Faith and the Good Thing Read online

  “Where can I take you?” he asked. He glanced over his shoulder (which he did often), then produced from his coat pocket a handkerchief so neatly folded it seemed the product of obsession. “Where are you staying?” He cocked his head. “What’s your name?” Finally, he raised his voice. “Can you speak?”

  “My name is Faith Cross and I don’t have a place to stay.” The region around her mouth felt brittle, her chattering teeth clipped at the edge of her tongue. “I don’t have a place to go—”

  He started to speak, but held his breath, picking his teeth with his tongue. At the bridge’s end two officers appeared with clubs swinging like pendulums at their sides. He grabbed Faith’s arm and tugged at her slightly. “There’s a nice spot just around the corner,” he said. His voice was as thin as his lips. “You look like you could use a drink.”

  Tugging Faith along the bridge, he directed her into the close foyer of an all-night tavern, then through a glass door to a semidark room. He found a booth at the rear, and sat poker-faced toward the door. In the dim light cast by the glowing blue screen of a television set above the bar, Faith could see soft kernels of sleep in the corners of his bloodshot eyes, could smell, when he leaned close to her across the table, his milk-sour breath.

  “What do you drink?” he asked.

  “Drink?” She hesitated, feeling crowded in the closeness of the booth, congested both in her throat and in her thoughts with the unfamiliar sounds and sensations in the room: those in the room around her were either looking for or trying to forget something, though she knew not what; but a portion of it was lost in the blue strata of cigarette smoke screening her vision of the peaked and anxious faces of drinkers at the bar who, as they tipped their glasses, regained it, only for others to have it lost again when a woman’s shrill cackling rose above their threshold of insularity. It was happiness they sought, or so Faith imagined; and it was sorrow they sought to escape. In and out, from those seated along the wood-paneled wall to those at the bar, something both light and dark moved, brightening a face here, causing a mouth to droop there, but continually moved silently from one nightlifer to another. Despite her original dread, Faith no longer felt afraid. Her host seemed to move through the smoke and pulse beat of this crowd easily. He had returned her bag, he seemed genuinely interested in her. Perhaps he could be, if given the chance, not a friend in utility (for these are flighty), or a friend in common traits and interests (far too superficial), but a friend, truly, in faith.

  “You look like a Bloody Mary to me,” he said, smiling.

  Faith’s left hand touched her face. “I do?”

  He grinned, left her, and slipped through the noisy crowd to the bar. During the interval of his absence she again felt unprotected. It reminded her of the way she felt when she stood on the platform at the train station in town watching Alpha Omega Jones leave home. It had been a terrible day. By chance she had encountered Alpha’s mother at the feed store in town and learned that Alpha, in just an hour, would be leaving Hatten County to look for work up North. She had not seen him for months, he working and all. After delivering the box of dry goods to Lavidia, she raced back to town. And missed him. She could see his sad profile in the train window—sad because of the necessity of his flight. She shouted his name, but the train whistle smothered her cry. The train pulled off, bathing her in white steam as she ran behind it, tossing pebbles at his window. She had been there; it was important that he know that, that he should carry her memory with him always. Probably, he never knew. She remembered her feeling of isolation as being unbearable. He, like all those in the bar, had been only inches from her in physical distance, but beyond touch. It lay heavy on Faith’s chest. She started talking the instant her host returned to slide a frosty glass toward her.

  “You haven’t told me your name—”

  He pursed his lips, and pulled at the tip of his nose. “Arnold T. Tippis.”

  “Well, Mr. Tippis,” she said, “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve—”

  “Forget it.” He yanked his nose again, then adjusted his glasses. “You don’t owe me anything yet.” For a second he looked embarrassed, perhaps by his eyes, which wandered in sweeping motions across her face, stopping momentarily to study the asymmetry of her eyes, then her mouth, and moved on to her shoulders and suggestion of breasts. Men judging livestock, or women inspecting fresh eggs at the fair have such eyes. “You’re nice-looking,” he said flatly, “. . . cute.”

  It was a purely objective statement; nothing, she convinced herself, lurked behind such a simple statement of fact. This she told herself at least twice, believing it until Tippis, after clearing his throat, reached across the table and folded his hand over her own.

  “I’m looking for something!” Faith blurted.

  With his free hand Tippis alternately chain-smoked, blowing smoke from the side of his mouth, rather than in her face, and nibbled at rye saltines from a bowl. “That’s bad,” he muttered.

  Her feelings were drained into the immediacy of the warmth between his hand and her own. She looked away from him again, but left her hand still, aware that her palm was growing moist and her fingers trembling. Not in erotic response; it was more like fear. This was not, in any circumstance, a safe man to be with, not because of what he might do to her but because of some strange thing he’d done to himself. Suddenly, her hand went dry, and she was all thought, pure intellect, and concentrating on the way his lips curled back like proud flesh around a half-healed wound.

  “I’m looking for the really Good Thing.” She sipped at her drink, discovered she had never tasted tomato juice prepared in quite this way, and accepted, when the barmaid noticed her empty glass, a second drink. To be truthful, it made her a bit braver.

  “Stop looking,” Tippis said. He arched his eyebrows sleepily. “Everybody’s looking for what’s Good and True and Beautiful. It’s damned foolish, really. Be content. Self-analysis will put you at peace with your problems—really.”

  After the third drink Faith’s stomach felt even emptier than before, like a warm pit, or the inside of an old, old cave unvisited by beast or fowl for centuries. Her head felt the same way. As a muffled muttering, his words came to her:

  “Me,” he said, “I can live with my problems. They make me unique, so they’re okay. You don’t mind listening to this, do you? I mean, you girls have to hear a lot of this sort of thing, right?”

  Dizzy, Faith said, “Right,” her brain besotted. She bugged her eyes at him. It was getting hard to see. She looked away briefly and was shocked by her condition, knowing that the swelling and detachment of her thoughts, like subdividing amoebas, had changed the room in a peculiar way: the bar looked glutted with bodies—fat ones squeezed into loud pastel shirts, lean and tall ones rising from the floor like reeds; and their outlines formed an odd unity similar to geometric shapes, flowing together, implicating each other in a terribly necessary way, jelling into a colorless whole. This was not rhythm, only chaos. She felt outside them, or locked within herself with all of them beyond her. Overhead, a star-shaped chandelier cast the entire room in inundating bolts of ocean blue. Watching it made her nauseous. She attended to Tippis, who lowered his eyes to the table and scratched his forefinger at cracker crumbs on the checkered cloth.

  “My analyst told me to scream when I get frustrated, but that’s not really as crazy as it sounds, not at all, because all my life there’ve been things I’ve wanted to scream at, to strike out of my path, or trample under my heel. But I kept silent. I tried to be cunning, thinking that—like the young sapling that bends in the wind—I could eventually conquer the world through endurance. Things started to churn and bubble inside me until I thought I’d explode. Passivity wasn’t working. It was like there was a grenade in my guts. That make any sense?”

  Faith concluded hastily, unclearly, that her host was possessed. It happened all the time. Someone was, perhaps, working evil mojo on him. Leechcraft was what he needed, or a talisman, but she had neither, or anythin
g to protect herself, or even anything to keep her heavy head from nodding like an old drunken hedonist gorged with grapes. Faith jerked herself upright. Her teeth felt soft and her bones rubbery; and every few minutes she felt herself sliding down her seat, prevented from going under the table only by Tippis’s hand gripping her wrist.

  “So I went to an analyst downtown when things started going wrong on my job. I practiced dentistry on the West Side—made good money, too, and had a good name. But one day my nerves started going, hands started to shake, and I kept getting headaches and hearing voices, y’know?”

  She nodded. Yes, she knew. The living dead, when bored, often communicated with their relatives, their friends. The point was to listen to them.

  “So I started seeing a psychiatrist. He said I should have come to him maybe ten years ago. He said it was fifty percent in my head and fifty percent in the world. Everybody’s got an ego that arises from the id when they have to satisfy their instinctual needs—” As he talked Tippis’s face twisted as though he tasted bile; he reared back his shoulders, squared them, and squeezed Faith’s dry hand. It didn’t matter. Her hand felt numb. She accepted another drink and nibbled ravenously with her free hand at the stale crackers.

  Tippis continued, a muscle beating in his jaw as he looked at but did not quite see her, “He convinced me to do my own research into the psyche.” What he told her made Faith giggle—that is, until she realized he was serious about infantile sexuality, and all those other things neither he nor she could see. Lavidia, she remembered, had derided Todd for believing in things he couldn’t see. But that was different: Lavidia simply hadn’t looked hard and long enough. Tippis said, “It’s so damned obvious! Everything you want is an object for the satisfaction of drives developed in childhood, and you, in society, are an object for others, hardly ever for yourself. But society, through the family and peer group, suppresses these drives so civilization doesn’t evaporate in a collective lust involving billions. Tell me,” he said, pulling at the tip of his dark goatee, “what is it you want most from life?”

  It shot from her lips: “The Good Thing.”

  Tippis stared, then chuckled, lighting a fresh cigarette, his tenth. “There is no such object. Surely you mean some specific thing that makes you feel good—like scratching, sneezing, or the pleasurable feeling when the valve to your full bladder opens—”

  “No, I mean—” She stopped, her eyes wide with incredulity. She stared past him to the wall. What did she mean?

  “You’re in serious trouble if you have a drive for which there’s no object. That’s what the world is really all about—subject-object antagonism. Objectifying a thing, making it no more than an object so it can be grasped, manipulated, and ruled is, obviously, dehumanizing, even cruel, I suppose, if done to another person. But too many of your drives can only be satisfied, and only then temporarily, in this way. There is no other way unless you kill off your feelings like a musty old monk or Indian bodhisattva. So find an object. The world provides several, and they’re useful and approved besides. Set an accepted goal for yourself—comfortable living, that’s a good one, or fashion, collecting antique bottles or comic books from World War II. Sublimate, child.” He looked at her over the rims of his glasses and smiled. “Do you like cuisine?”

  “I don’t know,” Faith said. “Isn’t that what they clean in the army?”

  “That’s latrine,” Tippis snorted. He waved his hand dramatically, then lowered it, stroking her wrist. “You can’t escape history, or the needs and neuroses you’ve picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth (Pardon me, I couldn’t resist that, dentistry and all).” He laughed deeply, “Mhah ha ha ha,” amusing himself. “Your every past action and thought have made you what you are. Am I right or wrong?”

  His words troubled Faith. The past, remote and distorted by the mercy of waning memories, had the terrible power to be present at all times in its effects: this was true. It was some kind of law. Didn’t sorcerers control their victims by possessing an old truss they’d worn, old cigarette butts that once touched their lips? And Dr. Lynch—wasn’t what he meant—that what was, was only the form of what had been, even if what was past had been accidental? In their corner of the bar, Faith tried to make her peace with the problems of change, permanence, and the free-will-destroying tyranny of history. Everything, including the Good Thing, seemed to hinge on it. But you couldn’t have it both ways—change and no change, freedom and the comfort of the past. Either you were brand-new at each instant, innocent and undetermined and, therefore, free, or you were a bent-back drudge hauling all of world history on your shoulders across the landscape of your life, limited in all your possibilities, enclosed within the small cage of what had passed before. Each event would weigh you down, alter you, send you through endless changes. You were in bondage. And the other way?—could you be brand-new each instant, remade by the power of either your own hand or magical thoughts? She turned it over and over: the Good Thing, if it could be at all, if it was indeed the truly unique good thing, had to be in the second way, above and beyond the wastepaper basket of the past; but didn’t that imply that it, being so aloft, so absolute, was not really in the world—that the slim line between perfection and impossibility was no distinction at all? It was all so confusing. Her thoughts became sluggish and lost their connections. Tippis’s voice drifted back again, breaking the mood. . . .

  “. . . am I right or wrong?”

  “That’s so grim. . . .” she wanted to say, but her tongue, heavy as lead, would not move.

  “It’s the same for everybody,” Tippis sighed through his teeth. “Civilized life is based on suffering, on the enslavement of the instincts and the self-alienation implicit in never being an object for your own needs. Look at this.” He released her hand and unfolded a paper napkin upon which he made a hasty sketch:

  “That’s what should happen,” Tippis said. “The instinctual drive is directed from the pleasure to the reality principles by a secondary process that points it head-on at the world. But it meets an anticathexis, and gets displaced this way:

  “. . . so the libidinal energy of the instinct itself feeds the neurosis.” Tippis stared at his sketch and groaned. “That’s me, Arnold Tyler Tippis! All I ever wanted was to be a musician, but that little arrow there got bent all to hell!”

  “Tha’s . . . turrble,” Faith said. “You wanted to be a moosician?”

  Pain sprang across Tippis’s face. His eyes seemed to swell like blowfish behind his lenses, and he shook his head violently. “I’m over that now. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I can even laugh about it. . . .”

  Faith did not hear him laugh.

  “My parents were killed in a highway accident when I was a child, so I grew up in a little Midwestern town with my aunt and uncle. I called him Uncle Bud, and he played a banjo like nobody’s business—he taught me chords and transitions, the whole works. Naturally, I wanted to be a traveling musician, he being my ego-ideal and all. But my aunt wouldn’t hear of it.” Tippis’s eyes moistened with remembrance. “She used to beat my fingers with a poker whenever she caught me playing Uncle Bud’s banjo after he died.” Tippis placed his cigarette in the ashtray to his left. Faith realized that his right index and forefinger remained outstretched and rigid though his hand was empty. Tippis held his right hand up, staring at his fingers with ill-suppressed horror:

  “She broke those two once. They never did come back exactly right. But she had my best interests at heart—I know that now. So,” he sighed, “I couldn’t fret Uncle Bud’s banjo anymore. About the only thing I could do after that was read. I graduated from college when I was nineteen. . . .”

  “And the fingers didn’t heal?” Faith asked.

  “Nope.” Tippis glanced over his shoulder, then shoved his right hand into his pocket. “Like I said, it used to bother me. I couldn’t date girls or anything like that for a long time. I felt too self-conscious.” He peeked at her over his lenses again. “You do understand,
don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Faith said.

  “But that’s okay, just as long as clever girls like you can stay on the streets the object I need is provided. You ready to go?”

  Though she knew not where and could hardly stand, Faith said, “Yes,” feeling inside and out all toasted, tight-chested, and trusting. He, this somehow sad and pitiable man dirty with the dust of his memories, supported her on his right arm, led her back onto the cold, empty street, and hailed a taxi. At Stony Island he took her to an old building bearing a sign out front—HOTEL SINCLAIR—a place so small its cockroaches had to walk single-file through the hallways. A stocky woman at the desk startled awake when they entered and studied Faith apprehensively before shoving Tippis the ledger and asking, “How old is she?” Tippis grunted, “Twenty-six,” and the woman handed him the key, grumbling, “No drinking—I run a decent place here, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor,” the last part of that being malevolent and as dry as witches’ ashes on a Puritan’s pyre. “Mrs. Taylor?” Faith said. Tippis ignored that and led her up a narrow, creaking flight of stairs to a dingy room at the end of the fourth floor. He closed the door and, in the darkness, dropped Faith across a mattress moist at its center. He stepped farther back into the shadows.

  Lying there on the bed she could hear no sound but the rush of Tippis’s birdlike breathing. Her eyes could not adjust to the darkness of the stuffy room—it was like fog, or the oval heart of a hippogriff, laced through and through with an inky material that absorbed any light from under the door. A feeling of vertigo crawled from her stomach to her throat. Fingers caught at her wrists.