Crazy Cock by Henry Miller Page A

clam. He was like a cipher which they erased or not, as they pleased. If he got in the way they bumped him, set him going like a pendulum. A pendulum! Something that ticked off their comings and goings. Every day the situation grew more and more cockeyed. Especially when Hildred was around. She would commence in the middle of a sentence or ask him to set the alarm when he picked up a book. She wanted them to argue with her, to gush, to rhapsodize. She wanted to sparkle, notto chew. Words . . . words . . . words. . . . She gobbled them up, spewed them out again, added them up, juggled them, nursed them along, carried them to bed and put them under the pillow like soiled pajamas, slept on them, snored over them. Words. . . . When every other memory of her had fled there would remain—HER WORDS.
    H OURS AHEAD of time, like a clock that’s been advanced, he would commence to remind them that it was time to go to bed. Toward five o’clock, when the trucks began to rumble by and there came the familiar clip-clop of the milkman’s horse, they would at last make preparations to retire. And then, when he had gotten into bed with Hildred, just as they were dozing off, Vanya would start prowling through the hall, muttering to herself. Sometimes she would knock at their door and get Hildred out of bed in order to hold a whispered conversation in the zenana.
    And what did they talk about in there? Always the same rigmarole: Vanya was morbid. . . . Vanya had received bad news from home. . . . Vanya had been thinking again about the insane asylum. Sometimes it was nothing more than a fit of depression due to a bad start she had made with a canvas.
    â€œLook here,” he said one night, as they lay fondling each other, “am I never to have an evening with you alone? Must I always share you with her?”
    â€œBut you’re not
sharing
me,” said Hildred, cuddling up to him affectionately.
    He suggested that they go somewhere together the next evening, to which Hildred immediately replied that it was out of the question. For one thing, she couldn’t afford to take a night off.
    â€œBut when you’re through . . . ?”
    â€œI’ll see,” said Hildred. “But not tomorrow, at any rate. Tomorrow I have an appointment with someone.”
    These appointments meant money. No way of rebutting that argument.
    Oddly enough, the appointment didn’t prove important enough to keep. Something else, something of a more important nature, had intervened. Quite spontaneously . . . quite unexpectedly, of course. One of her old customers had dropped in at the dinner hour and offered Hildred a couple of theater tickets which would otherwise have gone to waste.
    It was remarkable, moreover, how everyone remembered to bring her violets. At the appropriate moment he brought up the subject of the violets. But he was mistaken again—as he usually was. The man hadn’t brought her the violets—he hadn’t even taken her to the theater. It was Vanya who went to the theater with her.
    â€œBut who gave you the violets then?”
    â€œSomeone else.”
    â€œTo be sure, but who?”
    â€œWho? Why, the Spaniard.” She said it as if he knew all about the Spaniard, whereas he had never heard of him before. But he must have been mistaken about that, too, because most of the time he didn’t pay any attention to what she was telling him.
    The story of the violets had an almost plausible ring. There were always plenty of boobs dropping in to hand her flowers. One day, however, after an unusual to-do about the subject (it was one of his bad habits to open up old sores), he decided to have a little chat with the florist whose shop was just around the corner from the Caravan.
    It was a Greek who ran the shop. Tony Bring dropped inand asked quite casually to see the violets which the two young ladies usually ordered of him. The Greek shrugged his shoulders. Which two young ladies? There