Ape and Essence Read online

  An old deaf man, at whom we had to shout our questions, at last understood what we were talking about. Cottonwood Ranch -- of course he knew it. Take that dirt road there; drive south for a mile; then turn east, follow the irrigation ditch for another three quarters of a mile, and there it was. The old man wanted to tell us much more about the place; but Bob was too impatient to listen. He threw the car into gear and we were off.

  Along the irrigation ditch the cottonwoods and willows were aliens, clinging precariously, in the midst of those tough ascetic lives of the desert, to another, easier, more voluptuous mode of being. They were leafless now, the mere skeletons of trees, white against the sky; but one could imagine how intense, under the fierce clear sun, would be the emerald of their young leaves three months from now.

  The car, which was being driven much too fast, crashed heavily into an unexpected dip. Bob swore.

  "Why any man in his senses should choose to live at the end of a road like this, I can't imagine."

  "Perhaps he takes it a little more slowly," I ven­tured to suggest.

  Bob did not deign so much as to glance at me. The car rattled on at undiminished speed. I tried to con­centrate on the view.

  Out there, on the floor of the desert, there had been a noiseless, but almost explosive transformation. The clouds had shifted and the sun was now shining on the nearest of those abrupt and jagged buttes, which rose so inexplicably, like islands, out of the enormous plain. A moment before they had been black and dead. Now suddenly they had come to life between a shadowed foreground and a background of cloudy darkness. They shone as if with their own incan­descence.

  I touched Bob's arm and pointed.

  "Now do you understand why Tallis chooses to live at the end of this road?"

  He took a quick look, swerved round a fallen Joshua tree, looked again for a fraction of a second and brought his eyes back to the road.

  "It reminds me of that etching by Goya -- you know the one. The woman riding a stallion, and the animal's turning its head and has her dress between its teeth -- trying to pull her down, trying to tear the clothes off her. And she's laughing like a maniac, in a frenzy of pleasure. And in the background there's a plain, with buttes sticking out of it, just like here. Only if you look carefully at Goya's buttes, you see that they're really crouching animals, half rats, half lizards -- as big as mountains. I bought a reproduction of it for Elaine."

  But Elaine, I reflected in the ensuing silence, hadn't taken the hint. She had allowed the stallion to drag her to the ground; she had lain there, laughing and laughing, uncontrollably, while the big teeth ripped at her bodice, tore the skirt to shreds, grazing the soft skin beneath with a fearful but delicious threat, with the tingling imminence of pain. And then, at Acapulco, those huge rat-lizards had stirred out of their stony sleep, and suddenly poor old Bob had found himself surrounded, not by deliciously swooning Graces, not by the laughing troop of rosy-bottomed Cupids, but by monsters.

  But meanwhile we had reached our destination. Between the trees along the ditch I saw a white frame house under an enormous cottonwood, with a wind­mill to one side of it, a corrugated iron barn to the other. The gate was closed. Bob stopped the car and we got out. A white board had been nailed to the gatepost. On it an unskilled hand had painted a long inscription in vermilion.

  The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,

  The prurient ape's defiling touch:

  And do you like the human race?

  No, not much.

  THIS MEANS YOU, KEEP OUT.

  "Well, we've evidently come to the right place," I said.

  Bob nodded. We opened the gate, walked across a wide expanse of beaten earth and knocked at the door of the house. It was opened almost immediately by a stout elderly woman in spectacles, wearing a flowered blue cotton dress and a very old red jacket. She gave us a friendly smile.

  "Car broken down?" she enquired.

  We shook our heads and Bob explained that we had come to see Mr. Tallis.

  "Mr. Tallis?"

  The smile faded from her face; she looked grave and shook her head. "Didn't you know?" she said. "Mr. Tallis passed on six weeks ago."

  "Do you mean, he's dead?"

  "Passed on," she insisted, then launched out into her story.

  Mr. Tallis had rented the house for a year. She and her husband went to live in the little old cabin behind the barn. It only had an outside toilet but they had been used to that back in North Dakota, and luckily it had been a warm winter. Anyhow they were glad of the money, what with prices the way they were nowadays; and Mr. Tallis couldn't have been pleasanter, once you understood that he liked his privacy.

  "I suppose it was he who put up that sign on the gate?"

  The old lady nodded and said that it was kind of cute; she meant to leave it there.

  "Had he been sick for a long time?" I asked.

  "Not sick at all," she answered. "Though he always did say he had heart trouble."

  And that was why he had passed on. In the bath­room. She found him there one morning, when she came to bring him his quart of milk and a dozen eggs from the store. Stone cold. He must have laid there all night. She had never had such a shock in all her life. And then what a commotion on account of there not being any relatives that anybody knew about! The doctor was called and then the sheriff, and there had to be a court order before the poor man could even be buried, much less embalmed. And then all the books and papers and clothes had to be packed up and seals put on the boxes, and everything stored somewhere in Los Angeles, just in case there should be an heir somewhere. Well, now she and her husband were back in the house, and she felt rather badly about it, because poor Mr. Tallis still had four months of his lease to run and he'd paid everything in advance. But of course in one way she was thankful, now that the rain and snow had come at last -- on account of the toilet being inside the house, not outside, like when they were living in the cabin. She paused for breath. Bob and I exchanged glances. "Well, in the circumstances," I said, "I think we'd better be going."

  But the old lady wouldn't hear of it. "Come in," she insisted, "come in." We hesitated; then, accepting her invitation, fol­lowed her through a tiny entrance lobby into the living room. An oil stove was burning in a corner of the room; the air was hot and an almost tangible smell of fried food and nappies filled the house. A little old man like a leprechaun was seated in a rock­ing chair near the window, reading the Sunday comics. Near him a pale, preoccupied-looking young girl -- she couldn't have been more than seventeen -- was holding a baby in one arm and, with the other hand, buttoning her pink blouse. The child belched; a bubble of milk appeared at the corner of its mouth. The young mother left the final button undone and tenderly wiped the pouting lips. Through the open door of another room came the sound of a fresh soprano voice singing, "Now is the Hour," to the accompaniment of a guitar.

  "This is my husband," said the old lady. "Mr. Coulton."

  "Pleased to meet you," said the leprechaun, without looking up from his comics.

  "And this is our granddaughter, Katie. She got mar­ried last year."

  "So I see," said Bob. He bowed to the girl and gave her one of those fascinating smiles, for which he was so famous.

  Katie looked at him as though he were merely a piece of furniture; then, fastening that final button, she turned without a word and started to climb the steep stairs that led to the upper floor.

  "And these," Mrs. Coulton went on, indicating Bob and myself, "are two friends of Mr. Tallis."

  We had to explain that we weren't precisely friends. All we knew of Mr. Tallis was his work; but that had interested us so much that we had come here, hoping to make his acquaintance -- only to learn the tragic news of his death.

  Mr. Coulton looked up from his paper.

  "Sixty-six," he said. "That's all he was. I'm seventy-two myself. Seventy-two last October."

  He uttered the triumphant little laugh of one who has scored a vic
tory, then returned to Flash Gordon -- Flash the invulnerable, Flash the immortal, Flash the perpetual knight errant to girls, not as they lam­entably are, but as the idealists of the brassiere in­dustry proclaim that they ought to be.

  "I happened to see what Mr. Tallis had sent in to our Studio," said Bob.

  Again the leprechaun looked up.

  "You're in the movies?" he enquired.

  Bob admitted that he was.

  In the next room the music broke off suddenly in the middle of a phrase.

  "One of those big shots?" Mr. Coulton enquired.

  With the most charming false modesty, Bob as­sured him that he was only a writer who occasionally dabbled in directing.

  The leprechaun nodded slowly.

  "I see in the paper where that guy Goldwyn says all the big shots got to take a fifty per cent cut in their salary."

  His eyes twinkled gleefully, once again he uttered his triumphant little laugh. Then abruptly disinteresting himself from reality, he returned to his myths.

  Christ before Lublin! I tried to change the painful subject by asking Mrs. Coulton whether she had known that Tallis was interested in the movies. But as I spoke a sound of footsteps in the inner room distracted her attention.

  I turned my head. In the doorway, dressed in a black sweater and a tartan skirt there stood -- who? Lady Hamilton at sixteen, Ninon de Lenclos when she lost her virginity to Coligny, la petite Morphil, Anna Karenina in the schoolroom.

  "This is Rosie," said Mrs. Coulton proudly, "our other granddaughter. Rosie's studying singing," she confided to Bob. "She wants to get into the movies."

  "But how interesting!" cried Bob enthusiastically, as he rose and shook hands with the future Lady Hamilton.

  "Maybe you could give her some advice," said the doting grandmother.

  "I'd be only too happy. . ."

  "Fetch another chair, Rosie."

  The girl raised her eyelids and gave Bob a brief but intense look. "Unless you don't mind sitting in the kitchen," she said.

  "Of course not!"

  They vanished together into the inner room. Looking out of the window, I saw that the buttes were again in shadow. The rat-lizards had closed their eyes and were shamming death -- but only to lull their victim into a sense of false security.

  "It's more than luck," Mrs. Coulton was saying, "it's Providence. A big shot in the movies coming here, just when Rosie needs a helping hand."

  "Just when movies are going to fold up like vaude­ville," said the leprechaun without raising his eyes from the page before him.

  "What makes you say those things?"

  "It's not me that says them," the old man answered. "It's that Goldwyn guy."

  From the kitchen came the sound of a startlingly childish laugh. Bob was evidently making headway. I foresaw another trip to Acapulco, with consequences even more disastrous than the first.

  Innocently the procuress, Mrs. Coulton smiled with pleasure.

  "I like your friend," she said. "Gets on well with kids. None of that stuffed shirt business."

  I accepted the implied rebuke without comment and asked her again if she had known that Mr. Tallis was interested in movies.

  She nodded. Yes, he'd told her that he was sending something to one of the Studios. He wanted to make some money. Not for himself; for though he'd lost most of what he once had, there was still enough to live on. No, he wanted some extra money to send to Europe. He'd been married to a German girl, way back, before the First World War. Then they'd been divorced and she had stayed on in Germany with the baby. And now there wasn't anybody left but a grand­daughter. Mr. Tallis wanted to bring her over here; but the people at Washington wouldn't let him. So the next best thing was to send her a lot of money so she could eat properly and finish her education. That was why he'd written that thing for the movies.

  Her words suddenly reminded me of something in Tallis's script -- something about children in postwar Europe prostituting themselves for bars of chocolate. The granddaughter -- had she perhaps been one of those children? "Ich give you Schokolade, du give me Liebe. Understand?" They understood only too well. One Hershey bar now; two more afterward.

  "What happened to the wife?" I asked. "And the granddaughter's parents?"

  "They passed on," said Mrs. Coulton. "I guess they were Jewish, or something."

  "Mind you," said the leprechaun suddenly, "I don't have anything against Jews. But all the same. . ." He paused. "Maybe Hitler wasn't so dumb after all."

  This time, I could see, it was to the Katzenjammer Kids that he returned.

  Another peal of childish laughter broke out in the kitchen. Lady Hamilton at sixteen sounded as though she were about eleven. And yet how mature, how technically perfect had been the look with which she greeted Bob! Obviously, the most disquieting fact about Rosie was that she was simultaneously innocent and knowing, a calculating adventuress and a pigtailed schoolgirl.

  "He married again," the old lady went on, ignoring both the giggle and the anti-Semitism. "Someone on the stage. He told me the name, but I've forgotten it. Anyhow it didn't last long. She went off with some other fellow. I say it served him right for going off with her when he had a wife back there in Germany. I don't think it's right, all this divorcing and marrying somebody else's husband."

  In the ensuing silence I fabricated a whole biog­raphy for this man I had never seen. The young New Englander of good family. Carefully educated, but not to the point of pedantry. Naturally gifted, but not so overwhelmingly as to make him wish to exchange a life of leisure for the fatigues of professional author­ship. From Harvard he had gone on to Europe, had lived gracefully, had known the best people every­where. And then -- in Munich, I felt sure -- he had fallen in love. I visualised the girl, wearing the German equivalent of Liberty dresses -- the daughter of some successful artist or patron of the arts. One of those almost disembodied, those as it were floating products of Wilhelmine wealth and culture; a being at once vague and intense, fascinatingly unpredictable and maddeningly idealistic, tief and German. Tallis had fallen in love, had married, had fathered a child in spite of his wife's frigidity, had been almost asphyxiated by the oppressive soulfulness of the domestic atmosphere. How fresh and healthy, by comparison, had seemed the air of Paris and the personal ambience of that young Broadway actress whom he had met vacationing there!

  La belle Americaine,

  Qui rend les hommes fous,

  Dans deux ou trois semaines

  Partira pour Corfou.

  But this one didn't leave for Corfu -- or if she did, it was in Tallis's company. And she wasn't frigid, she didn't float, she was neither vague, nor intense, neither deep, nor soulful, nor an art snob. What she was, unfortunately, was a bit of a bitch. And that bit had grown larger with the passage of the years. By the time he divorced her, it had become the entire animal.

  Looking back from the vantage point of 1947, the Tallis of my imagination could see precisely what he had done: for the sake of a physical pleasure and the simultaneous excitement and satisfaction of an erotic imagination, he had condemned a wife and a daughter to death at the hands of maniacs, and a granddaughter to the caresses of any soldier or black marketeer with a pocketful of sweetmeats or the price of a decent meal.

  Romantic fancies! I turned to Mrs. Coulton.

  "Well, I wish I'd known him," I said.

  "You'd have liked him," she assured me. "We all liked Mr. Tallis. I'll tell you something," she confided. "Every time I make the trip to Lancaster for the Ladies' Bridge Club, I go to the cemetery, just to visit with him."

  "And I bet he hates it," said the leprechaun.

  "Now, Elmer," his wife protested.

  "But I heard him say it," Mr. Coulton insisted. "Time and again. 'If I die here,' he says, 'I want to be buried out in the desert.' "

  "He wrote as much in that script he sent to the Studio," I said.

  "He did?" Mrs. Coulton's tone was one of incre­dulity.
>
  "Yes, he even describes the grave he meant to be buried in. All by itself, under a Joshua tree."

  "I could have told him it wasn't legal," said the leprechaun. "Not since the morticians lobbied that bill through the legislature at Sacramento. I knew a man that had to be dug up twenty years after he was buried-way out there behind the buttes." He waved a hand in the direction of Goya's saurian rats. "It cost his nephew three hundred dollars by the time he was all through."

  He chuckled at the recollection.

  "I wouldn't want to be buried in the desert," said his wife emphatically.

  "Why not?"

  "Too lonely," she answered. "I'd hate it."

  While I was wondering what to say next, the pale young mother came down the stairs carrying a nappy. She stopped for a moment to look in at the kitchen.

  "Listen, Rosie," she said in a low, angry voice, "It's time you did some work for a change."

  Then she turned and walked towards the entrance lobby, where an open door revealed the modern con­veniences of that indoor bathroom.

  "He's got diarrhoea again," she said bitterly, as she passed her grandmother.

  Flushed, her eyes bright with excitement, the future Lady Hamilton emerged from the kitchen. Behind her, in the doorway, stood the future Hamilton, busily imagining that he was going to be Lord Nelson.

  "Grandma," the girl announced, "Mr. Briggs thinks he can arrange for me to have a screen test."

  The idiot! I got up.

  "Time we were going, Bob," I said, knowing that it was already too late.

  From the half-open door of the bathroom came the squelchy sound of nappies being rinsed in the toilet bowl.

  "Listen!" I whispered to Bob as we passed.

  "Listen to what?" he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Ears have they, neither do they hear.