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Cream
She surfaced with delightful
idiocy – cranberry spritzer mix, pastrami on rye, all of my favourite things –
her scatter-gun enquiry hot-beat, cold-beat against the thrubbing pulse of my
over-rehearsed mind. The recalcitrant echo of the past week’s tour, Vancouver
down to Newport, Kerouac to Ginsberg, faltered under laughter as clean and as
straight up as Columbian cocaine. Stepping up onto the veranda in a skinny and
terry cloth (me twenty stones, thin yellow hair in bunches, comfortable as soft
fruit pie), I watched her breach the clear blue pool, fresh as fluoride, with
laughter added, and be wrapped in a towel by Joss Hackinshaw, the third. Her
handshake, when it came, was warm, moist and spry, speaking all me su casa and gratia
placendi. My tribute was to leave off some fatuous diatribe – on the
obselescence of Le Corbusier to the Postmodern Style, I believe – for an
awe-struck silence, approvingly met.
“We’re thinking of property further north, ”
Joss was saying blithely, in response to my approbation reference the apartment
“toward Rockport over the Point.” He waved a conjuror’s conclusion, like a cut
price Prospero. His pony-tail, I took in from a height of six inches over,
completing the circumference of his indeliable nut with a wispy flick. “I’m all
concluded here. Besides, kinda restless for Em’ this south, right, sweetie?”
Emelda, who had tilted her head to dry her
hair with a towel intoned a couple of “uh-has” – musical bon mots – like it
meant something. Her manner was always to be busy, as though the weight of a
single consideration out of motion would crush her spirit. Her performance took
restlessness and cultivated it. “I just said it might be better to move back
awhile,” she offered. “Complexion an’t up to the task here, honestly; I’m best
up cold.”
Joss escorted us through the French windows
to the dining area, overlooking the white sand.Snappy, spik ‘n’ span in his immaculately tailored housecoat was
busy laying out breakfast: croisants, three english jams, coffee and pineapple,
in three carefully measured meals, with all the solemnity of a Mayflower
patrician.
“I guess the Aimes’ furore couldn’t have
helped,” I ventured off-hand, a remark that appeared to elicit some nervousness
from Emelda (a pause in sequence, a blush, a look away into the dazzling blue
light of infinity).
“This season’s
mark,” Joss replied philosophically. “Yes, well,” he hesitated, brushing glassy
spores of chlorine from his silk shirt. The insoucient gesture was a habit met
only by the rigid fascination in which he held his reflection off the sun
dappled window.“It’s pretty
symptomatic. Snappy will tell you that. Reckons the cops will key off on any
activity along the patch right now. Charge in with state-appointed jackhammers
on the first whiff of duplicating ink.”
“So what precisely went on? Some mart
conspiracy? Or perhaps Aimes didn’t pay off the right people?”
“A whole level of protocols shot to pieces,
that’s what. New money in lke that, killing off established relations.” He
shook his head with something like real mourning. “Your words right, Snap?”
“Will there be anything else, Joss?”
Snappy’s mellow tone suggested an urgency to be gone for more pressing
activities.
“No, this is great, truly.”
Snappy’s role didn’t surprise me much, Joss
incapable of tossing together a half-decent sentence. The term “season’s
mark”disturbed me, however, suggesting
as it did business and politics by other means, but with an appetite in waiting
I remained indulgent, the morning’s repast already overpowering four of my five
senses.
“Delicious.”Emelda’s tone softened to a purr, as though not be overheard by
Snappy, who, anyway, was already leaving the room.
Joss, I sensed, overplayed the subject of
the move, masking unease. Maybe he’d discovered Tijuana chits a little too hot,
a little too spicy, for his blood, but I wasn’t about to call it. To tell the
truth, I’d never doubted for a moment that Hackingshaw played his role through
a smoke-and-mirror type of gratuity and an unspecified, improbable line of
descent. Hackingshaw the second, we knew – all the old party out of Porterville
– was a card sharp at best, Hackingshaw the first, a small town quack, out of
Albany. What Joss had going for him, however, was Snappy, old family retainer,
talented investor and filibuster, who’d rascaled widow Hackingshaw, and -
apparently consumed with old fashioned Catholic guilt - brought up the second,
and now looked toward the fortunes of the third in the joint role of patriarch
and valet. As for Joss’s intentions, for sure they were well-meaning enough,
and he’d always been quick to takeadvice if it gave him advantage – except, unfortunately, during those
three years I’d been press-ganged into his general tutelage (sober then!) as a
favour for a number of social introductions that, in spite of it all hadn’t
amounted to very much - but I was aware, even from the comfort zone of society
newsprint and gossip leaders,how he’d
never been afraid to tread a few toes to meet his nut and maintain the
deception of a privileged legacy. At one point, he may even have attempted,
foolishly I might add, to influence his grade through bribery – but I have to
admit to having been too strung out at that late hour of his career, and mine,
to recall the full facts. A misunderstanding perhaps; with my own reputation on
the line, I had always chosen to give Joss the benefit of the doubt.
In Emelda, at least, it appeared Joss’s
backhand deals had won out. They had met at one of those society shindigs, so
lavish and decadent a charity has virtually to be invented just so that it
might be allowed to exist. Emelda, just such a society belle, its reason d’tat.
Everyone thought and said so, Joss bragged, as though needing to explain his
interest in some rare and exquisitely cut jewel. She had arrived, I was
intrigued to discover, hanging off the arm of the aforementioned Robert Aimes,
an investment tycoon out to cause ripples “over the development of a tidy sum
of land off Carlsband”, into which Snappy had allotted considerable share
value. Joss appeared to hang onto her every word, and her suggestion of moving
back north had him nodding in supplication.
“’Course, I’ll need to clear it with Snappy,
he confided later,but I’m sure he’ll find it the right thing to do.”
The murder of
Aimes had made several column inches in the local press, but its shelf life –
having been exceeded only the day after by a front spread of a dog rescued from
an overturned schooner – suggested some degree of professionalism. No one
doubted it was murder – a garrotte, in fact – but his neat disposal appeared to
make his death somewhat incidental to the brooding sky under which he was
discovered. Joss would add no colour to the local politics that had taken
investment out of the deal, but only infer that the measure of the possible was
greatly increased by Aims’s apparent misfortune, one that had trailed off
without, it appeared, any conclusion. “I don’t know where Aimes was getting his
information,” Joss said finally. “Let’s just say it was annoying to everyone.
I’m not gonna sit here and tell you I’m sorry that he went the way he did.”
II
The occasion of
our meeting – unmarred by the events of the season that preceded it – and from
which Emelda Elster (being the full name of my libidinous retinue) had
apparently recovered – was given over happily to the speculation of an autumn
wedding. The couple, neither hot nor cold, wet nor dry, but as blended as a
darkly flavoured Rothko, appeared emmently suited to an institution for which I
had always had a secret aversion, but I managed to wish them well, and meant it
all too sincerely. My stay had extended from a week into the second when I
noticed some tension between Joss and Snappy, however. Snappy, it appeared, had
suddenly taken a strong dislike to Emelda, following what I detected as having
been an initial warmth, such that the contrast between the two states
manifested itself as evidence of jealousy. This period - never fully explained
- was brief, however; three days later, Snappy, aged eighty, completing prayers
equal to the beads on his rosary, died of natural causes.
III
Some find it strange that I
was never a part of the beat generation upon which I presently lecture. Over
the next term, several students approached me in the hope of ascertaining some
personal insight only to leave disappointed. Now, it disappoints me. At the
time, it did no such thing. The road have never been a place where I’ve felt
even remotely comfortable. I’ve always carried the sensibility of the mall; a
deeply imbedded feeling for the emotional infantilism of the phantasmagorical,
the sweepingly melodramatic redolent of the cloying sentimentality of this
region, over the existential Sartrean posturing of an authentic existence. It’s
a dream of white, pristine surface culture, a soft dream of cream which has led
me to think that all emotion is, at heart, merely discursive – a series of
conventional appertisers serving as a prelude to some ugly flirtation.
I hear Lowell telling me how I’m staring out from the front-line
of defeat; indulging in the “ill-spirited sob” of my commodified soul. I would
only ask why the epithet “Middle-class life-style individualist” should apply
more to me than the self-reflexive Beat artist of spontaneity whose consumptive
unhooking bred a fresh round of investment? Aesthetic enterprise, afterall, is
built upon the obviscation of poverty from the surrounding aureole of wealthy
urban centres with their firewall towers and glass arcadias of consumerism.
While we lucky few simulacrate (sic) our individualism, what choice the mother
with no money to buy herself, no style but a mere life (the new subsistence) to
lead. (Yet aesthete I remain, disappointed by my own lack of geniune remorse. )
In truth, and in short, I have never been comfortable with the
raw state in which many of my students come to me with their problems.
Certainly, I will listen with an ear of sympathy, and will pour innumerable
cups of tea, but all the while dragging the conversation as quickly as it will
allow to the topic of the next essay. I do not feel this to be an unkind
gesture: I have no expertise in counselling and have always been of the mind
that perspective from me would do more harm than good. In fact, I know so. In
fact, I’ve conducted my own experiment – classroom-based – through thirty
years.
You may imagine, then, how it was with a real sense of foreboding
I received a second correspondence from Joss, requesting such a service. He
refused to go down to the line, however, saving the details for the bierkeller
conference on campus the next day. The matter arose thus over warm and frothy
pitchers of boname,across rooms full
of merry enthusiasts, cultivating a certain length of beard growth. Emelda –
several slammers sweet was brought out with a heart full of misery – their life
together explicated in all its lurid and bizarre detail.
It appeared, in short, that she was haunted – no, actually
possessed (“posseshed”, Joss slurred at me) – by the spirit of Snappy. I
stifled whatever was threatening to come out of me. Listenng, the way Dean
-dispairing, sad, Dean – listened to Sal in New York: “Can’t talk no-more…But
Listen!” Not two weeks after the funeral, the Hackingshaws-to-be had sold up
and moved out to Chula Vista, setting up what it was hoped would be a sedentary
life weekending the beach. Everything up begonias, according to Joss, with
wedding invitations sent and received by fifty of his closest financiers,
relatives and one or two friends (strange, I thought, he should include me in
the number, then thought that maybe he had me down in the former
category…anyway, there it sat on a desk of red bills and late excuses). But
then, as Joss laid it down, something arrived on a cold north-east
current,experienced first in an attitude of fierce discomfort – episodes of
sleeping-walking and Swedish angst, as dark and as bitter as chocolate left to
boil and burn. Then, as occasion would allow, in the garden one bright day in
February, Emelda holding a butcher’s knife, struggling against a malevolent
energy fighting for control over her, willing her to an act of “horrible
bittrial.” Joss, two slammers beyond irony, took me to the place of the
unexplainable and left me there: Snappy, behind the soft green eyes of his
girl, a small, spiteful, hateful figure now, repo to some dark debt unpaid for.
Only finally, with courage, had she managed to wrest back control, force the
knife from her own hand, and collapse weeping into the tall wet grass. (Yes,
Joss even brought me the “tall wet grass.” )
“This is incredible,” I said, “For a start I
remember how protective Snappy was to your interests.”
“I only know what I saw,” Joss concluded
miserably. He buried his blotched, tear-stained face in his hands. “He came to
me and began thowing around these wild accusations.”
“Accusations; of what?”
“He said Em-” but he interupted himself.
“But what does it matter? They were absurd. I was aware that Em’ was engaged to
Aimes before I met her.”
“Snappy thought she might be out for-”
“He couldn’t see how it tormented her. She
would tell me how his eyes would burrow down into her mind…couldn’t sleep…”
“Did Snappy kill Aimes?”
Joss rubbed his eyes. He was silent for a
moment, pensive, before looking me directly in the eye. “What I don’t
understand…what you have to understand is, Snappy always had my interests at
heart…till now.”
The longer I heard Joss speak, the more
convinced I became that he hadn’t come to listen. He already knew what he
planned to do and my point was not to convince him otherwise, butsimply to bear witness. I had been there for
his schooling, for his transition to adulthood, and now the fireworks, the
metaphysics, all that. Over the years, I had somehow become the totem for his
self belief and the truth was that he wanted me along for the ride.
IV
It might have
formed a part of the Byzantine sub-legislature making up a macabre pre-nup.
Suits gathered outside the prosconium ofSt Ignatias onan overcast wet
afternoon in late March. And yet no agreement to matrimony would have included
this. Emelda, strapped to a simple chair, its back to the altar, a priest
standing over her in the pose of his forefathers, dispensing justice from a
bible balanced precariously over the calloused white nuckles of his gun hand.
My eyeballs felt dirty. What was I doing here? Playing voyeur to a destressed
girl young enough to be one of my students, certainly. Guilty party in the
patronage of some Rabeliasian spectacle: absurd indice to a slip-stream history
of excess – Borough’s shooting his wife, Lucien Carr stabbing David Kammer to
death, Ginsberg committed to Columbia-Presbyterian psych. ward, my own scrappy
divorces. At some stage over that seven second reverie, indice became
coagulent, gaining the clotted weight of a trope, the silent unspent moment of
a missed beat inviting decision. Intention to intervention. No straightforward
decision, this. I knew the kind of people Hackingshaw carried. Nevertheless
there I was ready to act.
Then…then, what? Hesitaton? Perhaps merely a
subtle change of light (from what source impossible to tell); an egg-shaped
burr of cuff and cry, Emelda thrown into the funk of countless daytime Mexican
soaps, the restless inner landscape of being Beat, straining against the cut
and camp of leather bondage, slicing her wrists, oblivious to the shimmering
blue light rising up into the arches, gathering into a form recognizable as
Snappy as once I saw him – coming down to breakfast, cleaning the pool of a
Saturday- hair combed into the fringe
of its previous occupant, dapper in housecoat; all the things with which he’d
engineered his life, belying both harried expression and tortured limb. Some
current of preternatural energy appeared to have extracted him fromthe soap princess for the arch from which
we’d entered. Some energy, or some dope: the coffee that morning (had Joss
suspected opposition?) No less than its appearance, the end confounded: like an
expected high note of a well known concerto that isn’t performed; all
disruption ended abruptly, Snappy, the light, the litergy, the cries swallowed
by a mouth of dark silence.
What I recall
most singularly of Emelda is her walk along the veranda that first day. Like
the cream the cat lapped up: smooth, and rich in white satin, yet gone already,
somehow. As though I’d missed a scene. That restlessness about her, a trick of
the light on a filmy surface. A certain sourness: something removed. Somewhere,
a cat purred, satisfied, content. But it wasn’t here, I remembered thinking. It
wasn’t in this house.
My
students have begun to seek me out, I’m guessing having detecteda change in my attitude. Perhaps the
experience of recent days having suggested that even our worst moments are
strangely redeemable: the bespoke graveyard of inappropriately appropriated
scientism having forced us to abandon the world for our inner selves doubles
back upon itself, to interupt the sovereignty of being Beat, to begin to doubt
my own doubt, my unconditional faith in the wasteland of all faiths. At the
very least, I now dispense bad advise and leave my students with the lethal
consequences of taking it.In this
sense at least, the spirit of Snappy has been of some value, forcing a
concentration on my own lack of conviction. To recognize the absurdity in
increasingly sensuous observation without the pragmatic means to change that
vision. Melancholy shimmers, is momentarily replaced by resolution and history
begins once more.
V
History began
again for Joss Hackingshaw, the third, in the autumn, four months after the
wedding. It carried for thirty brief seconds, then just as abruptly came to a
halt. By then, I was stone sober (once more, never again), yet surprisingly not
the least surprised by events. During the present vacation, I took myself down
to Nebraska, not for truth, you understand, but to poke. When I arrived, I
sought out the house (there were begonias!) and the local newspaper to catch up
on the details of what had happened. Little had been added to the intial
by-line: only those who control the economy control time, and without Snappy’s
guiding influence Joss had diminished somewhat in stature and virtigous
estimation. All the clocks moved along just fine without him. All with the
exception of the flat logo of The Times, permanently set at 4 o’clock, eerily
recalling the time of Joss’s murder.
The column read as follows: Joss
Hackingshaw, the third, murdered. It continued, On Tuesday morning, at 4am,
Joss Hackingshaw, wealthy socialite and tycoon of the Hackingshaw fortune,
encountered a notorious end when he was found stabbed to death, in a violent
and frenzied attack whilst workingin
his study. Neighbours are reported to have heard peals of laughter from his
young wife EmeldaHackingshaw nee
Elster, once fiance to celebrated investor and philanthropist,Robert Aimes, amid cries of “free! Finally
free!.” Police are investigating the possibility of a premeditated attack from
his wife who may blame Hackinshaw for some as yet unspecified role he may have
played in thedeath of Aimes.
“I think everyone is aware of Hackingshaw’s
sullied past, and his connections to the underworld.” Detective Mike Marshawe,
presiding over the case,was reported
as saying, “The only mystery that remains, is why ittook so long for someone to act uponit.”
Steven Dorrell is a MA student in Critical and Cultural Studies. He has written
several stories and a play performed at the Oxford Playhouse. He is presently working on
his first novel.
Email: Steven Dorrell
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