Jack Kerouac - The Subterraneans

While sleeping they three get in Sand’s car and (properly) drive out to the beach, twenty miles, the boys jump in, swim, Mardou wanders on the shores of eternity her toes and feet that I love pressing down in the pale sand against the little shells and anemones and paupered dry seaweed long washed up and the wind blowing back her short haircut, as if Eternity’d met Heavenly Lane (as I thought of it in my bed) (seeing her also wandering around pouting, not knowing what to do next, abandoned by Suffering Leo and really alone and incapable of chatting about every tom dick and harry in art with Bromberg and Sand, what to do?)—So when they return she comes to the bed (after Bromberg’s preliminary wild bound up the stairs and bursting in of door and “WAKE up Leo you don’t want to sleep all day we’ve been to the beach, really it’s not fair!”)—“Leo,” says Mardou, “I didn’t want to sleep with you because I didn’t want to wake up in Bromberg’s bed at seven o’clock in the evening, it would be too much to cope with, I can’t—” meaning her therapy (which she hadn’t been going to any more out of sheer paralysis with me and my gang and cups), her inadequacy, the great now-crushing weight and fear of madness increasing in this disorderly awful life and unloved affair with me, to wake up horrified from hangover in a stranger’s (a kind but nevertheless not altogether wholeheartedwelcoming stranger’s) bed, with poor incapable Leo.—I suddenly looked at her, listening not to these real poor pleas so much as digging in her eyes that light that had shined on Yuri and it wasn’t her fault it could shine on all the world all the time, my light o love—

“Are you sincere?”—(“God you frighten me,” she said later, “you make me think suddenly I’ve been two people and betrayed you in one way, with one person, and this other person—it really frightened me—“) but as I ask that, “Are you sincere?” the pain I feel is so great, it has just risen fresh from that disordered roaring dream (“God is so disposed as to make our lives less cruel than our dreams,” is a quote I saw the other day God knows where)—feeling all that and harkening to other horrified hangover awakenings in Bromberg’s and all the hangover awakenings in my life, feeling now, “Boy, this is the real real beginning of the end, you can’t go on much further, how much more vagueness can your positive flesh take and how long will it stay positive if your psyche keeps blamming on it—boy, you are going to die, when birds get bleak—that’s the sign—.” But thinking more roars than that, visions of my work neglected, my well-being (so-called old well-being again) smashed, brain permanently injured now—ideas for working on the railroad—O God the whole host and foolish illusion and entire rigamarole and madness that we erect in the place of onelove, in our sadness—but now with Mardou leaning over me, tired, solemn, somber, capable as she played with the little unshaven uglies of my chin of seeing right through my flesh into my horror and capable of feeling every vibration of pain and futility I could send, as, too, attested by her recognition of “Are you sincere?” as the deep-well sounded call from the bottom—“Baby, let’s go home.”

“We’ll have to wait till Bromberg goes, take the train with him—I guess—.” So I get up, go into the bathroom (where I’d been earlier while they were at the beach and sex-phantasized in remembrance of the time, on another even wilder and further back Bromberg weekend, poor Annie with her hair done up in curlers and her face no makeup and Leroy poor Leroy in the other room wondering what his wife’s doing in there, and Leroy later driving off desperately into the night realizing we were up to something in the bathroom and so remembering myself now the pain I had caused Leroy that morning just for the sake of a little bit of sate for that worm and snake called sex)—I go into the bathroom and wash up and come down, trying to be cheerful.

Still I can’t look at Mardou straight in the eye—in my heart, “O why did you do it?”—sensing, in my desperation, the prophecy of what’s to come.

As if not enough this was the day of the night of the great Jones party, which was the night I jumped out of Mardou’s cab and abandoned her to the dogs of war—the war man Yuri wages gainst man Leo, each one.—Beginning, Bromberg making phone-calls and gathering birthday gifts and getting ready to take the bus to make old 151 at 4:47 for the city, Sand driving us (a sorry lot indeed) to bus stop, where we have quick one in bar across street while Mardou by now ashamed not only of herself but me too stays in back seat of car (tho exhausted) but in broad daylight, trying to catch a wink—really trying to think her way out of trap only I could help her out of if I’m given one more chance—in the bar, parenthetically amazed I am to hear Bromberg going right on with big booming burbling comments on art and literature and even in fact by God queer anecdotes as sullen Santa Clara Valley farmers guzzle at rail, Bromberg doesn’t even have consciousness of his fantastic impact on the ordinary—and Sand enjoying, himself in fact also weird—but minor details.—I come out to tell Mardou we have decided to take later train in order to go back to house to pick up forgotten package which is just another ringaroundtherosy of futility for her, she receives this news with solemn lips—ah my love and lost darling (out of date word)—if then I’d known what I know now, instead of returning to bar, for further talks, and looking at her with hurt eyes, etc., and let her lay there in the bleak sea of time untended and unsolaced and unforgiven for the sin of the sea of time I’d have gone in and sat down with her, taken her hand, promised her my life and protection—“Because I love you and there’s no reason”—but then far from having completely successfully realized this love, I was still in the act of thinking I was climbing out of my doubt about her—but the train came, finally, 153 at 5:31 after all our delays, we got in, and rode to the city—through South San Francisco and past my house, facing one another in coach seats, riding by the big yards in Bayshore and I gleefully (trying to be gleeful) point out a kicked boxcar ramming a hopper and you see the tinscrap shuddering far off, wow—but most of the time sitting bleakly under either stare and saying, finally, “I really do feel I must be getting a rummy nose”—anything I could think of saying to ease the pressure of what I really wanted to weep about—but in the main the three of us really sad, riding together on a train to gayety, horror, the eventual H bomb.

—Bidding Austin adieu finally at some teeming corner on Market where Mardou and I wandered among great sad sullen crowds in a confusion mass, as if we were suddenly lost in the actual physical manifestation of the mental condition we’d been in now together for two months, not even holding hands but I anxiously leading the way through crowds (so’s to get out fast, hated it) but really because I was too “hurt” to hold her hand and remembering (now with greater pain) her usual insistence that I not hold her in the street or people’ll think she’s a hustler—ending up, in bright lost sad afternoon, down Price Street (0 fated Price Street) towards Heavenly Lane, among the children, the young good-looking Mex chicks each one making me say to myself with contempt “Ah they’re almost all of ‘em better than Mardou, all I gotta do is get one of them … but O, but O”—neither one of us speaking much, and such chagrin in her eyes that in the original place where I had seen that Indian warmth which had originally prompted me to say to her, on some happy candlelit night, “Honey what I see in your eyes is a lifetime of affection not only from the Indian in you but because as part Negro somehow you are the first, the essential woman, and therefore the most, most originally most fully affectionate and maternal”—there now is the chagrin too, some lost American addition and mood with it—“Eden’s in Africa,” I’d added one time—but now in my hurt hate turning the other way and so walking down Price with her every time I see a Mexican gal or Negress I say to myself, “hustlers,” they’re all the same, always trying to cheat and rob you—harking back to all relations in the past with them—Mardou sensing these waves of hostility from me and silent.