Crazy Cock (1991) by Henry Miller

Author:Henry Miller [Miller, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classic, Adult, Fiction
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3

EVERY MORNING a calliope went by in a covered wagon. Its passage filled the house with salacious sounds. And every morning, driven frantic by the monotony of its plaint, Vanya leaped out of bed with an oath and fled through the rooms like a water buffalo in pursuit of a rainbow. Hildred, tossing in her sleep, would groan or mutter broken phrases as she dreamed of purple hippogriffs falling through the roof. Each morning Tony Bring bent over her and kissed her while she twitched and tossed, and always as he studied the grave, morbid beauty of her face hope came to him anew. How could it be that this enchantress who the night before had called him a god would awake to torture him afresh?

At breakfast Vanya usually chewed the cuds of her poetry. This breakfasting was a piece of extravagance in more ways than one. Instead of the gratuitous meal which the Caravan offered they chose to sit in the candlelight at home and begin the day with a brisk intellectual discussion. While Tony Bring squeezed oranges and kept an eye on the oil stove, so that Hildred’s bacon wouldn’t get too crisp, poems were shuffled back and forth. . . . Leave me a simple thing like the moon, it is not complicated. . . . She lay on the swaying sands whispering to her brother of death. . . . The lines were interspersed with parenthetical references to the coffee, or the price of strawberries.

Usually they left the house in an exuberant mood, as if they were setting forth on a holiday trip. But this morning, for some reason or other, Vanya showed no inclination to go. She talked about doing some real work for a change, meaning thereby a portrait of Tony Bring which she had started a few days back. Hildred, usually so eager and ready to gratify Vanya’s whims, displayed a strange indifference, a hostility, one might almost call it, to this suggestion. And when Vanya added, “Jesus, it’s stupid waiting on people all day . . . I’m not a horse,” Hildred rose abruptly and slipping on her cape said: “Very well, amuse yourself; I’ll do the dirty work.” At the door she turned around and flung out: “It’s fortunate I haven’t any creative urge to distract me from my responsibilities—else I don’t know what would become of you, the two of you.”

“I didn’t think she would take it like that,” said Vanya, as the door slammed behind Hildred. And then impulsively: “Have you any change, Tony? I’ll have to take a taxi.”

But when she rushed out of the house a moment later she espied Hildred walking leisurely toward the subway. “I’m so glad you waited for me,” she cried breathlessly as she caught up with her.

“I wasn’t waiting at all,” said Hildred. “I have a pain in my side, I can’t walk any faster.”

“Let’s take a cab,” said Vanya. It was another way of saying “Forgive me.”

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