The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels Read online

  The Cat’s Pajamas & Witch’s Milk

  Two Novels

  Peter De Vries

  I believe that humanity has but one objective: to suffer.

  —FLAUBERT

  People have more fun than anybody.

  —COLONEL STOOPNAGEL

  Contents

  I. THE CAT’S PAJAMAS

  II. WITCH’S MILK

  About the Author

  1

  The Cat’s Pajamas

  One

  Tattersall’s most embarrassing moment was one for which any newspaper running such a feature would probably have paid the standard fee, but which he himself would gladly have given his life’s savings to have been spared. It was the autumn Homecoming at his college, Chichester. He was attending an afternoon musicale, one of the campus events arranged for the weekend, when he became annoyed by a woman whispering behind him. He turned and glared over his shoulder at her—to find himself looking straight into the eye of an old flame.

  He did not immediately recognize her, nor she him. The ghost of Lucy Stiles the undergraduate was a moment in emerging from the fleshed-out cheeks and scrolls of tinted hair in which in the intervening decade it had become, if not obliterated, at least grievously smothered and entangled. Her own mouth opening in an audible gasp when she recognized her censor completed the sensation that was, for Tattersall, like falling through ice into boiling water. A lunatic assortment of expressions crossed his face by way of: surprise (shot-up eyebrows), acknowledgment (bit of a nod), self-deprecation (hunched shoulders and sleazy-rug-merchant spread of hands), and, finally, apology, more or less recorded in the mangled grin with which he turned around again, still mugging.

  Such an episode is bound to be especially gruesome at a reunion, where every acquaintance glimpsed is reminder enough of what time has done to all, each face lurking behind the lifted glass or the lowered teacup a threat to what remains of your composure. Tattersall disliked and even feared reunions on that account, but he now taught at Chichester, so there was nothing he could do about it. The reunions came to him. They sought him out as such remorseless personifications of Time that he had come to think of them as the Furies themselves, stalking him from year to year, ready to spring at a moment of their own contriving. He seemed hardly to have exaggerated.

  So then Lucy Stiles had become a gilded chatterbox who had to be shushed at concerts, and he a shusher of such women. But he was not! There was not a shred of proof for such a charge, save this fluke of a split second utterly without precedent in his thirty-three years, so utterly unlike him that if Lucy thought she recognized him, very well: he himself did not. He refused to make the identification. Let them adduce fingerprints, dental impressions, cephalic measurements and any other data said to hold up in court, and he would decline to authenticate the result. Let them add to these exhibits a motion picture of the scene just enacted, and he would deny he was its principal. It was the work of the Furies. They had cooked it up with someone masquerading as him, some imp or impostor lurking unsuspected in his veins, biding his time for three decades, genetically instructed to pop from hiding at the moment precisely calculated to do him in, wearing his guise, before as swiftly disappearing from view, never to be seen again, let’s hope.

  All this ran through Tattersall’s mind as he sat with his hands digging into his knees, convinced that if his temperature were taken just then with a sickroom thermometer it would be found to be well over a hundred. He believed that mortification ran you a fever. He cursed his luck through gritted teeth. This was not one of those things at which you would laugh six months from now. No, six months from now, six years, you would still, as tonight, draw the pillow across your face and groan.

  His hands had begun to enact covert unwitting gestures as, still mugging, he rehearsed the protestation that he did not go about looking daggers at people. This was an exception, a momentary lapse of urbanity—or as the jargon of the hour had it, loss of cool—not even explained by his wanting to hear the music. Far from it! If it was chamber music, it was torture chamber music. The quartet of aliens sawing away up there themselves constituted a public nuisance hard enough to bear without other distractions. Two minutes ago, if queried in an audience reaction poll, he would have said: “I’ll take fingernails run across a blackboard, thank you, or the shriek of automobile tires. Not the cats from whose entrails these sounds are drawn produced in their lifetimes anything like it.” Now he wished this hideous music would never end. Not, at least, till he had worked out some plan of action for the awful confrontation that awaited him the instant that it did.

  His nerves were shot anyway. A long and intensifying period of self-review had left Tattersall on edge. A habit of rigorously scrutinizing his conduct and its motives (so that any disclaimer that he ever gave people dirty looks could be taken at face value) had of late entered a new phase. He had always roughly cast these exercises in honesty into words. Now he put the words down on paper. Tattersall had taken to writing himself abusive and even threatening letters. “Dear Tattersall,” this other self would tap out on his office typewriter, this familiar, this Doppelgänger who hovered perpetually overhead like a prosecuting muse, “has it ever occurred to you that this openmindedness on which you pride yourself may very well be the mask for a kind of, oh, lazy malleability, an evasion of elementary Commitment traceable—here we come, boy—throughout your entire life? (And don’t smile at the italics as earmarks of your moral square.) Take for example your habit of ‘conscientiously’ ‘weighing’ both sides of an issue until it is no longer an issue and can be discerningly fingered in the museum of human action known as history. Are you within sight of an opinion about relaxing the rules for women visitors in the men’s dormitories, or are we afraid of being a square here too, perhaps planning a chest cold the day it comes up for vote at the faculty meeting from which we shall therefore be absent …?” Later he would find these letters in the pigeonhole where he got his mail. Proving that, though the unexamined life may not be worth living, the examined one is no bed of roses either.

  The abrasive score offered an all too appropriate musical background for the memories that now deluged Tattersall.

  He remembered how twelve years before, in a rowboat, on a stream clogged with water lilies, he had undertaken to explain to Lucy Stiles the meaning of the line, “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker,” in Eliot’s Prufrock. “Who is the eternal Footman, Hank?”—trailing a hand among the lilies. “I want to know.”

  Oars had had to be tucked up into the boat for the exegesis, and he had thrust his straw hat back an inch with his thumb as he began:

  “Well, he’s an, oh, a sort of personification of the force that seems to urge us along even as it ridicules us, don’t you know, Luce. Life egging us ever onward even as it mocks us. Encourages us to keep on making fools of ourselves. Something of that sort.” An apt recollection, wouldn’t you say! He was still smarting under the memory when another brought down its lash. “Your eyes are the soft, gentle brown of these button mushrooms.” Those liberally sprinkling the steaks over which they held hands at Tony’s later.

  And now he had just told this woman in pantomime to zip her lip.

  These fires the Devil personally stoked. Lucy had sprung into his car one autumn evening wearing a bright blue woolen throw, or shrug, around her shoulders. She had bought it at Garfinckel’s on a recent trip to Washington. She reported having been a half hour deciding from among a selection so beautiful she had wanted them all. By chance he had spent the next weekend in Washington himself, and hotfooted it up to Garfinckel’s. There, sure enough, was a display in the window, with a sign
reading: BRIGHTEN YOUR WINTER WITH A GARFINCKEL THROW. He had bought her a red one, over which she had squealed with such delight that he had gone home and written her a poem—The Girl in the Garfinckel Throw. Then to the words he had composed a tune. He sang the song to her, accompanying himself on the piano. “You have your throw, let’s have our fling …” One last twist of the knife: she might very well have a copy of the song around.

  What the Transylvanians continued implacably to fiddle was indeed music of the kind we love to hate, and several people walked out in protest. One man’s exit was somewhat diluted by his happening to march up the aisle in step with the rhythms being deplored, swinging his hat in his hand. Tattersall could have taken flight under cover of such a withdrawal. The speculation shot into his mind. But the intrinsic discrepancy of it would have been just too much. Walking out on music you have just shushed somebody so you could hear it would have reduced his position to absolute idiocy. Besides, there would be no end to the mail he was going to get without giving the Doppelgänger an opening like that. The Doppelgänger was already hard at it: “Let’s not pride ourselves too readily on ‘sticking,’ or ‘taking our medicine like a man,’ shall we, when the construction might as easily be put on matters that you hadn’t the guts to flee. You just sat there. The coward has been defined as someone who in an emergency thinks with his feet. What you thought with I shall leave to your no doubt ample …”

  The room seemed hot, its occupants to swim together in a mist, like the special effects in the avant-garde film to which they had been treated by the Drama Department the evening before. Tattersall felt a constriction in his chest, as though invisible hands had hitched his trouser belt up around his armpits and were tightening it with commendable stealth. He thought he must be turning purple. A timely heart attack, that’s the ticket. To be sped feet-first out of this mess, and out of all human mortification forever. But no such dramatic salvation was to be vouchsafed him, and the convicts trying to saw their way out of Schönberg went on into their fourth and final movement, marked allegro vivace.

  If only he could brazen it out, greet Lucy with a breezy laugh of the kind your unmitigated-gall types brought off with no trouble whatsoever, all over the world. You saw them everywhere, blandly inserting themselves into ticket queues instead of going to the end, butting in ahead of you at supermarket check-out counters without so much as a by-your-leave, and what’s more getting away with it, too. To resemble them in the least Tattersall would have to step away out of character, as in fact he sometimes tried to when up against a situation to which they were vastly more suited. One of his tricks for negotiating a complication for which he was himself miscast was to select some person of his acquaintance whom it was less likely to throw, and pretend to be that person. He did so now. He quickly sorted through a list of eligible candidates for the job of greeting Lucy as though nothing were amiss and came to—Repulski. Of course! At once handsome and hulking, with a kind of loping animal ease, the suave Slav, as he was known around campus, was a natural for this mess. That hovering, half-obvious, chocolate-brown gaze, and that agreeably brassy grin could handle anything. Besides, as head of the Music Department he was in a way responsible for it. The performance of this work during Homecoming could only be explained by the fact that its composer was a friend of Repulski’s. And fond as Tattersall was of music, he was here only out of friendship for Repulski too. So it was no more than fair that Repulski help get him out of it with a whole hide, vicariously speaking.

  Having mentally donned Repulski’s guise, then, he hastily tried to imagine a remark of the sort Repulski might be counted on to toss the whole contretemps off with (and given Tattersall’s lack of stomach for frontier-forging twelve-toners). “Well, Lucy, the last time I saw you I believe you were talking about having your ears pierced. Now you won’t have to. Mbahahaha!”

  Oh, Christ, no, that’s no good. The familiarity of it would be much too crude; it would be coming on too strong at far too short notice (however typical of Repulski on one level). Something in another vein, hurry. Something more impersonal as far as Lucy herself is concerned, and bearing in mind that slight buzz of an accent he has, though of course not including it in the impersonation. “Well, I thought zot quite an interestink experiment. Having all four musicians play different compositions at vunce.”

  He saw that Repulski had been a mistake, and seeing it, felt a spasm of irritation with the man. He could not carry it off, even leaning on his furled umbrella, the ferrule sinking slowly into the wet November sod. The first sally was precisely the kind the mesomorph would have made, which should have told Tattersall this was not up his alley. He would have to see it through himself, and his best bet was to pretend as blithely as possible, as equably as he, himself, could, that nothing was amiss. He had assumed the whisperer behind him to be deprecating the music, and had turned to agree with her. Of course! That must be his line. The scowl had been for the music, not her. They were kindred spirits. Capital! Thank God Sherry wasn’t here. Was Lucy’s husband? What the devil was her married name again? He’d seen it once in an alumni bulletin. Hurlbutt, Halliburton …

  Pulling himself together, Tattersall bowed his head as if in prayer, actually to spend the moments remaining to him in mentally rehearsing a few remarks suitable for a greeting predicated on those lines, and in spiritually preparing himself to deliver them. “Gawd,” he would say, rolling his eyes as he wheeled without an instant’s hesitation, on the audience’s arising, “I’m glad that’s over. I know what you were going through. Well, Lucy, I must say the years have been kind to you.”

  No, leave the years out of it. They’ll do you no good whatever. Just the pleasantry without the allusion to time. All right. Then the rest would have to be played by ear as, chatting beside her while they drifted slowly toward the exits, he would reconvene the scattered elements of such intelligence and charm as she must be presumed to have seen in him back in the days when, afloat on the gold and green of a Sunday afternoon, he had elucidated Prufrockian unease from such obvious firsthand knowledge.

  The composition drew to a close and with it the concert. The audience applauded and rose. Tattersall turned around.

  “Well, Hank Tattersall, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  Lucy flicked him across the chin with a program rolled into a tube. She smiled under a small blue hat, around whose edges curled the tips of her bronzed hair, remembered as of an auburn persuasion, and hanging to her shoulders and below.

  “Well, actually—”

  “Not a single bit.”

  “You’re looking very well yourself, Lucy.”

  “You know Mayo, my niece, of course. I don’t know whether you realized she was my niece. Therefore that I was her aunt.”

  The nineteen-year-old Gioconda standing at Lucy’s side was a student in his creative writing class. For all her ethereality, he wanted to wash her typewriter out with soap. It was not for him to say whether the novel on which she was at work showed any substantial talent or not; he only knew that its jolting content and jarring language, taken in conjunction with her genteel New England rearing, put him off, as did the not quite expressionless Mona Lisa gaze with which she heard out his “criticism” in personal conference; so that he jabbered away, fell all over himself in his attempt to seem to know his business while protesting ignorance of the milieu under delineation. What did this child know of junkies and kooks and death warmed over? And by what demon was she driven to write about them in the first-person vernacular? “Write about what you know,” he had said, and for his pains was reminded that she had spent two summers working as a volunteer in a Massachusetts snake pit. She spoke in a hurried whisper, and with a hint of quietly watchful amusement. She always seemed to be smiling secretly, as though she had something on you which qualified the validity of anything else you did or said. What she had on him, along with the rest of the class, was that he believed in something once called esthetic pleasure, and that it was the function of literature to furnish i
t in some measure, and not to beat you over the head with buzzard guts.

  Inching up the aisle between this creature and her aunt, Tattersall had the sense of being caught in a web of female complicity finer than gossamer yet tough as steel, a sacrificial victim, a poor sonofabitch held for a moment in polite suspension before being delivered over to their laughter the minute his back was turned. How would the gossip go? Would his being an old beau make Aunt Lucy go easy on him in instinctive defense of her own taste? Or would it be one of those “to think I nearly married him” things?

  “Mayo’s been turning out some bang-up stuff,” he said as they pressed forward in the crowd. He felt as though they were caught in a clogged meat grinder.

  “I wish he’d tell me that,” Mayo eagerly whispered.

  “She says very good things about you too, Hank,” Lucy said. “She thinks you’re fine.”

  “Why don’t we all have a drink and develop the point? God knows we need it after that music,” Tattersall said, beginning to recover his composure.

  Such an interval would have a twofold merit. It would delay the women’s own certain klatsch, while giving him the opportunity to recover some more lost ground. After all, chewing the rag was one of the arts at which he was most adept, given reasonable odds.

  “Oh, I’m sorry I can’t,” Lucy said. “Harry’s going to speak at this banquet tonight, you know, and I’ll have to see his dinner clothes are in shape, and maybe let him try out his speech on me, and what have you. Are you going?”

  “Certainly,” Tattersall said, and, winding up this encounter as gracefully as he could with a hasty, “See you there,” hightailed it across the campus to the Administration Building to find out from program headquarters what and where this banquet was, and try to get tickets. He hated banquets worse than anything on earth, with the possible exception of benefit balls, and caught fleeting glimpses of himself climbing into a boxcar, after one or another, dressed in dinner clothes, and disappearing from the knowledge of men.