself. Toward midnight they repaired to their separate sleeping quarters, the dog flopping down on his kitchen bed and Tattersall, fully clothed, on his upstairs.

The next evening, the dog barked insistently, looking up at Tattersall in a manner leaving little doubt about what he was trying to communicate. Tattersall said, “No, no,” but the dog followed him around, nipping at his heels. There was no peace until he had opened a can of beer and poured it into the dog’s pan. The mutt guzzled it thirstily till it was gone. The next night the same thing happened. The dog refused water. He simply wasn’t interested. By the end of the week Tattersall realized he had an alcoholic on his hands.

This completed the menage into which, toward the close of that month, a woman walked who identified herself as a social case worker for the city, come to check on it. Their little paradise was threatened.