Conrad Aiken - Great Circle

— Ha, ha. I’m laughing.

— Where is honesty then? I don’t believe we’ve got an honest fiber in our souls. We’re all colossal fakes — the more power we have, the more ingeniously and powerfully we fake. Michelangelo — what the hell. Did he ever tell the truth? Or Shakespeare? No, by God, they went lying into their graves, nothing said, their dirty little mouths twisted with deceit, their damned hearts packed full of filthy lies and blasphemies. Their whole lives wasted. One long fake, a pitiful and shameful glozing and glazing of the truth, slime upon slime and prettification on prettification, each new resolve to tell the truth coming to nothing, somehow turning to a neatly turned verse, a fine purple flight of rhetoric, a bloody little tune, an effective action, or a figure of which the very secret of power is artifact. Christ, Christ, what an agony — poor devils, they knew it too, and still they went on surrendering to the lies inherent in language and marble. Why? And why, even when I want to kill myself, do I have to cast myself as little orphan Annie with a rag doll clutched to her shawled bosom? I’m ashamed. No, I’m not either. Yes, I am too. I went into the Waldorf and cried into a cup of pale coffee. I could hardly swallow. I wanted to be dead. That damned dado of college banners made me sick. Old Turgenev, the cashier, was having trouble with a couple of drunks, they started to fight, and I got up with my coffee cup in my hand and went to talk to them — I persuaded them to go out to the sidewalk, and I went with them, holding my coffee cup. One of them, a tough guy from town, got the other down, the other was a mere kid, and when he got up his eye was cut open. I stopped the fight, with plausible words, feeling like a damned little pewter Galahad — Come on, now, I said, that’s enough, the kid’s had enough, leave him alone, what’s the idea, and I smiled a God-damned sickly smile at them both as if I were a paltry little Messiah, and they quit. I think it was the sight of the coffee cup out there in my hand in the snow that did it. One of them went down Holyoke Street and the other into the Yard, and I went back into the Waldorf feeling important and sat down with my coffee cup, and began to remember that I had wanted to cry, to die, to lie down on the mosaic floor with my coffee cup, just to stretch out like a dead Jesus on the dirty floor of this dirty and stinking world. But of course I didn’t do it. I merely thought about it, luxuriated disgustingly in the idea, imagined myself lying there among dead matches and wet sawdust, poor pitiful little Andrew Cather, him that was betrayed by the everlasting Judas tree. What is unhappiness, Bill?

— Defeated pride. A highball without ice. Ignorance.

— Ignorance be damned, and damn your eyes anyway. You and your amateur psychology. What the hell do you know about it, anyway? You sit there and goggle at the world as if you knew something — what the hell do you know? Oh, yes, I know, something hurt you irremediably when you were muscling your infant way into this cold, cold world, and you’ve never recovered, but you’ve fought your way back by superhuman intelligence to that drastic cold bath of a moment — isn’t that it? So now you’re wise and resigned, and smile Shakespearean wisdom on all the maimed host of mankind. You sit there and smile benignly at me, and wish to God I’d go home and leave you alone to sleep, you think I’m a fool, and you despise me because I’ve been betrayed and because I make such a fuss about it. What’s the use. Tea dance today. Novelty dance tonight. There will be charming favors, and saxophones will syncopate your livers. How long is it since you’ve cried, Bill?

— Oh, not since I was five or six, I guess.

— Why don’t you try it. It’s great. I’ve got the habit. I cry all the time. I wake up in the middle of the night crying — I dream I’m crying, and wake up crying. Yesterday morning I cried while I was shaving — it was the funniest thing I ever saw, the tears running down into the lather. I laughed at myself and then cried again. I think I’ll go insane. Deliberately — just think myself into madness. Why not?

— You’re insane now. Manic.

— Manic, hell.

— You’re heading a hell of a good time.

— Yes, indeed. Step up, ladies and gents, and see the trained lunatic, the miching mallecho Michelangelo, the pig with wings. Here lies the winged pig, feared and befriended by many, loved and betrayed by one. Why do I always dream about pigs? Last night I hit one in the snout with a walking stick — I thought he was attacking me, but it turned out I was mistaken. He merely wanted to attract my attention; but by that time I had fallen down in the mud, and my stick was dirty.

— It would be. Ha, ha.

— Don’t make me laugh.

— Anal erotic, what.

— Scatological too. Step up and see the scatological hebephrene, watch him weep pig’s tears into his snout.

— He eats them all.

— The pig with wings was a much smaller pig — a tiny pig, and such a little darling, as clean as clean could be. His wings were transparent and opalescent, lovely, and oh so tender — they were just unfurled, and scarcely dry, and imagine it, Bill, a dirty little bastard of a mongrel dog chose just that moment to attack him, biting at the wings! When I threw stones at him, he turned and attacked me.

— That dog was your best friend.

— My best friend — Christ. I mean Judas.

— You mean yourself.

— My polysyllabic soul, yes, of course I am guilty, I go about projecting my guilt like a magic lantern.

— Do you mind if I open the window a little, and let the smoke out?

— Oh, no, knock out the wall if you like. Einstein is waiting just outside with the fourth dimension on his forehead.

— I’ll ask him in.

— Do.

— Meanwhile, have you called up Bertha today.

— No, I went to see the Dingbats. The Dingbat sisters. I met them in the elevator, and one of them was carrying a bottle of gin, and I was already tight and so were they a little, and what with one thing and another, though I’d never spoken to them before, we smiled at each other and they invited me to come in and have a drink. So I did. The mystery women of Shepard Hall. They’re always getting telephone calls from the Navy Yard, and it amuses me to hear them at the public phone trying to answer indiscreet proposals in discreet words of one syllable. The older one took me into her bedroom to show me photographs of her two kids in Montreal. I hadn’t known she was married, and that put me off a little — I understood then why her breasts were so — ahem — mature and maternal. She leaned one of them against me, Bill, but I didn’t budge or feel a tremor. Not a tremor. Then they gave me six cocktails in rapid succession, in the dining room, a horrible room with red walls and fumed-oak furniture with an umbrella stand in one corner and such jolly colored prints of John Peel singing at the hunt breakfast. Why had I never been to see them, they said. They were always glad to see the people they liked, and if I just rang their bell six times, any time of the day or night, they would know it was me, and get out of bed even, if necessary. Very obliging. I asked them if they ever cried, and they were amused. I told them that I had a peculiar passion for crying, and would be glad to come in from time to time and have a good noisy cry with them while punishing the gin bottle. They laughed their heads off, and thought I was a hell of a wag. Then I said I must be going. The younger one, who is not so pretty, but who has no children, she is tall and has a gentler face, not quite so tough, you know, perhaps a trace of what you fellows call the anima type, she pleaded softly and cajolingly with me at the dining-room door, standing so close to me that I couldn’t get past her without embracing her, and she followed me to the front door and there, what do you think, just round the corner from Alice, we had a ten-minute nonstop kiss, you know the kind. Alice after a few minutes of the silence, said, Hey, there, what are you kids doing out there, and laughed, and then I went back for another cocktail. Oh, it was great fun, you have no idea. And when I finally came away I kissed her again at the door, a long, long kiss, not forgetting the tongue, and so went to the University Theater, where I suddenly and inexplicably felt very drunk. An undergraduate in front of me said, I smell boooooooze, and looked round. I smiled at him, very amiably.