Knot made to break part.., p.2
Fiction Complete, page 2
“Two quarts,” Henry finished for him. He did the requested pouring and wrapping; then, unexpectedly, he stood before Denis and addressed him apologetically but earnestly.
“I know I’m way out of line asking you this, Mr. Alaric, but just what in hell do you do with all that whiskey you buy here?”
“Huh?”
“Do you realize that, with the exception of my day off on Thursday, and Sunday, I’ve sold you two quarts of rye every day now for almost two years?”
“I drink it. Gotta drink a lot. Gives me lots of imagination. Makes my sketches unique. Women fight over those dizzy designs I get out of a bottle. Women’s hats. You can’t design them when you’re sober.”
“You mean you sort of dream them and then draw them?”
“Huh-uh. I live on Bendix Boulevard. see? Lots of strollers out in the afternoon. Well, I look out the window and spot a woman. Then I think hats, see? I think how funny she’d look in something—something, oh, like this, for instance.” Denis stroked a paper napkin with a soft pencil and held it up to Henry. “Now imagine two hundred pounds of Mrs. Oscar van Ritz Bitz under that number.” For a moment the recent disturbing memory faded in his mind, and Denis vented a bellow of laughter that echoed hollowly through the cocktail room, which was vacantly poised for the cocktail-hour rush. Then he looked at the drawing again, and he dropped the laugh right in its middle. “Say, that’s all right. Eisenwehr will like that one.” He tucked the napkin into his pocket.
“I see,” said Henry solemnly. “But don’t you ever . . . ever”—he twiddled his fingers vaguely—“see things, little men and elephants and that sort of thing?”
Abruptly Denis riveted a scowl on the bald barkeeper. “What do you know about little men?”
“Well, I know this much. They make us lose a dozen good customers every year. Look at Clifford Dugan. He only did it to one quart a day. For six months. They poured him into a coffin last week. He’d been seeing the little fellows.”
Denis swallowed his drink at this tale of weakness, and his spirit of braggadocio returned. Missing the pertinence of the conversation he clanked the sack under his arm. and chuckled off: “I got capacity.”
AT BREAKFAST in the adjoining buffet, Denis suddenly remembered the three overdue sketches for Mendlestein. They’d have to be redrawn and delivered quickly or he’d be swapping repartee with the landlord. Whatever other moral repercussions Mr. Alaric’s tippling had, one of them was not the usual irresponsibility which blackens the name of an habitual drinker.
Gingerly he let himself into his seventh-floor studio. In his absence the chambermaid had repaired as best she could the ravages of the past twenty-four hours.
A qualm clutched his heart. Suppose she had destroyed the sketches? They were all messed up, and she might, think—But no, Mary had more brains than that.
He found the drawing table in order, the board slanted in place, a new stack of paper at its side and—no whiskey-stained sketches.
“Blast that maid! I told her never to throw out so much as a scrap of toilet paper if it had drawing on it!”
His eyes swept the room unsuccessfully, then came to rest on the third drawer of the bureau. It had been closed, but now it was slowly sliding open. A diminutive, black pompadour popped over the edge, followed by a familiar little face with very large, green eyes and a pendulous nose. “Oh, it’s you!” the little man said defiantly, patting the outside of the drawer with an air of proprietorship.
He continued: “I hope you’re not looking for those stupid sketches. I took the slight liberty of removing them.”
Denis shuddered, uncorked a bottle and drew a long swiggle which made him gag slightly. “Don’t be silly. Pixies don’t do things. They’re just a by-product.”
There was a violent rustle of starched collars, and in a wink the tiny sartorial wonder confronted Denis with an anger that reached just above his kneecap. “Sir, you underestimate me.” With that he delivered to the bachelor’s shin a needlelike kick that haunted him for days. Then he reached back in the drawer, drew out the three sketches which he held up momentarily for identification, and deliberately tore them to pieces. Small pieces.
At this auspicious moment, when Denis was contemplating giving in to the hallucination to the extent of pulverizing this obnoxious mite, the door chimes ging-gonged.
At the top of his strained voice Denis hollered: “Come in!” The door swung in far enough to allow the maid to insert her head of straggly hair and adoring eyes. “I forgot to leave a note, Mr. Alaric, so I thought I’d better come back and tell you that I pressed your sketches between two sheets of blotting paper, and I put them in your shirt drawer so they wouldn’t be misplaced.”
“Oh!” Seeing the strips on the floor she almost sobbed. “Oh, you’ve gone and torn up them beautiful hat drawings. Oh, whydja do it, Mr. Alaric?”
Denis looked at the scraps, at the little man, who stood directly between them and the girl, then scrutinized the maid for six heartbeats.
“Why did I do it? Ah. Oh, yes. They were just copies, Mary. Mustn’t have extra copies of exclusive designs kicking around loose, you know. Good of you to look out for them, anyway. Thank you.” Mary sighed and withdrew.
HOLDING a bottle between his knees on the edge of the bed, Denis shrugged off his suit coat and jerked his tie until it dangled loosely. “So you are an honest-to-Pete pixy? She couldn’t have seen you or she would have said something.”
“Of course, she can’t see me. You are my sponsor, not her,” the little fellow explained, moving slowly toward the bed. “And what’s more, I’m now a pixy of the First Order.”
“What’s that?”
“That means I’m here to stay. You can drink as much or as little as you want, and I won’t go away.”
“Not even if I—” Denis made as if to heave the whiskey out the window.
“Nope. Not even if you quit drinking altogether.” He took another microscopic step, shaking his head vigorously. “You see, I’m not like other ‘little men.’ I’m smart. You conceived me over a year ago, but did I pop out right away and show myself? No, sir. Almost all Second Order pixies do that, and where does it get them? Either their sponsors drink themselves to death on the spot or they swear off for keeps. And during that first year Second Order pixies are completely dependent on their sponsors. Either way is fatal.
“So, what do I do? I lay in the weeds—”
“My shirt drawer,” Denis corrected crossly.
“—and keep out of sight until I graduate. Now I’m here to stay.”
Denis listened gravely and thought this over. He perceived a peculiarly logical note in the pixy’s harangue. The fact that his unusual capacity for liquor had forestalled the usual symptoms of alcoholism for so long lent credence to the theory that once it did catch up with him it might persist with great tenacity.
“Get ahold of yourself, Denis,” he told himself. “This is nothing supernatural. It’s just an hallucination. You get drunk and tip over the whiskey bottle, you get mad and tear up your sketches, you bark your shin on that footstool over there. And then you forget everything until your mind makes up a little man to explain what your memory can’t bring back to you directly.”
He looked up suddenly to realize that a voice had been saying this, and he wasn’t too sure it was his own. For the green-eyed atom stood before him with his rather droopy nose just seven sixteenths of an inch from Denis’ drooping chin.
For an instant the desire was almost overwhelming to couple his thumb and forefinger around that diminutive wing-tipped collar and throttle the best-dressed pixy on Bendix Boulevard. But he gritted his teeth on the firm conviction that he would sooner or later find a truncated banana or a mangled lampshade to his credit for the deed. He must repress these impulses.
Think of something else. Get your mind off this.
DENIS ALARIC pawed through his pockets until he found the napkin from the Rialto Bar. Then he stared deeply, into those green eyes and commanded: “Out of my way, runt. I’ve got work to do.”
The pixy stepped aside and bowed. Denis ignored the amenity. At his drawing board he copied the sketch from the napkin with the practiced fingers of a professional artist. When it was through it portrayed two halves of an eggshell with a tiny, full-plumed bird gathered in the crevice.
As he held it up for final inspection a soft voice spoke right at his ear. “Is that really what you do for a living?” asked the little man. He sounded sincerely shocked.
“Now, look here, runt, you get down off the back of my chair. That’s what I do for a living, and I’m not making any excuses for my art. Go on, skidoo!”
Instead of skidooing, a wee hand shot out and twisted his ear most painfully. “Just because the sketch sells you think you are an artist. Have you never considered the moral aspect of producing such weird atrocities?”
“There’s only one aspect that interests me, and that’s the eating aspect. Go on, tell me that I’m prostituting my art. Tell me that I break up homes with my hats. I still got to eat, don’t I?”
“But if you must draw hats,” the little man insisted gently, “why not draw nice hats? The kind of hats you would really like to see on women. The kind of hats you wouldn’t laugh at. Look, I’ll show you.” Before Denis’ eyes a sketch took form that at once charmed and hypnotized him with its beautifully smooth lines. An intricate little twist here, a simple fold there, a splash of color and, for the first time in his life, Denis beheld a woman’s hat which he confessed to be attractive. It was a sensible hat, the kind of a hat he’d been wanting to draw for years.
He said as much, then asked: “Can you draw any more like this?”
“Certainly. Watch.” In less than five minutes there were two more completed sketches before Denis as pleasing as the first. Enthusiastically, Denis scrutinized them. Then he frowned. The technique, if not the design, was his own. The same strokes, curves and accentuations. And in the lower right-hand corner was his initial, that screwy little “A” that had trade-marked his work since he left his garret full of nudes in Chicago.
“How in the world did—” He looked around, but he was addressing thin air. The third drawer of his bureau, his shirt drawer, slid gently shut.
Nervously he uncorked and corked the bottle. Then he fumbled his necktie into a misplaced knot. As he buttoned his topcoat he observed himself in the full-length mirror in the door. He thought he detected a tinge of dissipation in that middle-aged countenance. “This is it! You’ve got to do something about this,” he told his image. “Talking to yourself. Seeing things. Thanking a pixy who is no one but yourself for making your own drawings. Well, thank God, you can at least draw, even in a daze.”
He noticed that his white shirt was rumpled and soiled at the collar. He glanced at the bureau. Then he decided: “Oh, well, Mendlestein is sloppy himself. And he’s in a hell of a hurry for these sketches.” He skirted the bureau, slipped the drawings into a thin brief case and half ran from the room.
TONIGHT AUGUST Mendlestein was entertaining. He was not sloppy. He was painfully correct in dinner jacket and white tie. Being the innate good business man that he was he didn’t discriminate against Denis’ tweed slacks and brown topcoat. He did, however, draw him quickly aside into the library.
“Denis, my boy, I’m glad you came. You brought the sketches, I see. Good! Help yourself to the whiskey over there while I make your check.”
Denis shook his head. “No, thanks. No whiskey. No.”
“Well, you don’t have to tell me ‘no’ three times. Oh, I see,” Mendlestein laughed. “You are convincing yourself.”
“Better look at those drawings before you make out that check,” Denis said briskly. “Something special for you this time. They really belong with Eisenwehr, but then I promised you the next three.”
“Eisenwehr!” the stout little man snorted with little noises in his throat. “What does he know about merchandising hats? For every fifteen-dollar copy he sells I sell two exclusives. You should know—” He stopped, forgetting for the moment whatever disparaging remarks there were left unsaid about his competitor. A long minute passed as he scrutinized the top sketch. Then he glanced at the other two, slipped them into their folder and handed them back.
“What’s the matter, Mendlestein?”
“Eisenwehr can have them. I agree with you. They should be in his second-rate emporium.”
“But, August, those are the best I’ve knocked out in years.”
“Listen, Denis. Years ago we had this all out. You wanted to draw nice hats. I wanted to buy unique hats. So you got mad at me and drank some whiskey and drew some hats and wrapped the sketches around a rock and threw it through my plate-glass window’. What did I do? I paid you twenty bucks apiece for the sketches and didn’t even deduct the window.”
He sighed over his outspread hands. “And now, two years later, you bring me the same old tripe. What’s wrong with you, Denis? Are you out of whiskey, or out of your mind?”
The wealthy milliner saw him out the door with a fatherly pat. “I know how it is, my boy. You got inhibitions. All of a sudden you got to draw what you want to draw. Only,” he chided, “when you do, please take them to Eisenwehr. I can’t sell them in my shop.”
With the closing of the door, the music and gaiety of the party chopped off short, and an unmanageable fear stole over Denis. It wasn’t entirely the prospect of the D.T.’s, that is, the ordinary delirium tremens which are more or less inevitable, that made the artist shudder as he left the house. They could be cured the hard way. That is, most men could be cured the hard way. That is, most men could be cured. But for the first time a serious doubt came into his mind that he was merely a victim of alcoholism.
He hailed a cab. Denis started when the cab driver looked him in the eyes. Those eyes were green—or were they? Inside, he wiped cold sweat from his forehead and leaned forward. “Get me to 7622 Doran Street.” Before the top light switched off he saw that the eyes weren’t green at all. They were blue.
DOCTOR or no doctor, Morris Wakefield was his only bet now. Maybe he knew of a nice, quiet sanitarium. Or, being a psychiatrist, he might even be able to treat him without prescribing going on the wagon. But that was expecting too much. That was the only reason he hadn’t visited the physician before. It certainly looked like the cure for Denis Alaric. But anything was better than returning to the studio and his inhabited shirt drawer.
It was almost eleven p.m. when he rattled the knocker. The butler announced him and conducted him into a firelit drawing room. Morris Wakefield greeted him: “Hello, Denis. Have a drink?”
Denis’ started to refuse, then changed his mind. He poured a long one and downed it straight. “Thanks.”
He sat down and buffed his nails on his left trouser leg. “I hope you don’t mind my coming here, Morris. It’s a professional call.”
“Hell, no. I receive half my patients in front of this fireplace.” Wakefield had a plump, bald placidity that fitted the firelight. He plucked an ice cube from a dish and dropped it into his half-consumed highball. “I hate to drink my nightcap alone anyway. Now, what’s the trouble?”
“I’ve been having bad dreams, Morris.”
“You want them psychoanalyzed? At your age and with your past?” Wakefield chuckled.
“No. You don’t understand. These dreams, I have them with my eyes open. When I’m awake.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows. “Not by any chance reptilian daydreams?”
“You’re warm. It’s a little man with green eyes who lives in my shirt drawer. It’s—all very upsetting.”
“Tried ignoring him?
“Ever try ignoring a case of the measles?”
“Tell me about him,” Wakefield asked soothingly. Denis fingered the glass stopper of the whiskey decanter.
“What are the D.T.’s like. Morris?”
“Nonsense! You have no more of the delirium tremens than I have. I’ve never yet seen you drunk. A man loses control of himself, gets to looking like the very devil, can’t eat, shakes all the time—Why, you look practically in the pink.”
“Yeah, I feel all right. Except that I’ve got a star roomer with me right now, and I don’t like it.”
“Comes of too much introversion, Denis. You need more company. You sit around by yourself too much. Throw some parties like you used to do. Hit the spots. Meet some interesting women.”
Den is shook head and shoulders vehemently. “You don’t understand.”
“Yes, I do, Denis; perfectly. You mustn’t let a few drinks convince you that you’re falling to pieces. Why, look at me—I regularly drink half a pint a day. Never fazes me. You know, I shouldn’t be at all surprised that what you really need is a good bender. Buy yourself a quart and drink it all yourself. You artists need relaxation. Get yourself really plastered, and I bet that when the hangover wears off you’ll find out you’ve had some fun.” He yawned cavernously, stood up and stretched. “I’ll tell you, that’s what you’d better do. Get so stinko that you see little women, then you won’t give a hoot about your little men.”
Denis stood up, too, and enviously regarded the master of an untenanted shirt drawer. Considering the fact that no one had ever seen him really drunk, it wasn’t so incredible that Wakefield failed to recognize the symptoms. But it rather horrified the artist that his renowned doctor friend should so misdiagnose his case.
“Well, Morris, if your prescription doesn’t work you’ll have to collect your fee out of my hide.”
“How’s that?”
“The little man has been doing my drawings for me. And they don’t sell. Mendlestein just bounced three of them.”
A trace of concern disturbed the sleepy moonface for an instant. “Perhaps you’d better drop around to my office in the morning, at that. Maybe a few weeks in a sanitarium would do you good.”
“Why, you mercenary old goat,” Denis thought to himself as he allowed the butler to scoot his coat over his stiff arms and jerk his undercoat until his collar slightly choked him, “I’ll see how I get along tonight. I may be seeing you.” He plunged like a ghost into a light fog, muttering: “Buy myself a quart!”
