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mallorys_cameraChapter 3
(i)
The wife was called Beatrice.
Shocking, the intensity of Henry’s hatred for Beatrice considering how genial he was in practically every other respect. Henry Miller was a man who could accost another man waiting at a trolley stop, offer him a cigarette and end up talking to him for three hours about The Sorrows of Young Werther.
The other man may never have smoked a Lucky Strike in his life, almost certainly would never have heard of Goethe, but at the end of those three hours, he’d be standing Henry to a five-course meal at Child’s Restaurant—a second serving of pot roast? Please do!— and pressing sawbucks into the hand that Henry held out to shake farewell.
That was just the kind of man Henry was.
He never mentioned the wife by name. I knew by his inflection who he was talking about.
“She dreamed I was redecorating the bedroom,” he might say.
Henry was a big fan of Freud and psychoanalysis. And free association, and transference, psychosexual development, the id. Not so big on the Oedipal complex: “My mother never saw the irony when she called me a son-of-a-bitch,” he told me once.
“Dr. Fraud,” sneered Henry’s very good friend Emil Conason. Henry had a number of very good friends, and once we began seeing each other regularly, these very good friends would vie with one another to provide us with trysting locations. Emil—a Communist and a doctor—had an apartment on West End Avenue, the farthest outreach of genteel inhabitation, into which he crammed a wife, numerous small children, a medical practice, and room after room of useless furnishings—three-legged chiffoniers, broken pianos, wardrobes with fractured mirrors, sofas with collapsed springs—all of them coated in thick dust into which Henry traced our initials, surrounding them with misshapen hearts.
Sometimes, as we clutched and clawed in the throes of coitus, one of the small children would wander into the room to stare at us.
One time a boy child, after watching us silently, trudged off to a nearby corner to make pee-pee.
We much preferred to rendezvous in Henry’s own house on one of Beatrice’s frequent trips out of town with the child. There, Henry could indulge himself in post-coital slumber in his own bed, and I could review the items on Beatrice’s vanity table and deliberate over which one to snatch.
She had the petite bourgeoise’s taste in jewelry. A little strand of cheep seed pearls; a celluloid cameo; a filigree bracelet set, missing a few of its colored glass stones.
The pickings inside the drawers were not much better. Her drawers were cheap muslin; her stockings, heavily patched; her handkerchiefs, cotton scraps painstakingly embroidered with the initials BSW, had probably once been a school project—Henry had let slip that she’d been convent-educated.
I settled on a small cup. It was tarnished, so it was made of real silver. Perhaps it had been one of the things in Beatrice’s hope chest. Perhaps it had been given to her to celebrate the birth of the child that Henry showed no signs of caring about either.
I left her a tiny yellow candy conversation heart. Ask me, entreated the red dye letters on the front of the heart.
(i)
The wife was called Beatrice.
Shocking, the intensity of Henry’s hatred for Beatrice considering how genial he was in practically every other respect. Henry Miller was a man who could accost another man waiting at a trolley stop, offer him a cigarette and end up talking to him for three hours about The Sorrows of Young Werther.
The other man may never have smoked a Lucky Strike in his life, almost certainly would never have heard of Goethe, but at the end of those three hours, he’d be standing Henry to a five-course meal at Child’s Restaurant—a second serving of pot roast? Please do!— and pressing sawbucks into the hand that Henry held out to shake farewell.
That was just the kind of man Henry was.
He never mentioned the wife by name. I knew by his inflection who he was talking about.
“She dreamed I was redecorating the bedroom,” he might say.
Henry was a big fan of Freud and psychoanalysis. And free association, and transference, psychosexual development, the id. Not so big on the Oedipal complex: “My mother never saw the irony when she called me a son-of-a-bitch,” he told me once.
“Dr. Fraud,” sneered Henry’s very good friend Emil Conason. Henry had a number of very good friends, and once we began seeing each other regularly, these very good friends would vie with one another to provide us with trysting locations. Emil—a Communist and a doctor—had an apartment on West End Avenue, the farthest outreach of genteel inhabitation, into which he crammed a wife, numerous small children, a medical practice, and room after room of useless furnishings—three-legged chiffoniers, broken pianos, wardrobes with fractured mirrors, sofas with collapsed springs—all of them coated in thick dust into which Henry traced our initials, surrounding them with misshapen hearts.
Sometimes, as we clutched and clawed in the throes of coitus, one of the small children would wander into the room to stare at us.
One time a boy child, after watching us silently, trudged off to a nearby corner to make pee-pee.
We much preferred to rendezvous in Henry’s own house on one of Beatrice’s frequent trips out of town with the child. There, Henry could indulge himself in post-coital slumber in his own bed, and I could review the items on Beatrice’s vanity table and deliberate over which one to snatch.
She had the petite bourgeoise’s taste in jewelry. A little strand of cheep seed pearls; a celluloid cameo; a filigree bracelet set, missing a few of its colored glass stones.
The pickings inside the drawers were not much better. Her drawers were cheap muslin; her stockings, heavily patched; her handkerchiefs, cotton scraps painstakingly embroidered with the initials BSW, had probably once been a school project—Henry had let slip that she’d been convent-educated.
I settled on a small cup. It was tarnished, so it was made of real silver. Perhaps it had been one of the things in Beatrice’s hope chest. Perhaps it had been given to her to celebrate the birth of the child that Henry showed no signs of caring about either.
I left her a tiny yellow candy conversation heart. Ask me, entreated the red dye letters on the front of the heart.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-14 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-14 05:08 am (UTC)MacKenzie Bezos!
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Date: 2019-02-14 12:16 pm (UTC)Exactly so. :-)
Although by the time this is (I hope) published, the inspiration for that line will no longer be remembered. :-)
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Date: 2019-02-14 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-14 10:54 pm (UTC)It's my biographic novel about June Miller, Henry Miller's wife, who was "Mona/Mara" in early Miller works such as Tropic of Cancer, The Rosy Crucifiction et al. :-)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-15 02:24 pm (UTC)