Part 63 (1/2)
”Have I lost you?”
A desolation trailed in her eye.
”Then I'll look for you,” he said, going for her chair. He stared heavily down at her. ”Dark visage, black looks-next time I bring a lantern. Glimmer of the whites. She emerges. She was obscured by a dark brown study. Lo, here she is.”
”Enoch, stop it, just cut it out, I'm nowhere. Nowhere. Don't tell me to accept it, I can't accept it. Everything's spoiled. One G.o.dd.a.m.n little revolution and that's it They might just as well have shot me in the public square.”
”It happens to have been a nice clean little coup-they made a clean job of it, you know how you like clean jobs. n.o.body blown up. Not a pinp.r.i.c.k. Instead of sentries around the palace they posted cameramen. The new General is even more photogenic than the old one-wears a corset.”
”Fine. Everyone's laughing. A musical comedy and you're the star. Fallen star. What do you want me to do, dance and sing with timbrels?”
”Tell you what-stealthily but boldly get out your timbrels and tomorrow I'll suffer me to be taken to any nightclub in New York. Capitalize on the current notoriety.”
”I'm not the Two-Hour Amba.s.sador,” she sneered. ”They won't notice me. Enoch, don't try to buy me off. You can buy off a tragedy, but you can never in a hundred years buy off a comedy. A comedy lasts. -Is that what we're going to do from now on, reel from place to place?”
”Unless you prefer a stately tread. Dissipation,” he yielded, ”the first of the cardinal-”
But she jumped up and furiously smothered his mouth with her palm. He licked her loose. ”What do you think?” he asked me. ”Was I La Rochefoucauld twenty-five years ago? Or more likely Oscar Wilde?”
”Oscar Wilde is funny,” my mother said.
”And La Rochefoucauld is wise.”
My mother said coldly, ”'I can resist everything but temptation.' Now that's funny. You don't have anything like that. You don't have anything smart-aleck, in those aphorisms you're one-hundred-per-cent solemn.”
”Bp more generous. Fifty-per-cent. Posterity knows them as Vand's Halforisms. Not that they're only half true, but he believed in them only half his life. In the second half of his life he abandoned trying to live by formula.”
”You mean now,” my mother said ominously.
”Now,” he agreed.
”How are you going to live now?”
”By always remembering to keep breathing.”
”Dead!” she yelled. ”A formula for being dead! Dead dead dead! Dead and you don't care, dead and you don't know it-”
”I didn't overthrow the regime.”-He was all reasonableness. ”Allegra,” he said.
”You wanted to go high!”
”Not for the sensation of height.”
”Once you said you'd even be President if they let you-”
”Not in order to be President but to see the sameness of the world. The world is the same seen from all sides. Now there's a machine in the sky to prove it.”
”Gangsters. The world is not the same. It's not the same for those gangsters and for us, and it's not the same for an Amba.s.sador and for”-her head darted down-”a n.o.body.”
”The same,” he said. ”Also for the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the mind-gifted and the mind-deprived-”
”All right, then for the good and the evil too. Enoch,” she called, as though he were far, ”I thought you wanted to do good!”
”Oh no no no no. Not to do good. How can we know which act is good and which not? By the consequences? Who can tell which are the true consequences? Who can live long enough to know?”
She said nothing.
”How does she take it?” he asked. And to me: ”Narcissus always vanishes by way of water.”
My mother drew vengefully back. ”Nick you mean? You heard about Nick? You heard,” she said; her lip hung.
”So has every living breathing politician not actually unconscious. Allegra,” he told her, ”it's out.”
”Out? What's out?” Her half-sleeves came stiff against her like black stumps.
”Since late this afternoon every member of the United States Congress knows that but for the grace of the new General's gun we might have sent off a Caesar whose wife was once-upon-a-time not above suspicion. Every member of the Senate knows it. Every member of the Supreme Court knows it The President knows it the public knows it even the Vice-President's got wind of it-”
”It's out?” my mother cried.
”The very Senator William is privy to-my special pleader, mind you-hissed it into my left ear. Depositing carcinogenic fumes therein and causing me to miss two planes out.” To me he said, ”To William's pal the Senator you're known as a love-child. A pretty phrase. He does better by you than William.”
”Now look,” my mother began. And almost failed. ”I'll tell you who did it Nick did it right out of the devil's mouth-”
”The devil sticks to the retinas only of those he beguiles.”
And I: ”Not Nick, not Nick,” but it was to Enoch I addressed this.
She blasted me. ”Idiot! Who else let it out? Who!”