Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams

Author:Tennessee Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780811225625
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2016-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

I stop for a while for breath and I look down at BON AMI.

What is, or rather, what was BON AMI? I know it means good friend in French and I remember that when I inquired of Lance soon after I started using it as a work-desk, he said, “Oh, shit, it’s some old product that’s off the market, I reckon, like you and me are gonna be off it someday.” That wasn’t all he said. Lance resented BON AMI because he liked his sleep and he claimed the eyeless black domino which was given him by Moise in the days when she could provide such things before she ran out of such things to provide. He claimed that it pressed on his eyeballs and blurred his eyesight. Of course this wasn’t the problem. His eyeballs were not the balls to which the domino and BON AMI were an offense. Lance resented BON AMI and the black domino because they interfered with or delayed the rituals of love which were to him an essential for a night’s sleep.

“Git your ass off BON AMI and into bed, baby!”

“My ass is not on BON AMI.”

“Don’t talk back to me, Thelma.”

“If you call me Thelma again, I’ll”

“You’ll what?”

“I’ll call you”

“You know better’n to call me nothing with this royal straight pointed at you and you with a single pair.”

The talk would go like that, but I am an obstinate writer, as obstinate as unsuccessful, and if Lance persisted in trying to interrupt me when I was hotter for a Blue Jay than even for him, I would run downstairs and continue on the Blue Jay in the Pier Ten bar which used to be across the street from the warehouse but which exists no longer.

(I remember one summer night I did this, and Lance followed me to Pier Ten, he came looming in the door, his bare skin above pants level shining like brass which had just been polished, and everybody looked at him while he looked at me, pretending to be unaware of his entrance. He sat down at the bar and began to talk in ferocious language about me.

“See that prick at the table that thinks he’s a writer?”

The barman would utter a low-pitched “Aw” and a drunk or two would sometimes turn to look at me at the table and make remarks about me which once incited me to throw a beer mug toward them, but usually, no, the barman would tip them off, if they didn’t already know that Lance and I were dangerous to discuss. Lance would go on, though.

“Thinks he’s got a literary career but I happen to know that his career is what he is sitting on whenever he’s not standing or lying down.”

Well, I wasn’t afraid of Lance even when he talked in public in this degrading manner. Of course it did stop me writing anything but one phrase over and over in the Blue Jay, and that phrase was “fucking son of a bitch.”

Love talk is often rough.

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