William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

I nodded my agreement, which amused Giselle and also the doctor, who continued: “To finance his life with you in the haut monde , he thrust himself into the petty criminality that now threatens his freedom. Further, after his arrest, and being simultaneously abandoned by his mentor in corruption, Meister Geld, a man about whom he knows almost nothing, he is once again the bereft bastard, without parent, without salvation. He is the unredeemable, loathsome, fear-ridden orphan of the storm, living in the shadow of an achieved father, crippled, he thinks, by the genes of unknown ancestors, and now with a future that holds only degradation, possibly of a lifelong order. And so he descended into a neurotic abyss, and resurrected from it in the guise of a blasphemous new Jesus, the only saviour available in this profane world he now inhabits. The army would be as mad as he is to put him on trial in this condition.”

The army, citing my illness and my sterling war record, moved me toward a medical discharge. Dr. Tannen also announced that his tour of army duty was at an end, and that he was returning to private practice in Manhattan. This news plunged me into a new depression.

As I slowly came out of it, I was released from the hospital, and at the sunny lunch hour of the third day I told Giselle I wanted to go to the Künstler Klause to dance. It was the first time I’d expressed interest in doing anything since my collapse. The dismissal of the charges buoyed my spirit, but the impending loss of my therapist weighed on me. Giselle asked him if he would take me as a patient back in Manhattan, and he said of course. She then made the private decision to send me home alone.

Eva the belly dancer was one of the Künstler Klause’s attractions, along with a magician and a four-piece band — trumpet, drums, violin, and accordion. The club was cheap glitz with a marine decor. Fishnets adorned with anchors, marlin, and mermaids formed the backdrop for the small stage and modest dance floor. The waiter lit the table candle when we sat down, and as we listened to the music I became intensely happy. The club’s crowd was mostly Germans, with a few GIs. Quinn came in while the band played.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I said to him.

“I asked him,” Giselle said. “I thought we’d celebrate your first night out.”

“That’s a fine idea,” I said.

“I’d like some wine,” Quinn said to the waiter. “Moselle.”

“Moselle all around,” I said and I took a fifty-mark note out of my pocket.

“Put your money away,” Quinn said.

Quinn looked very young. He had large even teeth and a handsome, crooked smile that gave him a knowing look.

“I saved the good news for our party,” Giselle said.

“What good news?” I asked.

“Quinn started it,” she said. “He sent my photographs to Paris Match and they bought them. Isn’t that something?”

“That’s quite something,” I said. “What photographs?”

“The photos of you at Fritz’s Garden, you and all those freaks. The editors said they hadn’t seen anything like this out of Germany since the early thirties. Isn’t that remarkable?”

“Photos of me?” I said.

“No one could recognize you,” she said. “You were biting yourself. Paris Match is using four pictures and they have an assignment for me in Berlin.”

I said nothing.

“I did very little,” Quinn said. “I just put her in touch with the editors. The pictures sold themselves. Not only that, the magazine’s art director knew Giselle’s mother very well.”

“She knew everybody in art,” Giselle said.

“So Giselle comes by her talent naturally,” Quinn said.

“She’s a natural, all right,” I said, and I heard that my voice had gone flat.

Eva the belly dancer came on, dancing close to the ringside tables so men could stuff money into her belt, which rode well below the belly

“I remember her,” I said when I saw Eva. “People insulted her at the Christmas party.” I took my fifty marks out of my pocket again and tucked it into Eva’s belt, just under the navel.

“Orson,” Giselle said, grabbing the bill as Eva spun away from us, “you can’t afford to give money away.”

“We have to pay for insulting the girl.”

“I already paid,” Giselle said. “Remember?”

“Ah,” I said.

“I remember,” said Quinn.

We didn’t speak until Eva had finished her dance and the magician came on. He gave his patter in German and then did a few simple tricks with handkerchiefs and flowers. Boring. He lit a cigarette and made it disappear to his left, then picked it out of his right pocket, smoked it, threw it, lit, from hand to hand, and smoked it again.

“That’s a fake cigarette,” I said. “It’s not lit. Watch what he does with it.”

The magician put the cigarette inside his shirt collar, against his neck.

“He gets rid of the real cigarette right away and holds its smoke in his mouth to use for the fake one,” I explained.

“You know all the tricks,” Giselle said.

The magician had relaxed me and I asked Giselle to dance. We danced well, like old times.

“I’m sorry I’m sick,” I said.

“You’re not sick. Things just got to be too much.”

“I’ll come out of it.”

“Dr. Tannen thinks he can help you. He said he’d continue treating you.”

“How? By mail?”

“You could go to New York.”

“ I could.”

“Yes, you.”

“Not you?”

“One of us has to work. I’ve got another six months in my contract with the government. And now there’s the photo assignment in Berlin, and I really want that.”

“So. You go your way, I’ll go mine.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’ll come to New York to stay in six months’ time.”

I let my arm fall and walked back to the table and drank my wine. “I have no place to live in New York,” I said.

“I called your father yesterday and again this morning. He has space in his apartment. He also called your old publisher and they’ll give you free-lance editing work.”

That widened my smile. “My father,” I said. “My father, my father, my father. I could sleep on my father’s couch anytime. I could sleep on his couch or I could sleep in his bathtub, in his sink. He’d give me his bed, two beds. Two beds and a couch. Three beds, two tubs, and six couches. Take your choice, boy, the sky’s the limit, anything you want. Dad. My dad. Symbiotic, that’s what we are. He’s the symbi, I’m the otic, together we’re a great team. It’s just like this place, look around you. Ever see a more homey, more beautiful place? Look at those fishnets, listen to that music, straight from the angels, straight from the fish. And Eva, what a beauty. I thinks she wants to fuck me. Why don’t we go back and tell her it’s okay? She’s such a sweetheart, nobody like her in Germany. Like my mother, a great dancer. Like my father, a great dancer. Dance is the thing, the ticket, the flow, the flood. Dance is manse and pants and ants in your prance. High kicking, watch those shanks and pasterns, folks, watch those hocks and fetlocks. Nothing like mothers and fathers dancing together, nothing like fucking beautiful women who love you and dance so well while they’re doing it, wishing it, wishing will make it so, wish you were here, it is true if you think it is, true love, it’s true, it’s blue, it’s you, it’s moo moo mulieribus in aeternitatem, ein Prosit, ein Prosit , Herr Ober, more Moselle, more Moselle, more Moselle. .”

And on I went until Giselle leaned over and kissed me with her Judas kiss. Then she and Quinn took me home. Dr. Tannen came the next afternoon and the way to New York was arranged, the charges against me buried in the army’s dead-case file, my troop ship awaiting. Quinn and Giselle took the train with me to Bremerhaven and we had a fine time while I said my farewells to Germany. We ate in the first-class dining car, ordered champagne to toast our reunion in six months, and the beginning of our new lives. I put Quinn in charge of Giselle, told him to report anyone who tried to move in on her while I was away. Quinn and I shook hands on it. On the way back to Frankfurt I have no doubt that Quinn, being in charge of Giselle, bought a first-class sleeper for their trip.