[24] Far can a single impulse extend

Our second week returned, the Friday after dinner, Paul would be playing with the little guy at home, but instead we’re going out farther than the Singing Swan (where we all can be seen every two nights or three). I need to pretend everything is normal. I mean, pretend in front of more people than we’ve seen yet. So we pack up the tiny one in his sleeping robe and blankets and little scarf and little wool hat and socks, which takes half an hour, the way he rejects our advances, and I slip the Duclos tin in my coat pocket, because I’m going to break the seal tonight, and we go by fiaker to the SilverDome for Kopsky’s opening (Paul will be two more cranks), and later across the square between the minarets to the Marzipan, where the afterparty always develops. Nothing’s organized about that – it’s more that of course every insider at the Dome is going to end up there all at once tonight. When there isn’t a table free for us, the owner steers some strangers’ party out of the tarok room and brings me seven pillows for us to hold court on the long couch.

This is our first appearance since Johnny’s Big Day, and all we expected is there: a crowd of publishers (but hardly any journalists), a gang of Roller’s set painters from the Court Opera, sundry dealers from the Turkish Circus, and this room, which is a clubhouse for the Dome crowd from across the way. It’s always the same people, and how far can a single impulse extend? They clap and jeer when we enter, the way they do, to see if we still take it the right way. I don’t know why (though I can guess), but the first time Paul brought me here seven years ago, they all played together the same joke to him: a deliberate howl of mockery, a standing ovation of catcalls and whistles that Paul acknowledged with a straight face and that click bow of moneyed entitlement he’ll never scrub off or forget how to summon. This isn’t a crowd, it’s a pack – big difference. It’s a small world, not The Big One. A place like this, people come to stay in training for The Big One, to learn new tricks to play on the powers and to practise old ones on the authorities. Tonight, Paul raises Johnny over his head like a trophy and they unleash the lad one for his own so that he wakes up and howls back at them. The boldest artists attack the pillars of society, Johnny, they tremble before no enemies. Then someone gives up the long couch to us, many thanks kind sirs, it pleases us very much.

Gus rarely comes here – too far from his studio, and he prefers the Berliner in the Eighth Quarter – but Gus’s Dome friends are here. The ones he sends, you can always tell who they are by how they watch you enter and the way their whispers in ears reach across the room. Around the people here, Paul can stop being the only exotic beast, and he can talk to them in exotic beast language, about money and wall space and who’s entering the market to buy or sell.

Yellow table lanterns lick the crimson walls and soften the chairs and tables. The air is liquid with smoke and wine fumes and the fug of paint-stained clothes. The room, when I think of it, smells like Paul, like the crucible he formed his life within, and Johnny in my lap is bubbling and drooling while I watch the circles people make towards us and wait for the handful of women here to take turns wanting to hold him. People pay court to the new mommy, and the handful of wives hover to giggle and coo, but Johnny doesn’t pay any attention to them. All he wants to look at these days is me, and there’s no way for me to hide from that. What does he know? What is he telling me? I flash the Duclos tin and people clap hands and go ooooh … Paul breaks the seal for me with the claspknife he’s always got and twists the lid, and people crowd around, the waiter bringing each comer a semidemitasse spoon. I take the first turn and wait for the crowd to thin a little so that I can shiver and soar in the arctic glow of peace. When materialist beliefs are shaken, man turns his gaze inward. Art is where the spiritual revolution is first felt. There’s never any music at the Marzipan – just a roar of arguments over small things, and sometimes a shoving match. Hardly any fistfights here. Show the baby. Someone’s wife wants to hold him, and I let her go off with him a few steps. So that’s what it feels like to be un-Johnnied for a moment. I wonder if that’s the first thing I ever forgot. Johnny enjoys all of it for the first half-hour, and when it starts to wear him out, the owner’s wife hands me the key to kitchen pantry, which is soon full of people following Duclos and his brain sugar.

I sit in a soft chair they bring in for me surrounded by stove and body warmth and baking smells with a glass of medium-red in my hand and take visitors two or three at a time. When Paul comes in to visit me, he’s broken his rule about not drinking during the week – good for him, rule breaking is the point here, and I’ve reminded him well – and that means one bottle of red. Not Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay, but a near miss to hand. Paul doesn’t let himself get drunk during his colour days – direct to the hands – but he lets it relax him when the night calls for it, and relaxing releases him from his working energy and changes how he looks at people. They stop being animated things and he can talk to them without always having to plunder them. One bottle of anything is always enough for him. Paul never has to play himself at the Marzipan – he is himself. He watches me get powdered and smiles at his shared memories of our madder days. The stuff lifts the world off your shoulders, I know well enough, and simplifies it in a good way. Johnny, over there in the corner in a waitress’s arms, cackles to me as if he and I know something the rest don’t, but what is it?

Art must destabilize vision so that people are compelled to imagine alternatives. Okay, Emma loves to watch me move. The way she looks at me now, with that hopeful heat in her eyes, I don’t mind that she loves it. Big bones – that’s what she likes. She still loves to trace them on my skin some nights, from head to toe. Sometimes she used to mimic the way I walk, to crack up visitors. She’d take these long, heavy strides, chin strutting, arms akimbo, legs bowed a little, feet slapping flat on the ground. Will she ever do that again? My hands – she plays with those, too, like she is tonight. She can never get over their size. All right, so big you think he won’t know what to do with them, but then he picks up something, or touches me, and the energy pours through out his fingertips, every ounce of it, and his soul after that. Same with his eyes – when he can relax from the studio, he makes himself see into things, into you, with this deliberate gentle power. Okay, I’m happy tonight, and you can see the relief on her face, that it’s what she wanted to see in me. Of course I can be happy with you, Emma – your worry? Wasn’t reminding yourself the point tonight? I collapse beside her on the upstairs sofa so that she almost sails through the air. Over there, the waitress has passed the little guy to one of the cooks, who wants to offer him a spoonlet of jam and looks our way for permission. I point to Emma – her call. She looks up. Johnny spreads his arms and legs towards her like a flying squirrel just as Emma is prying open the Duclos tin again. Just then she looks up and glares for a moment, then drops the tin and howls –

‘Release … that … CHILD!!!’

The room crashes silent except for Johnny, who’s gurgling at the spoon, trying to pry it from the cook’s hand with the fingers of his right, his left hand tucked into his sweater.

‘Here, here, HERE! Bring him to me! Oh, Johnny,’ she gasps when she’s holding him again. ‘You really do love me, don’t you? And so soon! You! That spoon, bring it now!’

The room has fallen silent to stare. The cook tiptoes up and hands the spoon to me, and me to Emma. With one hand, she holds Johnny sitting up in her lap. With the other, she dangles the spoon in front of him. Johnny stares entranced for a moment, leans his head to the left while she holds her breath, then leans his body towards the spoon, pressing his left hand to his sweater and reaching with the other.

‘Oh Johnny … Your momma teach you that? Here, have some.’ And she releases the spoon to him. He’s blowing bubbles with his dinner, and kicking her thigh with his little sock feet, and smearing the jam on his forehead with the spoon clutched tight in his walnut-sized right fist.

‘Oh, Johnny, that’s right. Look at momma. Who taught you that, little Johnny? Was it your mother, hmnh?’