Robert Lowry: The Knife

The Knife

BY ROBERT LOWRY

t he knife by robert lowry

Edited with an introduction by James Reidel

Heinz Wohlers Verlag 2005

Copyright © 1959, 2005 by the Estate of Robert Lowry

This text is based on the original “little man book” edition of fifty copies printed by Robert Lowry in 1959.

Cover photograph by Sam Rosenberg

© edition depression im Heinz Wohlers Verlag 2005 1. Auflage

Introduction Robert James Lowry has the knack of being able to paint a word picture without striving for effect.

He must be accepted in the same manner in which an artist is accepted . . .

—Mark Warren, South Haven (Mich.) Daily Tribune July 25, 1961

The term “outsider art” almost exclusively means visual art. In Colin Rhodes study, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives, it is work produced outside the mainstream of modernism, typically by the self-taught and untrained.

The artists themselves are visionaries, spiritualists, eccentric recluses, folk artists, psychiatric cases, criminals, and others existing “beyond the imposed margins of society and the art market.” The origin of the term, coined by Roger Cardinal in 1972, is derived from Jean Dubuffet’s art brut, which means literally raw, uncooked, and, by extension, brutal art created by a sensibility that disregards, that is unaware and unaffected by artistic fashions and standards. The appreciative regard now paid to out-

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sider art can be seen, for example, in the prices that the paintings and drawings produced by the mental patients of the Austrian sanatorium at Mauer-Öhling during the early part of the last century fetch at auction and gallery sales.

To call writing “outsider art,” and specifically the work of the novelist Robert Lowry (1919–1994), who was published by New Directions and Doubleday in hardcover, who wrote about the folk artist Steve Harley in Fleur Cowles sophisticated glossy Flair, seems less reliable. Indeed, it gets confused with his very real contributions to the genre, such as the lost “exhibit” recorded by the photographer Sam Rosenberg in 1953, when he shot Lowry, ostensibly for a dust jacket portrait, standing like some grimly serious Abstract Expressionist, before his hallucinatory art on the “gallery” wall in Ward 5 of the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital. There his shock-therapy-induced persona of ressentiment first became apparent and what once been a proper “liberal imagination” became its the changeling, its Other, the child–man who soiled himself with anything that offended the grownups—his second wife, his doctors, his editors, and his friends who had to keep bringing him

Introduction • III

back to the V.A. This included his hot-and-cold running anti-Semitism and mild racism that ran counter to the man he had become, the writer who had married two Jewish women and counted many black (and gay) American writers as close friends, a man who was comfortable lending his voice to the literature of social justice, who still was, even as his mental illness turned him into a kind of gargoyle watching over Bleecker Street or sitting unemployable in Washington Square Park.

Yet this novella, produced like his other self-publishings after Doubleday had released him, on a tabletop Speed-O-Print “Liberator 50” mimeograph machine, the kind once used by school teachers to print pass outs and tests in the 1950s and ’60s, is “outsider art” par excellence and at every imaginable level. The Knife is really a sculpture of a book, a maquette, a vestige that shows the visceral and even embarrassing link that still exists between play and creativity, a fetish for its middle-aged wunderkind to hold while exiled from the adult universe of New York publishing, a cargo cult object, even a little self-parody for his high-flying career as a war novelist, a promising post-Hemingway modernist taken seriously by editors, literary agents, and a rich circle of contem-

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poraries. Lowry could count Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, William Inge, and others as friends. He was an insider artist first or tried to be in that terribly competitive milieu of the New York writer and intellectual after the Second World War. Failing that, Lowry suffered a breakdown fueled by his libido and alcohol and their concomitant misadventures that sapped away what sanity he had to play the part of a rising young novelist, husband, and father in that terribly competitive milieu of the New York intellectual—and found something strangely and intoxicatingly liberating about his many institutionalizations in the mental wards of various Veterans Administration hospitals in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts during the 1950s. These—and a new wife with an insurance company job—became his Yaddos and Guggenheim fellowships, where he was never cured— and he never stopped writing. The Knife was produced when Lowry could still turn out an occasional saleable short story such as “The American Writer” in the May 1959 Esquire, a homage to Ernest Hemingway, who “invented” not only Key West, Cuba bullfighters, and the lion, but writers such as Lowry himself. Indeed, with his madhouse freedom, Lowry meta-imitates and exagger-

Introduction • V

ates with his novella that seamy filler fiction that would appear between the photographs of naked women in men’s magazines.

As much as The Knife is a fetish—beginning with the sensuous pleasure he took in hand coloring of all fifty copies of the cover art depicting the Village bohemian ingénue seen through a peeping tom’s keyhole—it is, nevertheless, good writing and becomes accidentally and surreally “interesting” when his soldier-murdererpainter is “painted” into a corner and literally must exit the window. The Knife is an indication, a vestige really, of where Lowry would have gone had gotten better, had he not become a pariah to his editors and lost friends. One of them, Gore Vidal once said that Lowry had no handle on dialog. But here, Lowry, who never descended into the high tone of his friend’s historical novels, has refined his matter-of-fact conversations—those with the reader and between the characters—and Hopperesque settings—the story practically begins in a New York diner—to a kind of menacing directness that suggests the method of Patricia Highsmith at her best. Indeed, The Knife, has the feel of Highsmith’s amoral, misogynistic tales, her Ripley novels and The Blunderer, which Lowry had the chance to

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read and select for its paperback edition when he was an editor and reader for Popular Library in the mid-1950s.

His colleague then, Arthur Orrmont, recalls a character who stood out much like Lowry’s amputee Christopher Grey in The Knife. “I’d see Bob around the office looking anxious and depressed in his brown suit and ties. He was something of a Village character even then.”

The Knife is a “problem” text but it needs an apologist for its Monarch Notes’ length rather than an interpretation given the messy theater of Lowry’s bipolar life and work after the first of his 22 shock treatments in 1952. The story he imagined probably originated in the reaction he recorded in one of his diaristic and eccentric self-published magazines, which he produced after his third marriage to Antoinette LoBianco in 1958—who had mercifully brought him back to New York from a yearlong convalescence in his parents’ (and childhood) home in Cincinnati so that he could resume his writing career.

During this time, he had noticed the many young interracial couples on the streets and from the window of his apartment overlooking the San Remo Café:

Introduction • VII

In no other neighborhood in the world can you see so many black men escorting white women.

Many of these couples are married; many have already produced one or more mulatto children. It is not a question of the white residents of Greenwich Village accepting this situation. On the contrary, they are dominated by it, for the sidewalks these days—and this is true especially in the evening—are literally patrolled by Negroes—in pairs or threesomes, or with their white women. In short, the policy adopted by the President of the United States is having its most fulsome flowering in this American Bohemia.1 With the entire issue of Robert Lowry Western World, his urzine cranked from the same printing press used to run off copies of The Knife—it is easier to see that Lowry’s ironic observation is not the most startling item amid his idiosyncratic content. It lends another context to the disturbing Blanche DuBois-tude and the high-toned syntax of the concerned citizen’s letter to the editor (yet 1 Robert Lowry, “The Situation in Greenwich Village,” Robert Lowry’s Western World 1, no. 4 (October 10, 1958), p. 3.

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another expression of the outsider), for one can see the whole picture of Lowry as the literary naïf–intellectual (“ROBERT LOWRY’S WESTERN WORLD RECOMMENDS ALL OF THE NOVELS OF JACK KEROUAC”), whose atavism goes back even further than writing for his high school newspaper—in some issues of his magazine Lowry would draw what may have been a self-portrait, the head of a screaming baby, sometimes enclosed inside a wire globe surmounted with an Iron Cross. But he is uncomfortable with what he sees in the Village, and not for the same reason that a Southern sheriff of the 1950s would. Lowry’s “problem with it” stems from not being able to stroll in the Village with a trophy woman, too. His issue, as seen through his new world view, “enhanced” by the heavy-handed psychiatric care of the period, is not so much jealousy as disenfranchisement. Lowry had written a novel about an interracial love affair between an African American prizefighter and a white woman artist—The Violent Wedding (Doubleday, 1953)—and he did so with more than just the imported, postwar existential freedom that made being a choice, plastic. He saw himself as the “white nigger” before Norman Mailer had provided this name and this book

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ultimately as “all the force of my great literary voice fully expressed, fully written, finally put down and forever.”

“In short,” he wrote in a rare rational moment of objectivity, “I regard all of my work since THE VIOLENT WEDDING as corrupt and senile and rotten, whatever interesting literary and stylistic and imaginative qualities may be discovered about it.”2 Of course, he is warning us away from The Knife here, and telling us to look closer in the same breath.

Unbridled and uninhibited by his mental illness—not unlike Art Linkletter’s children who said the “darndest things”—Lowry believed that in The Violent Wedding “the Negro really had his day in American literature.”

That he, with the endorsement of the Doubleday imprint, had given “his Negro hero a beautiful blonde for his mistress and made him the Middle-weight Champion of the World.”3 One would have to know this extraordinary novel—Lowry finished it after his first mental breakRobert Lowry, “James Laughlin: A Memoir,” unpublished typescript (1964).

3 Robert Lowry, “The Staff of New Directions in 1945–46,” U.S.A. 1, no. 2 (1958), p. 5. Lowry never “colored inside the lines” in his own articles. This quote is taken from a piece that features a hand-drawn copy of a photograph of Lowry, James Lauglin IV, Herbert Creekmore, and Susan Lustig (the sister of Alvin Lustig, who, along with Lowry, designed New Directions books).

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down—to understand the real intent of this “gift”: that he had taken a career risk in being the agent provocateur, the one who would affront white sensibilities in a way that still seemed disallowed and even indecorous for African American fiction writers in the mainstream. The Violent Wedding was ahead of its time and soon to be made inauthentic because its author was the wrong skin color—in other words, the same pass extended to Elvis Presley to sing and dance like a black man had no analog for a man who wrote like one. Nevertheless, Lowry tried to be this ultimate white outsider—the urban Natural Man who the Italian translator of his first novel Casualty, Giorgio Monicelli, saw in 1948: Lowry, indeed, loves life and has faith in mankind.

The reason his protest here becomes a flood of tears and fury is that he sees humanity soiling its own nobility, corrupting itself with its lowest impulses and a mad bestiality. Lowry is of one of those Americans […] who preserve in their heart a dream that was born from America. […] Rous-

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seau bears fruit where it has been pressed from them […]4 In Lowry’s Doubleday fiction, he saw himself in the unblanchingly signified character Dick Black, the workingclass boy writer who would make it (just as Lowry did).

In The Knife, this alter ego is reinvented downward and repackaged in stapled sheets of cheap typewriter paper.

He is now Christopher Grey, a name that suggests his vagueness, the mixing of black and white so that he is both both and neither—and a name recycled from a more ambitious work that Lowry imagined, with the working title “His Grey Eminence.” Christopher is not a successful anything save for being a cipher, but in this, in true fifties’ quiz show fashion, he is the Charles Van Doren of nonentity. He has no employment, no fixed address, and no real purpose save to spend his army pension on drinks and french fries and orphically ride subways and elevators. Had George Davis, the editor of Lowry’s run of Mademoiselle stories in the 1940s, not died the year before The Knife appeared, had he received his “review Giorgio Monicelli, translator’s introduction to Naja (Milan: Elmo, 1948), the Italian translation of Casualty (Norfolk, CN: New Directions, 1946) by Robert Lowry, pp. 16–17.

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copy” in those relentless mailings that became a kind of affliction for anyone who had befriended and published Lowry, he would have recognized the reuse of the maimed and aimless ex-soldier of Find Me in Fire (Doubleday, 1948), the novel Davis had midwifed. He would have seen that Lowry was, perhaps, congenitally incapable of avoiding the cold comfort narcissism that this kind of character provided and the denouement that he deserved.

The writing in The Knife is indebted to steamy filler copy found in the fiction of the era’s girlie magazines.

(There is even a debt to that outsider art of dance, that is, in Lowry’s ecdysiast treatment of women’s clothes.)

The narrative “style” is pulp fictive rather than pulp fiction, however, in that The Knife aspires to sublimation, to behold and internalize the ideal muse–whore, to pay some holy debt to her, even though the novella seems to be low art, kitsch—cartoonish and analogous to the flat, cocktail napkin-like rendering of Christopher Grey’s experience, what Lowry calls its “grotesque outline.”

Though ostensibly written in third-person, Lowry’s verbal two-dimensionality is first person; he is ever present in the text, watching himself play himself, ver-

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bally violating his own perspective—so much so that at times he seems to forget or never-mind the cosmetic and mechanical limitations of his one-armed soldier.

With women Christopher Grey performs tirelessly in bed—and after his crime, Lowry does not let the wellcraftedness of the crime novel prevent him from endowing his protagonist with superhuman dexterity: Chris took a small towel from a rack by the sink, wiped his fingerprints from the knife which he was still holding, and dropped it on her body.

Lowry let other “mistakes” go by, too, perhaps because he was too tired to retype the two whole pages he needed again, carefully aligned side-by-side on the special stationery that the Speed-O-Print used. A typo, a misspelling, a flaw in the storyline’s chronology have to be pardoned in his case much the way we overlook that lack of machined perfection in handmade things, in folk art objects and antiques. Lowry even lets Christopher practically regenerate his missing forearm and hand at one point.

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The novella’s descriptions of African Americans are also painfully true to the period, and The Knife comes very close to belonging in a display case with the Aunt Jemima bric-a-brac in the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia (and if there was such a museum for women, this hand-made book could be added to its collection too).

Some readers will find the novella offensive in this regard.

They will not be able separate the damaged Lowry from his “evil” twin in Christopher Grey even knowing that Lowry had once been keenest blade in the drawer for the American Mercury and Doubleday when it came to writing cutting-edge fiction about race and prejudice without the white liberal guilt. Because The Knife reads so outside the pale, it is hard to see that Lowry redeems himself in the way he sets—or sends?—his killer up with the mojo of a stuffed toy lion and a subtle comparison to the old Saturday matinee’s great white jungle adventurer, Frank Buck of Wild Cargo and Fang and Claw. (Lowry’s reified need for this kind of absurd shooting gallery prize would later be echoed in the four-foot high pink plush dog that he sat in a chair next to his writing table during the 1970s, when he tried and tried again to write something beyond letters, strange poems, and grand fragments.) This redemption,

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however, is not limited to a comic effect in this hardboiled little drama that moves like the method-acted teleplays of its time. Lowry, who literally came from the other side of the tracks that cut his East End, working-class German and Appalachian roots off from the rest of Cincinnati, commits some social justice on himself. Those familiar with his devolution into an American Nazi Party fellow traveler in the 1960s or of his semi-self-published novel, The Prince of Pride Starring, with its anti-Semitic victim–hero—the high water marks in his high-functioning mental decline—would be incredulous on this point. However, they would be unmercifully closed-minded to forget the pre-crazy Lowry whose ghost comes through in The Knife, rehabilitated enough to perform a mercy killing in fiction. He even performs this “self-murder” twice, with as many psychological colors and psychosocial and sexual contradictions as can be loaded into a text of this length because here he sleeps with the enemy on both sides of the bed. There is more to Lowry’s caricature of the race traitor and Tokyo Rose of Christopher Grey’s brief, coital Floating World: She gave him a shrewd look out of the corners of her eyes. There was something Oriental about

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that look, and about her strange, crooked little smile, too.

This enemy, as Lowry clues early on in The Knife, is Grey’s mirror. The benighted lovers of this Village passion play share names, one is the other’s doppelganger: “But that’s my name too!” the girl said. “I mean, I’m called Chris too—short for Christine. It was just so strange—it was like being introduced to myself, somehow.

And after they part for the last time, Christopher Grey assumes her place in the world, her vocation like a warrior who eats the heart of his enemy to possess, in this case, her soul. He takes up painting as a kind of homage to his dead girl and, indeed, paints outsider art inside Lowry’s outsider fiction.

The Nighttown New York setting is out of B-picture noir or the shocking photography of Wee-gee—what Lowry describes as the “City of shrouds,” at once suggesting Golgotha and the crime scene. The murder mystery is more a mystery story in the religious sense and

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its “plot” relies not only on that old detective story shortcut of the coincidence, but on a breathtaking foreshortening around any kind of detective work as Lowry realized, as he wrote, that he would soon max out the 50-sheet capacity of his printing machine. This compression and omission and violent death as justice suggest a Grimm’s fairytale, a fable, a myth, even a bible story—the stuff from which insider art owes its very existence—everything, from “The Waste Land” to The Twilight Zone (which began to air in the fall season of the year The Knife was written, not in time to supply the influence that would seem to be in Lowry’s novella).

The Knife is the last sustained expression of Lowry as a novelist. It was even reviewed by a friend he had made on the Michigan Shore in South Haven Daily Tribune, well outside of Lowry’s lost orbit in the East— where fewer and fewer readers would have recognized the latest permutation of his signature into three names. (The outlaw cadence of Robert James Lowry is in itself an outsider gesture that shows the distance cut between the tamer author of Doubleday’s stable.) This, however, and the narrative’s quirks show where his gift ends almost exactly like stress cracks in some eviden-

tiary piece of wreckage. Nevertheless, the gift leaves here in a kind of lumpen-Mozartean performance given that The Knife was probably written right out of Lowry’s head onto the master stencil for his finished pages.

No edited manuscript survives, no early drafts—only the few Little Man Book copies that exist in library special collections. This text is transcribed from the copy Lowry sent to his sister.

The Knife, finally, is a darkly pathological fabliau, a kind of postwar, pre-Beat Village Woyzeck in which Lowry’s solder, like Büchner’s, is punished here—for his black and white rage against himself. It serves for that self-exam that many of us somehow miss when made to read that old, undergraduate chestnut of the novella form, Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s “horror” squared is as much revealed here as is “destroy all the brutes”—but look closely at who is destroyed this time.

George Davis made Lowry remove the punishment that he wished to inflict on the one-legged veteran of Find Me in Fire. Here, he restores that harsh judgment like something that would not be denied him.

—James Reidel

the knife

N

early twenty-three years after his birth in a small town in Northern Ohio, a young American named Christopher Gray, wearing the uniform of a combat infantryman and taking part in the invasion of Europe, was injured by a mortar barrage at Anzio Beach in Italy and they removed all but a flipper of what was left of his right arm in a field hospital the next day. All but a stump. They left him the stump, the flipper as he and the other armless GIs around him on the ward in the hospital in Naples called what was left of their arm, and later at a hospital in New Jersey before he was discharged the therapy workers taught him to use an artificial arm made of plastic and aluminum, but he did not like it—liked his empty coat sleeve better and that was the way he wore his stump after he got out of the hospital, wearing the stump undecorated by the cunningly contrived and balanced machine arm that they had given him. This machine-arm that they had given him. This machine-arm that he stored in a box in his room at home.

His arm was dead. His younger brother was dead, having

2 • Robert Lowry

found his death at Guadalcanal. His sister was married and he was all alone in the house with his parents and the war that they said was won shrilled laughter across the great oceans at him.

In an early morning dream he saw his arm again. He saw it on a flag. The Russians had his arm now and they had sewn it on their red flag. His lost arm, bent slightly at the elbow, was the sickle part of the Red Russian hammer-and-sickle—that was what they had used it for in his early morning dream.

Chris felt restless. “I think I’ll go to New York for awhile,” he said.

“You do whatever you want to do, Chris,” his mother told him. “Your life is yours.”

His mother had wept when she had seen the arm.

And it had turned out to be a good idea, New York.

He lived here now and the arm that was missing did not bother him so much and the two hundred and thirtythree shrapnel scars from Anzio did not bother him much either. You forgot about scars, in New York City.

You went to the theatres and the museums and the parks and you rode the subways and the double-decker Fifth

The Knife • 3

Avenue busses and read quite a lot in your room and drank quite a lot in the hotel bar and in other bars.

He was sitting there at the counter in a sandwich bar in Greenwich Village one noontime, thinking about not much of anything and dipping French-fried potatoes into a mound of ketchup that he had shaken onto his plate, and eating them, one by one, not hungrily but contemplatively, when this pretty doxy of a girl with her long rich full brown hair swishing in a horsetail and wearing the skintight blue jeans that were fashionable with girls in Greenwich Village just after the war, sort of threw her leg over the stool next to him almost as if she were climbing into a saddle and immediately started a conversation without any sort of introductory remark whatsoever—no salt to pass, no inquiry about the time, just: “I can’t get over the way you can walk three blocks in this town and see all of mankind, can you?”

“Mankind?” Chris said. “Well no, I guess I can’t.”

They were blue eyes and he found himself caught in them and there did not seem to be any way out of them.

So then she ordered something from the counterman and without looking again at Chris she opened a

4 • Robert Lowry

copy of a paperback book and began to read, removing herself some two million miles from him, as if she had never spoken.

He went to the park when he left the sandwich place, and he was sitting there reading his newspaper when he looked up and there she was sitting immediately across from him on a bench on the other side of the walk and she was still reading the book.

“Aren’t you the girl who just talked to me back there in the Griddle Shop?” he asked her.

These two big blue eyes traveled up from the page of the book to meet his own. It was like looking at the sky.

“Oh it’s you,” she said. “How in the world did you get here?”

“I walked here,” Christopher said. “I guess you walked here too, didn’t you?”

“Well, naturally. But I didn’t notice you sitting over there—I mean, I noticed that there was somebody sitting there but I didn’t look hard enough to know that it was you.”

“Yeah,” it’s me,” Chris said. He sort of laughed, not exactly out of embarrassment, although there was a little

The Knife • 5

embarrassment in the laugh too, but mostly because he was sitting here in the park talking to such a pretty girl on such a pretty day, and he laughed in pure enjoyment at these happy circumstances.

She was sort of studying, with those big blue eyes, his face, but the scar side of his face was turned away from her so that he knew she was not just studying the scars as he sometimes saw people doing. Then her eyes dropped down to what was left of his arm and he guessed that that was all right too, since she was looking at the empty sleeve so frankly and you couldn’t help noticing something like that, could you?

“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” she asked.

“I mean—before back there at the luncheonette?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you live in the Village?”

“No,” Chris said. “I live downtown in a hotel—near Battery Park.”

“Yes,” she said. “Where you get the ferryboat to Staten Island. I like it down there.”

“The sea,” Chris said.

“I beg your pardon?” She closed her book over her index finger and came over and sat down beside him.

6 • Robert Lowry

“You wake up in the morning—down there—and the air in your room is wet with the sea,” Chris explained.

“And you ache with the sea out there as if that were everywhere there is to go, out across the gray sea.”

“Really,” the girl said, “you speak very well, you know.”

“Naturally,” Chris told her. “I’m a genius.”

“Really?”

“I’m a mot juste man from way back. And I’m also very good at walking.”

“At—walking?”

“I walk for miles in this town,” Chris said.

“Oh. You mean just walking. I guess I do that too, sometimes.”

“So there you are—you see? You’re probably a genius too,” Chris said. “The walking is a very important part of being a genius, believe me.”

“No,” she said. “No. I paint a little. But I’m not a genius.” She looked down at the paperback book, almost as if the words that she was going to say came from it.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” she said, “if without even known

The Knife • 7

your name or your knowing mine I asked you to come over to my place and see some of the things I’ve done?”

“Not funny at all,” Chris said. “And I have the time.”

She sat gazing at him, as if she were balancing all sorts of hazards and propositions and moral systems in her head.

“All right then, come on,” she said.

And a little later, as they were walking along, she added: “I guess I picked you up, didn’t I?” “That’s just a phrase, after all,” Chris said. “Let’s just say that we got acquainted—in a kind of an unorthodox way. Although,” he added, “this isn’t the first time that two people got acquainted in a park—or in a sandwich shop.”

“May I—ask about your arm?” she asked.

“Sure. Ask about it all you like.”

“Well—how did you lose it?”

“I didn’t lose it,” Chris said. “See: There it is. Good arm.”

“Now you’re kidding me. I meant—your other arm, of course.”

“Oh. This one.” Chris moved the flipper as they walked. “I left the rest of this one over in Italy during the

8 • Robert Lowry

war. Laid it on the line over there, so to speak. Goodlooking arm, too. Even better-looking than this other one.”

“Really?”

“The nostalgia that absence and distance lends to things,” Chris said. ‘That’s probably what makes me think so.”

‘There you go, speaking very well again.”

“I can’t help it,” Chris said. “It’s all that genius rearing its handsome head again. It just comes natural to me, all that genius.”

“I see. I didn’t know that it did. Because it seems to me that all I’ve ever read about genius is that it came, or I mean sort of was realized, oh, with all kinds of struggles and hardships. They had to devote themselves and almost torture themselves. The geniuses did, I mean. It was awfully hard—like for Edgar Allan Poe and for Michelangelo and all of them.”

“Wouldn’t know,” Chris said. “May be true, in some cases, but I’m the other kind.” He gave her a good big grin. “I don’t even have to work at it, that’s the kind I am.”

The Knife • 9

“You say it beautifully. I know you’re only kidding— you must be only kidding—but you say everything with a straight face. Oh—here we are and I still don’t even know your name.”

“Chris.”

“Chris?” She actually stopped right there on the street and stared at him, she was surprised.

“Sure,” Chris said. “Chris is short for Christopher.

What’s so strange about that?”

“But that’s my name too!” the girl said. “I mean, I’m called Chris too—short for Christine. It was just so strange—it was like being introduced to myself, somehow. It’s right in here. I hope you don’t mind walking up five flights of stairs.

“Both legs in wonderful shape,” Chris said. The shrapnel scares did not hurt at all any more and the legs had never really given him much trouble.

They climbed the five flights without stopping, Chris the girl a little in the lead. Twice she glanced back at him and smiled.

“I’m going to paint this door someday,” Christine said, unlocking a door at the end of a corridor at the top

10 • Robert Lowry

of the fifth flight of stairs. “Here. I’ll turn on the light.

Come on in, Chris. Isn’t everything a mess?”

“Everything looks pretty neat, to tell you the truth, Chris.”

“If you’re really a genius,” Christine said, “I’d wish that you would open that window over there. It sticks and I never can.” Then she remembered about the arm and quickly added, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll do it, Chris.”

“That’s all right. I can do it.” And with a couple of jerks Chris got the window to open with his one good arm and there was a nice view out across the rooftops— cars and people no bigger than toys on the avenue over there. New York, New York, he thought. You incredible variety. You colossus of shrouds. I never saw the like of you, New York, he thought.

Then he smelled coffee and turned around and she had lit the stove under the coffeepot and now she was bringing cups out of a cupboard above the sink. He saw then her smile for the first time—her white young teeth and the cute curl of her red, red lips.

They drank the coffee, sitting at the kitchen table; and then they went into the other room and looked at her paintings and he thought they were good. There

The Knife • 11

were children in them; animals, some art-class nudes; and one of a young girl sitting up in bed and nude to the waist, holding a flower.

“Haven’t I seen her somewhere before?” he asked.

“I painted it sitting up in bed,” Christine said. “I mean, using a mirror, and leaving out the painting things, of course.”

In the charcoal sketches that she brought out of a big banged-up red portfolio, she showed a stronger, surer hand, perhaps—but he really liked them all—the paintings with their rather shy use of color and their sharp definition in the drawing, and the drawings too, bold and quick for a girl to do, he thought.

“There are others,” she said, and waved to some vague corner of the room. “But nothing really worth showing.”

“Have you always been an artist?”

“Always?” She laughed. “Well, no. Hardly. I mean— I’ve only really been working at it just for the past couple of years. And I’ve done some illustrating for magazines, too, and they’ve been published.”

“Have you had a show of your own yet? You know, like in a gallery?”

12 • Robert Lowry

“Well, not really. But yes I have, too. The Village Outdoor Art Show, and I even sold two paintings and it was kind of fun. Although I guess some of the people made remarks that hurt you and it rained and some of my drawings were ruined before I could cover them. But I guess I’ll do it again next year—unless a gallery takes my work and sometimes they want you exclusively and then you can’t go in the show. Did you see the show? I was on Fifth Avenue just above Eighth Street.

“No, I didn’t see it,” Chris said. “It was already over by the time I got to New York.” He picked up the painting of the girl in bed with the flower. “This is the one that I want to buy.”

“Really?” She was squinting at him mischievously.

“You do really want it?”

“Really and actually and it’s mine, all right?” And he got out his roll, quite a roll that looked real good and green there in his hand—pension check money with some of the money that he had saved during his army years thrown in. “How much?” he said.

She looked at him and then at the money he held in his hand and then at the painting.

The Knife • 13

“Well… I was asking forty dollars for it in the show.

Is that too much? But really, Chris, I didn’t bring you here to sell you anything. Really.”

And he tried to put the four ten-dollar bills in her hand, but she would not hold on to them; so he tucked the money into the breast pocket of her shirt and felt his fingers brush her breast as he did this—and saw her eyes come around wide-open and questioning to his face. He shoved the rest of the roll back into his pocket and then quietly and carefully and avoiding her eyes, picked up the picture and looked at it.

“It’s the only painting I ever bought,” he said. “The only painting I own.”

“I’m glad it’s yours—because you liked it.”

He felt her bare arm touch his forearm, and looking up he met her wide-open eyes again. He set down the picture, carefully, and took her into his arms and kissed her. She allowed him to, without resisting, and he felt her trembling with excitement against him.

But after the kiss, as he still stood holding her, she said, “it’s after three and I was supposed to be somewhere at three.”

“Don’t go yet.”

14 • Robert Lowry

“Oh, Chris, I don’t even know you.”

“I’m your friend, your patron, and your pickup and your genius. Remember me?”

“Oh, Chris—” “I know there’s a bed in the front room.”

She was panting. “I hope you don’t think I do things like this all the time.”

They went through the kitchen and into the front room and she peeled off the blue jeans but nothing else.

“I really can’t take very long,” she said. “I really am supposed to be somewhere.”

They played hardly at all, there on her little bed, but did it quickly in a quick, hard, fiery gallop and then she was on her feet again and pulling on the blue jeans.

“You can stay here,” she said, flushed, still out of breath and her eyes turned away from him. “I’ll come back. I mean, it’s really important. This painter I know is going to Europe and he’s going to sell me a wonderful easel and a lot of other things for almost nothing.”

“All right.”

“Are you going to wait for me?”

“Yes. I’ll wait,” he said.

The Knife • 15

“I’ll be back. It may be an hour.”

“All right.”

“You can have something from the refrigerator if you get hungry.”

“All right.”

She was at the kitchen door that led into the outside hall, and he was standing in the doorway that led into the kitchen from the front room where they had done it.

She smiled at him as she closed the door behind her. He listened to her footsteps fading away down the hall, and then he went back into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. It had all been very good and very quick except for her pants they had both been fully clothed. It was something to think about, all right, and he thought he was thinking about it but he was already sleeping.

The rain was hitting hard against the windowpanes when he woke up, and it was dark outside. He turned on a lamp and got up and closed the window and then saw the clock. It was nine-thirty.

Nine-thirty? In the evening? What in the world had happened to her?

16 • Robert Lowry

He went out into the kitchen and looked into the studio room where she had shown him her paintings, but she certainly wasn’t here or anywhere else in the apartment. He felt hungry and thirsty and slightly cockeyed from the quick make and the sleep and waking up in a strange apartment. In the kitchen he filled a glass with water at the sink and sat down with it at the kitchen table where they had their coffee—sitting there squintyeyed from the bright ceiling light and still only half awake, when he noticed, leaning against the wall over there by the door, an easel. That must the easel she had mentioned—and there was a note thumbtacked onto it.

Dear Chris, it said, This is from Chris. I hope you see this because I thought that you would notice the easel. I came back and you were fast asleep and so I was very quiet and you didn’t wake up even when the telephone rang—so now I think you’re a genius at sleeping, too, Chris, not to mention all the other things I think you’re a genius at, Mmm! Say no more—somebody else might see this! But anyhow, I have to go out again and so I’m leaving you this note so you won’t think something happened to me and I didn’t come back. I hope to be back by five, so wait for me or otherwise you’ll have to leave the apt. door unlocked and I don’t think that’s

The Knife • 17

a good idea—I have all kinds of neighbors! Should I wake you up after all, Chris? I just hate to wake people up—especially when they look as sweet and handsome as you do there on the bed at this moment! I should be back by five o’clock.

Love—from “THE OTHER CHRIS”!

All very nice, he thought, putting the note down on the kitchen table. And I guess I’ll wait for her even if it isn’t five o’clock but getting on towards ten.

He thought he heard her footsteps out in the hall, and he opened the door and looked out down the long gloomy yellow tenement hallway to where a feeble light bulb lit the stair landing. Nobody out there—he had been mistaken. And no telephone number on the note—nowhere to call her—so what to do? I guess I’ll wait, he thought, and closed the door again and went back into the bedroom where he had noticed some books. Running a sleepy eye over the titles in the bookcase, he finally took down a collection of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and brought it out to the kitchen and sat down and read: I will be the gladdest thing Under the sun!

18 • Robert Lowry

I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one.

It went on like that and it was a nice poem and he heard of her. She had been a Greenwich Village poet, hadn’t she—during the Nineteen Twenties? Something about burning her candle at both ends—he remembered that poem about the burning candle—probably find it somewhere in here. So he read on, liking all of them, the plainness and the ecstasy of them. They were pretty and they were feminine and they were often passionate, and he even liked the exclamation points, although there were maybe a few too many.

But he put the book away finally, back in the bookcase among Christine’s other books, and stood looking at her refrigerator wondering how long it had been since he had felt as hungry as he felt right now. He opened the refrigerator door, saw an apple, and took it and closed the door. The apple was firm and cold and clean on his teeth when he bit into it. And then he heard someone at the door, and turned around, and there she was, smiling, positively radiant as if life were all a wonderful party,

The Knife • 19

and putting her handbag on the kitchen table and saying, “Gee, I’m glad you didn’t go, Chris.”

“But it’s getting on towards midnight,” Chris said.

“Where in the world have you been?”

“Oh dear! It was all a mix-up, really. I mean, I told these friends of mine—tres gai, you known, because they’re not married but they live together—anyhow, I said I’d stop by this afternoon and how did I know they expected me for dinner? Should I have called you? I kept thinking I’d get away—and I really didn’t even think of how late it was getting. Have you been all right? I hope you got just hours and hours of wonderful sleep.”

“I did,” Chris said. “I just woke up a little while ago.

And I was hungry and ate one of your apples.”

She was smiling at him. “Aha!” she said. “You know what that means!”

Chris was just looking at her, not understanding.

“Remember what happened last time a boy took an apple from a girl.”

“What happened?”

“They had to leave Paradise.”

Chris remembered now. “But wasn’t there a serpent involved in that exchange?” Chris asked her.

20 • Robert Lowry

Christine was nodding and still smiling. “Yes,” she said. “And I’ve often wondered what they meant by that serpent. It may have been the same serpent that we got involved with a little earlier this afternoon.”

Her boldness startled Chris. She looked so fresh and young and innocent saying all of this.

“Shall we bring him out again and ask him if he’s the same one?” he said, capping her boldness with a boldness of his own.

And he saw that she was blushing now, and looking away.

“Oh Chris,” she said, “tomorrow. I’ve just got to sleep now—I’ve been running around all day, and I hardly got any sleep at all last night. Tomorrow?” she said. “We’ll make love again tomorrow. All right? Twelve o’clock.”

“All right.”

He looked around once as he went down the hall, and there was her pretty, bright-eyed, smiling face in the doorway, watching him go.

She lived in a very nest of backstreets that twisted and turned and bisected at unconventional angles—dark, rain-soaked, tenement-walled streets that led him, unknowing the way, through a real merry maze of doubtful

The Knife • 21

turns until at last he came out on the avenue all dappled with round dark mirrors of water from the quick hard autumn rain that now had stopped, thank God, or he would have been soaked through trying to find his way out of her little neighborhood.

Damn, he thought. I forgot the picture. Maybe she’ll bring it along with her tomorrow—or we’ll go back to her place and get it.

He headed past a double lane of humming and zooming shiny-wet traffic towards the green subway entrance up there, his hunger now forgotten and even the girl quickly fading behind him into memory.

There were big puddles at the bottom of the subway steps—the rainwater must have come cascading down them a half an hour ago. Christopher fed the turnstile slot a gold-colored token and went through just as a banging, blinking wall of bright windows went plunging by—the express train on the inside track and this was a local stop, this tiled, moist, shadowy cave in Greenwich Village. He watched the tunnel swallow up the last car of the express and then sat down on a bench to wait, when someone said his name.

“Grey.”

22 • Robert Lowry

Chris looked up.

“You are Chris Grey, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“So you don’t remember me, eh?” The man standing there had a familiar look all right, but still Chris couldn’t quite place him. “We were at Fort McClellan together.

Basic training, 1942. Remember now? My bunk was right next to yours.”

“That’s right,” Chris said. “I do remember you now.

Your name is Harris, isn’t it?”

“That’s pretty close. Harrison. Bill Harrison. Are you living in New York now, Grey? I remember you were from Ohio, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, I was,” Chris said, “but I’m living in New York now. How have you been getting along, Bill? I see you got back form it all, too. I often wondered what happened to you and some of the other guys after basic.”

“I made out all right, Chris,” Bill Harrison said. He gave Chris’s hand a hearty squeeze and a good big shake and then sat down on the bench beside his old army buddy. “Pretty wet evening, eh?”

“Yeah. Lucky we didn’t get caught in it an hour ago.”

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“I haven’t run into more than, oh, not even a dozen of them since I’ve been out,” Harrison said. “Gives you a peculiar sort of feeling—you know what I mean? I mean, when you were in the army you more or less know everybody around you, or had some connection with them even if it was only the uniform and maybe standing behind them in the chow line one day or another. But now I’m out and it’s real peculiar going for days without seeing anybody I know on the subways or the street. Of course, I guess it would have been different if I’d stayed back in Pennsylvania where I belong. East Stroudsburg. I knew just about everybody there. What are you doing in New York, Chris?”

“I’m just plain living here,” Chris said. I’ve got the pension and I just through I’d come up here to the big town and take a long vacation from everything.”

“I see you’re missing one of the flippers, Chris. Did you lose that one overseas?”

“Anzio Beach, 1944.”

“That was pretty rough, Chris,” Harrison said.

“Nothing like that happened to me. I mean, we all went different ways when we left basic and I guess it was just the breaks. Some got hurt, some didn’t. Some got killed

24 • Robert Lowry

and some got promoted to master sergeant. That’s the way it goes. What were you in, Chris—infantry?”

“Yeah.”

“They shipped me out to the Engineers after basic,” Harrison said. “I thought about you. Wondered what happened to you and some of the other guys. My unit, we never saw any of the real fighting. We were attached to the air force, you know, building airfields—so it was a lot of work and some real craphole places, those islands over there, you know, but not too rough, after all, compared to what some of you guys went through.”

“In the Pacific?”

“Well, after the Stateside tour that we had for about five months after basic, then they shipped us out to Casablanca, then from there to the Pacific—and you want to know something that’s the honest-to-God truth? I went through the whole damn war and never so much as heard a shot fired. I mean an enemy shot. Of course, there was the rifle range and that kind of stuff, and our own antiaircraft fire sometimes, and now that I think of it they did bomb one airfield where I was at pretty bad—the Japs did, I mean. And not that I wanted to hear any more shots fired than I did hear in these three years,

The Knife • 25

you know. I’m telling you man, I saw some of those B-29 boys come back from missions all shot up to hell and gone—that was enough for me, Chris.

When the South Ferry local came along, they stepped aboard together and sat down near the door. The doors closed with a swish of sound, and although it was impossible to talk now with the train roaring and reeling and screeching along, Bill Harrison nevertheless had his hand on Chris’s arm and seemed determined to make him understand something. “… Chambers Street …” Chris made out, looking hard at Bill Harrison and trying to read his lips. “… good party. O.K.?”

Chris was nodding, not quite sure what he was agreeing to, and when the train stopped at Houston Street and in the few moments of silence, Bill made himself clearer.

“It’s over in Brooklyn. The Heights,” Bill said. “I’d like you to meet my wife—she’ll be there—and a few other people.”

“Then you’re living over in Brooklyn now, Bill?”

“No, we’re up in Astoria. It’s this married couple, friends of ours,” Harrison managed to shout out over

26 • Robert Lowry

the swishing sound of the closing doors and the grinding forward of the train as it rammed out of the lighted station and into the dark tunnel again. “ THEIR NAME IS SMITH!” Bill was screaming now. “HE SERVES A PRETTY GOOD BRAND OF LIQUOR, CHRIS!” And Harrison winked and nudged Chris.

So Chris left the local with Bill Harrison at the Chambers Street stop, and on the other side of the platform the New Lots Avenue Express was waiting with open doors.

As the roaring, rattling train hurtled along through the long black tunnel that led under the East River to Brooklyn, Chris, sitting there beside his old Army sidekick Bill Harrison and rocking and bouncing with the jolting train just as Bill was, suddenly began to have the oddly desperate feeling that he was doing the wrong thing, and that he should not be coming along to this party of Bill’s at all but should instead have stayed on his local and gone on with it to the end of the line. If this turned out to be some sort of all-night party with a lot of drinking, how was he going to get up in time tomorrow to meet Christine at noon?

And as if in response to his doubts, his arm, his short arm that was only a sleeve, began to ache a little for the first time in many months. Yet Bill Harrison’s party invi-

The Knife • 27

tation had seemed, only a few minutes ago on the other train, a fine idea—exactly the right sort of development out of the sort of unusual day that it had been. A party.

They were on their way to a party, and somehow it felt like the first party that Chris had ever gone to, although he remembered now that there had been others—for instance that surprise party that his mother had given for him on his seventeenth birthday back in Ohio (although the people who had come had been mostly relatives and, except for the presents and the cake, it had been more like Sunday dinner with visitors around the table); and also that really smashing affair at the U.S.O. that his battalion had thrown just before embarking for Africa. But Harrison’s party sounded more like a real party; a “private” party the kind you read about in the slick-paper magazines or saw in the movies with cocktails being passed around maybe by a butler or caterer or some sort of serving maid—whatever they had—and all the men puffing away at cigarettes and getting boiled and all the women dressed to the teeth or undressed to the nipples—all those tightly silked and taffetaed backsides moving back and forth across the room all night. Well, maybe Harrison had something for him here after all, if

28 • Robert Lowry

his imagination wasn’t playing him for a sucker. All right, Chris decided, I’ll keep on to the party and I’ll leave a call in at the desk back at the hotel so I can get up in time to meet Christine tomorrow. “…” Harrison was saying, gesturing to a calling card that he had just drawn from his wallet. “…”

Chris took the card and read: 7 Dwarves Publishing Company Bizarre Novelty Company

William Cadwallader Harrison Authorized Representative

12 Caroway Street New York 5, N.Y.

Maidenhead 7-8053

“I’LL KEEP IT!” Christ shouted, waving the card and then getting his wallet out of his back pocket and shoving the card into it. And Harrison nodded and smiled, and waited until the train stopped at Borough Hall and they were walking up the steps before trying to say anything more.

“I’m a salesman for those two companies,” Bill was explaining in the really wonderful silence that was all

The Knife • 29

round then now. “And believe you me, Chris, I present some very, very interesting little items.”

“What do you mean?”

“The works,” Bill Harrison said. “You name it, man, and if it’s in that line we’ve probably got it. Let’s start with books, shall we? Books of shall we say a somewhat—er—‘off-color’ nature? And not just word books, my boy-o, but picture books, many of which are not, I hasten to add, offered openly on the counters of our various outlets across the country.”

“Nudes?” Chris asked. He saw by the wet streets that Brooklyn had had some rain too this evening.

“You said it,” Harrison told him. “Nudes and what I mean not just female nudes all alone by their lonesome, either.”

“Wow.” “Only I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, Chris,” Bill Harrison hastened to add as they crossed the street. “All of the merchandise I handle isn’t sexed up to the high heavens like that. I handle a straight line of just plain novelties, too, and a lot to the stores that I go to don’t know anything about my other under-the-counter line because they probably wouldn’t be interested in

30 • Robert Lowry

handling it and I wouldn’t take a chance on showing it to them. But we’ve got a nice line for those stores, too, like our Statue of Liberty miniatures, for instance. We sell a lot of those in the Times Square area. Sailors like to by them, you know. And tourists. That’s probably our leading item, but our stuffed toy animals are a good seller too. We’ve got a run of lions from this big”—and Bill indicated two inches with his thumb and forefingers—“to this big, three feet long.”

“How much does a lion like your big one run you retail?” Chris asked, for he had the sudden desire to own one and wake up in the morning and see it there on the hotel dresser.

“Forty-one dollars, retail, that’s what they get for that great big one,” Bill Harrison said. But I’ll get one for you for, let’s see, I think for about nineteen dollars, wholesale, Chris, if you really want one.”

“Yeah,” Chris said. “Get me one, Bill.”

“Deliver it to you tomorrow,” Bill Harrison answered.

“Personally. We turn the corner here. I sure hope my wife made it over here all right. I was checking on some of our Times Square outlets this evening and we decided to meet at the party rather than me trying to get all the

The Knife • 31

way back to Astoria to escort her, which I wouldn’t have had time to do anyhow. But look here, Chris, I don’t want to give you the idea that all we handle is the sort of cheap dirty literature that you’ve got to be ashamed of and sneak around within a plain wrapper and all that.

High class stuff—and of course in illustrated editions, to get people interested. Chaucer, Voltaire, Balzac, Boccaccio, the Marquis de Sade, Guy de Maupassant—those are some of the authors. Ever heared of any of them?

We put out some beautiful editions—and you ought to see some of those illustrations. You’ve never seen such goings on, Chris, in all your born days.”

“Yeah, I heard of them,” Chris said. “I’m just trying to remember that Boccaccio story I read recently. It’s the one about the husband who’s scared to death his wife will be unfaithful to him—you probably know it, Bill.

She’s sleeping right there beside him in bed and he’s lying awake all night worrying about whether she’ll be true to him or not. Then he finally does go to sleep and he has this dream about an angel. This angel gives him a ring and tells him that as long as he wears it on his finger his wife will be faithful. Then he wakes up—and you know where his finger is and what he has around it.”

32 • Robert Lowry

“Oh yeah!” Bill Harrison laughed. “If you’ve got that kind of a ring around your finger, she’ll have to be faithful, all right.” Bill was keeping an eye out for the right apartment house as they walked along and so he was talking a little distractedly now. “Brassieres, Chris,” he said. “You might have seen some of our brassieres in the novelty shows around town. The one with the two black hands holding up the breasts—seen that one? Well, that’s one of our numbers, and a very good little seller it is, too.

Also black nylon panties with red lace on them—we do a pretty good business in them, too. You might have seen them around in the store windows. You know, they’re decorated with words and phrases like STAGE ENTRANCE and DETOUR and NO LOITERING and MAKE MINE A HAND SANDWICH. These sound like harmless enough words, don’t they, Chris, wherever you print them. But you’d be surprised how they take on new meaning when you print them over certain areas on a pair of black nylon panties with red lace. That really peps things up.”

Chris laughed.

“Here’s our slogan,” Bill said. “ ‘What’s Good for the Bizarre Novelty Company Is Good for America.’ How do you like that? And it’s the truth, too. You know what I

The Knife • 33

mean? We amuse people—that’s it. We keep them happy and interested in life. Nothing wrong with keeping people happy and interested in life, is there, Chris? Oh, here we are,” Bill Harrison interrupted himself. “Right near the river, eh? And there’s your New York skyline over there.”

They entered a well-lighted lobby and walked towards themselves in a big mirror on the rear wall—Bill, a tall, healthy, cheerful man with a hearty pink complexion, looking prosperous in a hat and a topcoat, and Chris about the same height as Bill, but much more casually dressed and wearing no hat on his curly blond head.

“You’re going to like these people,” Bill said.

They were in the automatic elevator now, and Harrison pushed a button and the door closed and they began to go up.

“Harvey Smith is in the insurance business on Wall Street and his wife used to be a model—still does some modeling occasionally, I guess. Wait till you see her!”

When the elevator stopped, and even before the door slid open, they could heard the party. And then the door slid open and they stepped out into the hall and you could hear the party loud now.

34 • Robert Lowry

“Sounds like a big party,” Chris said. “Look, Bill, I don’t even know these people. And I’ve just been thinking, I have to get up tomorrow to keep an appointment.

You go on in and I think I’ll just go on back home, and thanks a lot for inviting me, Bill.”

“Hey, what’s the matter? Don’t get cold feed at the last minute, fellow. Come on, Chris, don’t go back in there.”

But Chris was already back in the elevator.

“Thanks a lot, Bill, just the same,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

And he let the door close and pressed the G button and the elevator began to descend. On the street outside he heard footsteps after him.

“Come on, Chris,” Bill said, taking his arm. “You don’t have to get cold feet with any of these people— they’re just a nice friendly crowd. Come on now—up to the party with both of us! You’re going to like it, Chris, I promise you that. You can’t tell, we might even get a little poker game going. O.K.?”

So Chris went back with Bill Harrison, through the same front entrance, up on the same automatic elevator, and into a big living room where the big, booming,

The Knife • 35

roaring, tinkling party was in progress. There were some pretty women around the room—standing, sitting, laughing with their heads thrown back, sipping at their drinks and exposing a good deal of frontage in a variety of blooms and exposures. At first glance all of the women looked young to him—they might all somehow have been sisters of the same age, perhaps thirty; while the men, short and tall, thin and fat, ruddy and fair, talkative and silent, looked a wide variety of ages. There were a lot of people in this room, and he saw that the party extended on through into another room. It occurred to him that there must be a hundred people here, all told, and Chris found himself on his own with them, for Bill Harrison, who had been so all-fired insistent that Chris come along up here with him, disappeared into the wild and woolly depths of the party almost immediately, and although Chris saw him in the crowded, smoke-blue distances of the room occasionally as the evening progressed, he never got near enough to him to exchange more thank a wink. It was that kind of party. It was a crush and jam of people—increasingly so as new arrivals came in and nobody left. And sparking all this boom and roar was the high shrill laughter of the women and the

36 • Robert Lowry

trembling and turning and swinging and swaying of their brassiere-upholstered breasts as they devastated their audience with looks and yelps and little twists to one side or another, and sipped at their sweating glasses of liquor, and plucked the pretty party snacks from a tray that passed around the rooms in the hand of the most elegantly dressed man here, an elderly servant in a white shirt and a black suit and black bow tie and thin, pointed patent-leather shoes. This solemnly engaged fellow alternated between passing the drinks and collecting the empty glasses and passing the trayful of parti-colored hors d’oeuvres. These were considerably larger than the five o’clock cocktail party size, and included items as ambitious as hot pastrami sandwiches and potato salad.

And he kept Chris well supplied. It was midnight and then it was two o’clock in the morning, Chris saw on his wristwatch. And what were they all talking about?

What had he been talking about and listening to for over two hours? Innumerable faces had grouped themselves around him and then disappeared as the party shifted and flowed through the rooms and out onto a fine big terrace that looked away over the river and the harbor and the dark fingers and twinkling heights of New York

The Knife • 37

over there. Chris liked it best out here. The Scotch in his highball glass was the best, and there were fewer people and he could stand over here to one side of the concrete railing and look out.

And he was getting drunk. Getting drunk, and he knew it, and it was a new kind of drunkenness, not the same at all as drinking alone in his hotel room or in the bars around the town. It was an elegant, big warm drunkenness that hugged him during those hours around midnight in a big warm happiness. Who cared about these women? All of them were married, he thought. They couldn’t mean anything to him. He had his girl. He had found her today and would see her tomorrow again, at high noon. And what a pretty, vital little girl she was, too. And she gave it to me on the first day we met, Chris thought, standing out there alone on the dark terrace. I wonder if she’s really as much in love with me as I am with her at this moment? Probably sleeping, he decided.

Probably sleeping in that little bed of hers in the front room at this moment. And tomorrow at noon when I see her, I’m going to tell her that I love her. That’s what I’m going to do. We might even get married, Chris thought.

Wouldn’t that be something, if I’d found my wife today.

38 • Robert Lowry

“We’re going downstairs for a little show, Chris.” It was Bill Harrison who had come up beside him. “Come on along.”

“Where?” Chris asked. “I ought to be getting along back home, Bill.”

“Just the apartment downstairs,” Bill told him. “You’ll get a kick out of this. Just a little something to liven up the evening for a few of us.”

Chris went along with Bill, out through the crowded living room, and they took the elevator down one floor.

Bill knocked at an apartment door, and a Negro, whom Chris took for a servant, opened it.

“It’s all right,” Bill said. “He’s with me. It hasn’t started yet, has it?”

“No. We got the lights off, but it hasn’t started yet,” the Negro answered. “They’re all in here. I kept two seats for you near the door.”

“Now, when we get in here, Chris, just slip into a seat and don’t say a word,” Bill told Chris. “Then the lights will come on in a minute and you’ll see what I mean.”

“O.K.,” Chris said.

The Negro opened a door for them, indicated two chairs just inside the door, and they sat down, while

The Knife • 39

the Negro closed the door after them, letting them sit in here in pitch-blackness with the dozen or so other people whom Chris had caught a glimpse of before the door closed.

“Pretty dark in here,” Chris whispered.

But all Bill answered was, ‘Shhh.”

And except for a cough or a clearing of the throat from here and there around the room, they sat in silence, waiting.

Then Chris heard another door open and close, and two pairs of naked feet walking across the floor. There was a squeaking sound. Sounds like they’re getting into bed, Chris thought. Now there was a giggle, and a girl’s voice saying, “Oh!” and a squeal.

Then a brilliant spotlight from the ceiling flashed on, momentarily blinding Chris so that at first he was only vaguely aware of people from the party upstairs sitting on chairs around the room, and a bed in the middle of the room. On the bed in the act of ardent sexual intercourse were a blue-black, kinky-haired Negro and a pretty white girl, both of them stark naked, the Negro on top of the white girl and the girl with her legs and arms wrapped around him and her pretty little rosebud

40 • Robert Lowry

of a mouth completely enveloped and lost in his heavylipped kiss which he had fastened to her mouth as he pumped away at her. A kind of panting of passion came from the group assembled around the bed, and Chris thought his eyes were going to bug right out of his head.

Then he heard a cry come from his own mouth as he recognized the girl. It was Christine.

“Sit down, Chris! Sit down!” Bill was whispering furiously. But Chris was on his feet, and only Bill’s strong hands, grabbing him from behind, stopped him form going towards the bed. “Something like this always happens at one of these things. What’s the matter with you, Chris? Let’s get out of here,” Bill was saying; and he was on his feet too now, and still holding on to Chris with one hand.

Everyone in the room was looking at Chris and Bill instead of the couple on the bed, and even the couple on the bed had heard the noise and stopped their sensual gallop to look around. For a single moment before Bill got Chris turned around and headed towards the door, Christine, white and naked and entangled notoriously with the black Negro on the bed, looked up at him from under the Negro’s chin and their eyes met. And a feel-

The Knife • 41

ing of such absolute blind hate as he had never known before for another person left him limp and will-less, so that it was no trouble at all for Bill to turn him around and lead him out of the room.

“Come on, Chris, let’s go back upstairs and get ourselves a drink. We need one after that, eh?” Bill was trying his best to be jovial about it all. “What happened in there? I didn’t know you were prejudiced like that, Chris. Was that it? I mean, the Negro angle to it?”

“I don’t know what I am,” Chris answered when they were outside in the hall and waiting for the elevator to come up. “But I know that girl on the bed. I met her this afternoon.”

“Well, you never know about a girl, Chris—especially one who you just met this afternoon,” Bill told him, opening the elevator door. “Where’d you meet her? In Greenwich Village?”

“I was just coming from her place when I ran into you. She’s an artist. I bought one of her paintings this afternoon.”

“Oh, she’s an artist all right, Chris!” Bill laughed. “I thought she was showing off a lot of talent down there in that bedroom, didn’t you? So the best thing, Chris, is

42 • Robert Lowry

just to forget it—I mean if what you just saw her doing bothers you so much. You look a little pale, old buddy.

How about a nightcap? One for the road, O.K.?”

They took the elevator up one floor and once more entered the tinkle and jam of the party. “Now enjoy that,” Bill said, coming back from the kitchen with a good big drink of whiskey for Chris. “And don’t give what you saw downstairs another thought— O.K.?” Bill looked around.

“Oh, there’s somebody over there I’ve got to talk to, Chris. Circulate a little bit—plenty of pretty women here, eh?—I’ll see you in a little bit.”

Chris walked out onto the terrace again with his drink. He took a burning mouthful of the whiskey, thinking, It doesn’t matter now how late I get to bed this morning. There’s nothing to get up for now.

He became aware that a woman had come up and was standing beside him in the darkness.

“Mm. A warm autumn night,” she said finally.

“Yes, it’s pretty sight down there.”

“Enjoying the party?”

Her voice sounded so close to his ear that Chris glanced at her, but she was still standing a couple of feet away from him. Her eyes twinkled and burned, smiling at

The Knife • 43

him through the darkness, and he saw the smiling “O.K.?” curve of her red lips. She was stylishly thin and quite as tall as he was; rather angular of feature, but a handsome and aggressive-looking woman.

“This is sure some party all right,” Chris answered— and was surprised to feel her light cool touch on his hand.

“Look.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “I’ll show you one.”

Chris did not know how his new acquaintance got her dress open in that winking of an eye—perhaps she had only been holding it closed with her hand as she talked to him. And there she was, stark naked in the frame of the open dress, her breasts bursting forth to him, rose-budded both of them, and the dark triangle of her hair revealed. She laughed, and as he glanced up into her eyes to see why she laughed, she closed and buttoned her dress again with two or three adroit little twists of her fingers.

“Yes, young man, you’re so right. It is a beautiful view from here, isn’t it?”

She was leaning slightly against him, but he decided not to put his arm around her, somehow dismayed both

44 • Robert Lowry

by what she had just done and by the wedding band and engagement ring on her left hand.

“Just think,” she went on, “that little green light going by down there in the darkness is a tugboat. Did I shock you? I do so like to shock handsome young men.”

Chris laughed—a short dry little laugh—a sort of nervous reaction not only to what she had just done with her dress but to all that had happened to him today.

“You know, I might not be talking this way if I hadn’t had at least five of these.” She raised her glass. “Aren’t you even going to tell me your name—now that we’re acquainted?”

She was still leaning against him—and once more he had the odd inspiration to laugh. But he did not laugh.

Instead he told her his name, Christopher Grey, in all seriousness. And when she did not respond by supplying her own name, he asked for it.

“My dear young man, believe it or not my name is Honey Bunch.”

“Really?”

“Well—almost. You say ‘Really?’ with such sincerity that I’ll have to confess that while my first name is Honey, my last name is Bonege—but if you say them to-

The Knife • 45

gether quickly, it does sound like Honey Bunch, don’t you think?”

Chris nodded, gazing at her and hardly knowing what to make of this—was it Miss or Mrs.?—Honey Bonege.

“And how that we’re the best of friends, Mr. Christopher Grey—why don’t we leave their noisy old party and go somewhere and have a nice quiet nightcap together—all right? I haven’t frightened you, have I?” She was positively nudging Chris as she said this—so close up against him now that he could not think of anything better to say than, “Where are we going?”

“Oh—somewhere! So many places to have another drink, you know. Nice quiet places. All right, Christopher? Coming along?”

Chris laughed. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

She took his hand, squeezing it tightly and actually leading him in through the big noisy room. He was surprised to see, in here under the lights, that her hair had a tint of red to it.

The man whom she led Chris up to had a neat black mustache embellishing a hearty suntan. “Chris, dear, I want you to meet my dear jolly old better half . . .”

46 • Robert Lowry

She said her husband’s name, but it was lost in the blurring noise of the room; and Chris shook hands with whatever-his-first-name-was and the three of them squeezed their way on out through the tight thickets of party stay-all-nights to the quieter hall outside where Honey Bonege pressed a button and they stood waiting for the elevator to come up. Chris sure hoped it was O.K. with old Bonege over there—the way she kept tight hold of his hand and stood so close against him like this.

It was more of the same and something extra in the taxicab they took across the bridge and into Manhattan.

She was necking with Chris something fierce in the cab and her hands were all over him, and old Bonege was just sitting over there staring out the window at the East River as if his wife and her new-found friend were not even here. The cab stopped at the curb somewhere on the Upper East Side, and Chris paid the fare, and the three of them went up on the elevator to the Boneges’ apartment. Bonege was plastered; that much was plain.

He had not said a word all the way over here in the cab, and he went on keeping his silence now that they were at home. All he did was to take himself a stiff drink of whiskey and go on in to bed.

The Knife • 47

“Not on the couch,” Honey Bonege said. “Come on in here.”

“But he’s in there.”

“He’s sleeping—can’t you hear him?”

That tight hot long-fingered hand of hers was drawing him into the bedroom; and then she was kissing him as she unbuttoned him, and they were down on the bed close to the bulk of Bonege and his snoring. And at first the lovemaking went all right—she went about it with a quiet, trembling intensity, kissing him as she played with him, and then drawing him into her with a little kicking thrust of her pelvis. But as she locked herself against his galloping thrust, her emotions seemed to loosen and come burbling and whimpering out of her. “Oh, Al!” she was crying—and Chris knew her husband’s name at last.

“Oh, I wish you were Al! I wish you were Al! I want Al! I love only Al! Oh please be Al! Al! Al! Al! “Thanks,” Chris said, rolling out of bed and fumbling for his clothes in the dark. “Thanks a lot, Honey, from the bottom of Al’s heart.”

“But you came, didn’t you?” she whispered.

“Ha,” Chris said. He could not find his other shoe—but then he found it and put it on. “Sure. I came. And it was wonderful.”

48 • Robert Lowry

And he left her there on the bed in the darkness with her dear and darling Al whom apparently she adored so much, and went out of the apartment and down on the elevator and out into the warm, moist autumn night—wide awake now, and the day’s and night’s series of adventures curdling and choking into something that stood apart from him in grotesque outline—grotesque and somehow wildly humorous.

Before he saw a cruising taxicab and hailed it, he had walked all the way to Park Avenue. And the moment he was seated in the cab and pouring downtown over the smooth macadam, his grotesquely humorous picture of today’s events was suddenly extinguished and replaced by a sharp sense of having lost something or forgotten something. The cab had already turned off into the Battery before he was able to identify what it was. It was that picture he had bought from Christine this afternoon. She still had the picture and she had the forty bucks he had given her for it. All right, he thought, I want either the picture or the forty bucks, one of the two. I’ll be there tomorrow at noon at that sandwich shop to meet her. And if she isn’t there, I’ll go over to her place.

The Knife • 49

He felt his hate for her like a hot hard knot in his head as he paid the cab driver and turned and walked into his little hotel.

“Can you give me a ring at eleven o’clock?” he asked the desk clerk.

“O.K., Mr. Grey,” the desk clerk said sleepily as he handed Chris his room key. “Eleven o’clock it is.”

The Negro elevator operator took Chris up to his floor, and when he was inside his room Chris saw through the window that the sky was already lightening and the night was over. He took off his clothes quickly and got into bed— To awaken, it seemed only the winking of an eye later, and it was broad daylight and the telephone was ringing and somebody was knocking on the door. Calling out, “Wait a minute!” Chris reached for the telephone and the desk clerk downstairs said in his ear, “It’s one o’clock, sir.”

“One o’clock?” Chris said. “But I left a call for eleven o’clock.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Grey. It looks like one o’clock on the call slip and that’s all I had to go by.”

“O.K.,” Chris said. He was still too sleepbound to be much annoyed.

50 • Robert Lowry

He hung up the telephone, got out of bed wearing just his shorts, and went to the door and opened it.

Bill Harrison, beaming, was standing there, and under his arm was the biggest stuffed toy lion that Chris had ever seen.

“Greetings, salutations, and make way for the presentation. I’ve come to lionize you, no less,” Bill said.

“You of the quick fade-out last night. What in the world happened to you, Chris? You were there and then it seemed like I looked around and you were gone.”

“I went out for a drink with a couple of people,” Chris said. “I didn’t see you around when I left.”

“Well, you know these big parties,” Bill said.

“Anyhow, Chris, here’s your lion. How do you like it? Incidentally, it’s one of my samples so take it with my compliments—no charge! There you are, Chris.

You look just like Frank Buck now. Christopher Grey, Tamer of the Lions. Consider yourself lionized now, Soldier Grey.”

“Well, gee whiz, Bill, I can’t just take this lion for nothing.” Chris put the lion down on the dresser and got some money out of his pocket. “Come on now, Bill, how much did you say it would be?”

The Knife • 51

“Put it away, boy. Put it away,” Bill Harrison said.

“And my advice is never look a gift lion in the mouth.”

“Man, this one has got his wide-open.”

“It closes, too,” Bill said, and reached over and closed the lion’s mouth. “A couple of things I forgot, though, Chris. I meant to bring you down a pair of those crazy panties I was telling you about last night; also a nice little selection of literature, including our edition of the Boccaccio stories, and I was away from the office and all I had handy was the lion.”

“Man, that’s some lion.”

“So I’ve got to be running along now, Chris, but I’ll bring you down the other stuff in a day or two and maybe we’ll have a few together. O.K.?”

“Sure thing, Bill. I don’t know how to thank you for the lion.”

And as Bill went out the door, Chris began putting on his clothes. Maybe she’ll still be there, he thought. Or maybe she overslept too. After all, she had quite a day herself yesterday.

A

s Chris crossed West Eighth Street a half-an-hour or so later, he could see in through the big front

52 • Robert Lowry

window of the Griddle Shop and Christine was not there.

But he went on in anyhow, and ordered a cup of coffee, and asked the counterman if a girl had been in here waiting for someone during the past hour and a half.

“A girl waiting for someone?” the counterman said.

“That’s all we’ve got in here all day is girls waiting for somebody. Sure, there’s been plenty of girls in here so far today, waiting around, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Chris said. “This one is kind of pretty.

Has brown hair, brown eyes, medium height. About and hour and a half ago.”

The counterman stood staring at him. “As a matter of fact,” he said. “I think maybe that one was in here. Yeah.

About an hour and a half ago. Noontime. Yeah, that might have been her. She waited around here for about a halfan-hour—ate a piece of pie and drank a couple of cups of coffee and kept looking out the window like she was waiting for somebody. Maybe waitin’ for you, huh?”

“Sounds like her. Did she say anything about coming back?”

“Didn’t say nothing to me,” the counterman said.

“What’s all this about? Were you supposed to meet her here or something?”

The Knife • 53

“Yeah. Only I’m a little late, and now what am I going to do?”

“Well, why don’t you call her up? Maybe she went on back home or something.”

“Have you got a telephone book?

“Back there.” The counterman pointed to the telephone booths at the back of the restaurant with this thumb.

It was only then that Chris realized that he did not know Christine’s last name. He grinned almost guiltily at the counterman. “Oh well, she’ll turn up without me calling her, I guess,” he told the counterman. “Thanks a lot, anyhow.”

Outside on the street he stood pensively, trying to collect his thoughts as the cars and trucks clattered and banged along. Now where exactly was that street of hers? he wondered. Over that way, wasn’t it?

He did not know the name of the street and had only the vaguest sense of which direction it lay in. He had seen Seventh Avenue from her apartment window—he did remember that much about it. But that much did not really help much.

54 • Robert Lowry

I’ll find her, he thought. I’ll find her if it’s the last thing I do. And he just started wandering—in and out of a maze of Greenwich Village streets—always thinking that that doorway up ahead must be hers—but it never was.

Two hours went by in this way, and he felt that he must have been on every street in Greenwich Village more than once this afternoon—when suddenly he saw the Negro.

The Negro came out of the apartment house halfway up the block, and Chris recognized him immediately as the Negro who had been on that bed last night with Christine.

The Negro was walking away up the street, and Chris continued on until he got to the doorway, where he stopped and stood studying it. That looks like it, he thought. We’ll see if her name is on the mailbox in the hall.

He saw her name almost immediately, written on one of the card slots in pen-and-ink: Christine Lust

It was apartment 20. Chris started up the stairs.

The Knife • 55

When he got to the top of the fifth flight of stairs he was breathing heavily, and he hesitated a moment before he went down the hall and knocked at her door.

“Who is it?” she called.

“It’s—me,” Chris said.

He heard her turning the bolt and then he saw her eye as she opened the door a crack.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said—and sort of laughed. A lock of hair hung over her eye. She was wearing an orange kimono and her feet were bare. “All right, I guess you can come in. I’m not dressed or anything. Sorry I stood you up.”

“I guess you slept late, eh?” Chris said as she closed the door behind him. “Busy night last night?”

She looked away from him, the smile still lingering on her lips. “I never expected to see you there,” she said.

“You can imagine my surprise.”

“Yeah, I guess I can,” Chris said. “And you can imagine mine, too. Why did you do that?”

“I’ve done it before. It’s one way to make a living, isn’t it?”

“But how did you get the job? How did they get you to do it?”

56 • Robert Lowry

She shrugged her shoulders. He saw the kimono edging away from her bare white breasts. “You ask too many questions,” she said. “What did you come back here to see me for, if you didn’t like it?”

“Just curiosity,” Chris said. “That’s why I want to know how they got in contact with you to do a thing like that. Come on. Tell me.”

“There’s an agency—a model agency. They book things like that, too, and you can leave your name with them.”

“And the Negro?”

She smiled at him. “Well, now, maybe he left his name with the agency too.”

“You’re lying,” Chris said. “I know you’re lying because I just now saw that Negro leaving this apartment house. He was coming form here, wasn’t he?”

He took her by the arm when she did not answer.

“After the public session with him over there in Brooklyn Heights, you came back here and had a private session with him in your own bed. Is that right?”

“So what if it is right? What’s it to you? You’re nothing to me.”

The Knife • 57

“Nothing?” Chris said, staring at her with hatred.

“Nothing? I was something to you yesterday, though, wasn’t I?” She shrugged her pretty shoulders. “What was that?” she said. “Just a little wild idea that we had, wasn’t it?”

“But you seemed so innocent yesterday. You even said—something about that you didn’t do things like that every day, or hoped I didn’t think you did, or something like that.”

“Do I have to remember what I said yesterday or any other day? I don’t even know you and here you are trying to quiz me about my personal life. You act like you’re a detective.”

“But you are an artist, aren’t you?” Chris asked, almost pleading with her now to be the girl he had thought she was.

She gave him shrewd look out of the corners of her eyes. There was something Oriental about that look, and about her strange, crooked little smile, too.

“Oh, so that’s what you came back about—the picture. Ha! Well, you can have your picture or you can have your lousy forty bucks. Which will it be?”

58 • Robert Lowry

He felt himself standing somewhere far out in a white sky of time. The picture or the money? Her question enraged him. On the sink beside him was a butcher knife.

Without thinking twice about it—acting automatically and almost as if the knife had been placed there on the sink for this very purpose—he picked it up and plunged it into Christine Lust’s belly.

She opened her lips, as if to speak, as she stared at him. But she said not a word, and her eyes rolled up into her head, showing blind whites, as she crumpled down onto the floor with a surprisingly light thud, lying there now without moving, in a twisted, angular position and her face turned half down to the linoleum. Her blood came widening out from her body in a dark-red pool.

Chris took a small towel from a rack by the sink, wiped his fingerprints from the knife which he was still holding, and dropped it on her body. He opened the door with the towel, also to avoid leaving his fingerprints, and then tossed the towel into the pool of blood just before he closed the door behind him.

There was no one in the hall or on the flights of stairs, and even the street outside was deserted at the moment he left the building.

The Knife • 59

Get out of this neighborhood and go up to Times Square and take in a movie, he thought. Now there’s an alibi. Maybe I’ll make some sort of remark to the cashier at the ticket window so she’ll remember me in case I need her for the alibi. Or no, better not, she might note the time and that could prove me a liar. Well look what I’ve done! I’ve come out on Seventh Avenue just as I did the last time I was at Christine’s apartment, yesterday!

I seem to have been unconsciously following the same track— He was just starting down the steps into the subway station when he noticed the bright red spot of blood on the front of his shirt. I’ve been walking along the streets showing that! he thought, covering it now with his hand and finding that this just barely hid it. Had someone seen it who could later point him out? There was no way of knowing, but he had to get rid of this shirt, for it was just possible that he might be picked up at any time and certainly that spot of blood would be hard to explain—and might even lead to his getting picked up.

Not the subway, he thought. Too many people will have the chance to see that I’m trying to cover up something.

60 • Robert Lowry

He came back up the steps and standing at the curb he hailed a taxicab. It glided over to a stop and he got in, still holding his hand over the bloodstain. Not the Battery, he though. I’ll have to go somewhere where nobody knows me and buy a shirt. “Yorkville,” he said to the taxicab driver, saying the first neighborhood that came into his mind.

Twenty-five minutes later he discharged the taxicab at East Eighty-Sixth Street and Third Avenue and walked into a men’s haberdasher. There were shirts stacked by size on a table at the front of the store, and before either of the salesmen standing at the back of the store could come forward, Chris had found a shirt in his size and gotten out the money for it, so that by the time the salesman came up he was able to hand over both shirt and money without saying a word, and more or less still concealing the spot of blood with the gesture and with a quick, reassuring smile to engage the salesman’s attention.

And the salesman apparently noticed nothing, but merely concerned himself with putting the shirt into a bag and ringing up the sale. Chris kept the bloody side of himself turned slightly away from the salesman as

The Knife • 61

he took the package, and immediately he put it under his stump of arm, and concealed the spot of blood that way—so that for the moment the purchase was a success even without putting on the new shirt. He then went down the street to a movie house, bought a ticket, and went inside to the men’s room, where he locked himself in a toilet and put on the new shirt.

But what to do with the old one? It seemed too dangerous to leave it here with that bloodstain on it.

And it seemed equally dangerous to take it with him—in case they were looking for him and found him with this damning piece of evidence. Finally he decided to wash out the blood as best as he could in the toilet bowl. But although the water in the toilet turned red from his efforts, the stain in the shirt remained. He put the shirt into the paper bag, flushed the toilet, and left the lounge.

A few minutes later, still carrying the incriminating shirt in the paper bag, he was riding the express train downtown to Grand Central Terminal, where he got off, went out on the street, and dropped the sack with the bloody shirt in it into a trashcan.

It’s done, he thought, walking back down into the subway. It’s done. And this little phrase, “It’s done,”

62 • Robert Lowry

seemed to numb all his thinking, so that from the time he boarded the train at Grand Central Terminal until he arrived back in the Battery, Chris had no thoughts at all to speak of and time seemed to stop. Lying fully clothed here on the bed in his hotel room, he fell asleep, and for five hours he slept the dull dead sleep of the very guilty or the very innocent. It was nine o’clock in the evening and already dark when he awoke.

Chris turned on the bedside lamp, took off his shirt, and with a razor blade cut the label from the inside of the collar of his new shirt. He made a special trip down the hall to the toilet just to flush the label—and as he came back into his room and locked the door behind him, he felt a curious sense of sudden safety, now that even the evidence of where he had bought the shirt was destroyed. I haven’t got an alibi, he thought. No really good airtight alibi. Just the alibi that I didn’t see Christine Lust today and that I spent the day here and there around New York. Yes, I was in the Village. Yes, I was in Yorkville. No, I wasn’t anywhere around Grand Central Terminal (that might connect me up with my bloody shirt, if they find it). But the main thing is, they won’t

The Knife • 63

even suspect me! They won’t even guess that I so much as knew Christine Lust.

And then he remembered Bill Harrison.

Bill Harrison knows that I knew her because I told him so last night— And if they run her picture in the paper and Bill recognizes her as the same girl— Chris went over and played with the fuzzy ear of the stuffed toy lion that Bill had brought down to him earlier today. Bill and that counterman at the Griddle Shop— they’re the only two people who can establish my connection with her, Chris thought. So I’d better pull myself together and get a pretty definite alibi. The movie was a good idea after all—but they’ll probably ask me what the pictures were and what they were about. I’ll have to take in a movie tonight and find out, that’s all.

And so Chris went up to Times Square that evening on the subway, sat dutifully through two feature-length films plus a newsreel and a cartoon comedy, and came out again into a Forty-Second Street that was almost as bright as day with all the lights of its signs and movie houses, and still crowded with people. He bought copies of the News and the Mirror at a newsstand and was glad

64 • Robert Lowry

to see that Christine Lust’s murder was not in the frontpage headlines on either paper. But sitting on the subway train that was taking him back to the Battery, he found short items about the discovery of the body inside both papers. It seemed that the blood had soaked through the floor into the apartment underneath and the superintendent of the building had opened the door of Christine’s apartment and found her body. There was a photograph of Christine in the News. Yet apparently the police had not yet decided whether her death was a murder or a suicide. They called it “possible homicide.”

Chris shoved the newspapers into a trashcan outside the subway station, and went home to bed. But it was after five o’clock in the morning before he finally got to sleep.

During the days that followed, Christopher had no calls from the police and he could find no more items in the newspapers about Christine Lust’s death. Perhaps they wrote it off as a suicide, he decided. Or maybe they’re just laying low on it since they don’t have any clues. In either case I’m probably safe now and it’s going to be all right.

The Knife • 65

For more than two weeks he stayed away from Christine’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, but then one day he decided that he had nothing more to fear and went back there, merely staying away from the Griddle Shop on West Eighth Street where he had met her, and away from the immediate streets around her apartment house. He felt free now, and almost without fear. Partly this was the result of a curious illusion that was taking hold of him.

It almost seemed to him at times that Christine Lust was still alive.

He would be standing in a bar, having a glass of beer and listening vaguely to a popular tune playing from the jukebox, apparently thinking and doing nothing much— yet his eye would be wandering out across the faces of the other customers to the passing crowd on the street outside, and he would realize suddenly that he was looking for Christine. Or he would come to in the morning, in that little hotel room of his down by the water, thinking, Yes, that’s it! There were two steps leading into the entrance of the building—I remember the two steps. I’ve got to remember those two steps. It’s a building with two steps in front of it.

66 • Robert Lowry

In a moment he had come fully awake with the realization that it was no longer necessary for him to remember Christine’s apartment house, for he had found it on that fatal day.

One afternoon he came back to his hotel to find Bill Harrison waiting for him in the little lobby. Bill seemed as smiling and as cheerful as ever as he got up from one of the lobby’s worn old leather chairs. He doesn’t know a thing about it, Chris thought. He probably didn’t even read that she was dead.

“Just dropped by to see how you were getting along, Chris,” Bill said.

“Good to see you, Bill,” Chris said, shaking hands.

“I’d invite you up to the room, but I don’t have a thing to drink up there. How about letting me buy you one over here in the bar, Bill?”

“No, I just have a minute—I have an appointment uptown at four-thirty. Here, I brought you some of those books I was telling you about. He put a package in Chris’s hands and then, leaning forward so that he was whispering into Chris’s ear, he added, “And oh by the way, old buddy, here are those panties I promised you, too.”

The Knife • 67

Before Chris even had the chance to thank him, Bill was walking away out of the lobby with a wave of his hand and a “So long, Chris. I’ll be seeing you soon!”

Chris took the two packages that Bill had given him up to his room and opened them there. There were four books—The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, Ball-ofFat by Guy de Maupassant, The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde, and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller—and all four of them were illustrated in a voluptuous woodcut style of drawing by an artist with the somewhat unlikely name of Rover Fauna. The panties, in the other package, where exactly as Bill had described them yesterday.

Chris put the panties on the big stuffed toy lion, which sat on the dresser, and he stacked the books on the bedside table and read them when he could not sleep.

There were many nights now when he hardly read at all, and it was suddenly dawn and he was still reading …

T

he longing that Chris felt for his victim was akin to the longing of love—especially a frustrated love where the lover can never hope to see his beloved again. Everyone knows that often the frustrated lover will emulate his lost beloved in order to be closer to her if only spiri-

68 • Robert Lowry

tually. Chris, caught up in his longing for the deceased artist, enrolled in an art school early in December. The girl, the crime, and the unrecovered painting that he had bought from her were all clues to his motives for doing this.

Christopher’s tuition was paid by the Government under a National program that provided ex-servicemen with four years of education in the schools of their choice; and while Christopher in the past had not planned to take advantage of this, he found that the sketching and the painting involved him and distracted him from the vaporous days of looking and longing that his life had become since the murder. Chris made no attempt to get to know the other students at the art school, but worked industriously, learning all that he could from his instructor and applying ideas of his own whenever he had them.

Just after the beginning of the new year he rented a big barnlike loft on Bleecker Street and went to work there every day as punctually as a businessman with an office. His art classes were all in the afternoon so that now with his mornings working alone in his studio in Greenwich Village and his afternoons working and learn-

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ing with the group at the art school, he found that his days were completely dominated by art, and the ghost of Christine Lust was beginning to fade.

And no question about it, Christopher Grey was talented—a genius, in truth. He had guessed right about himself when he had told Christine, that first day, that he was a genius. He was daring with his color and strong and positive in his line. From his years as an infantry soldier in Africa and Europe, he had brought back something special. That special something was the white he worked into even his most somber nudes and night scenes, giving them the chalky, whitish look of masonry in Algeria and Tunisia and Southern Italy—an originally classic atmosphere that even his instructor could not quite define—that chalky white tufa-rock tone and texture that even great painters in the past had mistaken for the play of sunlight.

Occasionally Bill Harrison would look in on Chris at his studio. Always cheerful and enthusiastic, Bill showed great interest in Chris’s painting, and he especially liked a huge canvas taller than a man and as wide as a couch that showed, in a blue-black vastness softened by Christopher’s chalky-white effect, American troops wading

70 • Robert Lowry

ashore from landing barges under cover of darkness.

Christopher felt a certain pride in this work; yet in spite of its size it had not been a difficult painting for him to carry out. Tiny inverted-pot helmets suggested soldiers by the thousands; the beachhead shore was simply a scrubless sandy reach of beach; and the water through which the soldiers were wading was a blackish scalloped shine of water that had oddly been more difficult to paint true than anything else in the picture. In the darker righthand side of the canvas, you could see the black bulk of American destroyers and battleships and troop transports gathered in rendezvous as the troops went in. A dark, dead, breathless calm hung over the entire scene, and old Bill Harrison just stood there in Christopher’s studio, staring at it.

“You know what?” Bill said. “I never saw a picture yet where I can hear the guns like I can in this one—and the crazy thing is that there’s not a gun firing!”

“It turned out to be a kind of delayed-action bomb that I fixed up,” Chris said.

“I guess it sort of makes you imagine shooting.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I imagined while I was painting it, Bill. Anyhow, this one’s yours, if you like it.”

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“But I couldn’t take your painting, Chris.”

“Sure you can. I mean, if you want it at all, well, it’s yours. You gave me a lot of things and wouldn’t let me pay for them. O.K.?”

Bill looked at him with a crinkly-eyed smile. “O.K., Chris,” he said. “And let’s hope that you paint a lot more.

I really think you’re good, you know.”

“I’m still an amateur,” Chris said. “I know that. I’m just getting started. But it may all come to something.”

“Yes,” Bill said. “Well, let’s hope that it does, Chris.

Anyhow, I think that it will from the looks of what you’ve done so far. These things are daring, you know that?”

Bill motioned to a dozen of Christopher’s paintings that stood around the studio on tables and chairs and the floor.

“But what do you mean, they’re daring?” Chris asked Bill. He had read this word “daring” in art criticism occasionally, but he was not sure how it applied to the work that he was doing.

“I mean,” Bill explained, “that you’re not afraid to attack your subject matter. You go at it like a real professional, painting whatever you feel and think about. No

72 • Robert Lowry

pussyfooting around. It’s just like you’ve been drawing and painting all your life.”

“Well, I used to draw a lot when I was a kid,” Chris admitted, a bit flattered by Bill Harrison’s estimate of his work. “You know, just with a pencil or colored crayons.

And sometimes I painted with watercolors, too.”

“You can see that. I just hope you’ll never give it up, now that you’ve started. Go right ahead the way you’re going, Chris. I think you’re really good.”

And a few days later when Chris and Bill Harrison took the big painting of the beachhead at night up to Bill’s apartment in Astoria, and hung at one end of the living room, they found that it all but covered the wall.

“Where is this?” Bill’s wife Charmaine wanted to know.

“It’s anywhere,” Chris told her. “It’s a little like Anzio, maybe, but actually it isn’t really anywhere in particular. I was in on quite a few invasions, and I just made it up.”

Charmaine Harrison went ahead studying the painting, pertly engrossed there with her hands on her hips.

“But didn’t they catch cold, getting all wet in the water like that?” she asked finally in all innocence, glancing around at Chris with wide hazel eyes.

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Chris and Bill both smiled.

“That’s what soldiers are for,” Bill said. “They’re supposed to get wet, Charm. Come on, now, let’s the three of us get a little wet ourselves with some martinis.”

And they toasted Christopher Grey’s invasion with their beaded, brimming, sunlit martini glasses.

I

f Christopher often painted ominous and even violent scenes, this was hardly surprising, for he wore the mark of violence in the arm that had been shortened in Italy during the war; and moreover an act of violence had helped to turn him to painting in the first place. Also, the great city itself did nothing to temper this explainable inclination of his for violent subject matter. There was a harsh impatience, a violent anxiety, even in the way that drivers shifted gears in New York City. And more than merely gear-shifting announced the big town’s temper.

Taking a walk late one afternoon, Christopher came out on Fifth Avenue and saw a huge crowd gathered in the street—everyone gawking skywards at a naked blonde girl standing on an apartment house roof. When Christopher saw her she was just peeling off the last of her clothes, a black brassiere, and tossing it down to the

74 • Robert Lowry

throng. Police squad cars and city fire engines were jamming into the avenue below her as she jumped, while the crowd scattered wildly in all directions.

During the weeks that followed this incident, Chris did a half-a-dozen paintings of the girl before he was finally satisfied. Someday he hoped to complete his least successful attempt to paint the scene, which showed her body in midair as she bulleted down towards the pavement and the fleeing crowd; while at the same time wondering whether anybody would be able to stand to look at it; however flowing-haired, streamlined handsome he might be able to make her in her descent. For yes, it was true, in spite of all the shock and horror and suspense of the scene, it had been a dazzlingly handsome one, thrilling and surprising and somehow perfectly timed, from the little call “Here!” with which she tossed down her black brassiere, to the thud of her body on the pavement where it lay flattened facedown, a red stain widening around her. Even now, Chris guessed, the souvenirs of clothing that she had tossed down were scattered around the city in the apartments of the various people who had caught them—one silk stocking there, another somewhere else; a blouse in the Bronx, a slipper in Long

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Island, the brassiere in Queens or perhaps in Brooklyn.

The painting that Chris finally completed showed the girl in the moment after she had tossed away all her clothing and standing flamboyantly nude up there on the ledge of the apartment house roof, outlined against the reddening late-afternoon sky, while from the avenue below the frozen crowd gawked in paralyzed silence.

“You sure can paint women,” Chris,” Bill Harrison said one morning when he stopped by Chris’s studio and saw the painting. “Why don’t you paint more of them?

This is the first girl you’ve painted, isn’t it?”

“Well, I’ve painted the models at art school,” Chris said. He glanced at Bill, who was still standing there admiringly before the easel where the finished painting rested. “The truth is, Bill, that when I’m on my own I just paint whatever I happen to see that moves me some way or another. I don’t see any reason to just paint girls for their own sake—although I admit it might be profitable—I mean you might be able to sell paintings of girls more easily than other subjects.”

Bill laughed. “Yeah. The business that I’m in—we can testify to that, all right.”

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“But I’m not even thinking about doing anything commercial with my painting, so that isn’t a consideration, Bill. I just went into all of this painting thing because—well, I wanted to see if I could do it, that was all. And I wasn’t doing anything else except drink up my pension check every month, and that was beginning to get old.”

“Well, I’ll bet you’ll sell that one, Chris,” Bill answered. And then in a very offhand manner he added, “I hope you’ll paint some more.”

And as things turned out, Bill Harrison’s prediction was correct. Chris’s blonde nude on the rooftop was the first painting that he sold, and he sold it to a very unlikely prospect, his instructor at the art school, who came down to the studio one day to see the work that Chris was doing outside of class and who insisted on having the rooftop scene as soon as he saw it. Chris let the instructor pay ten dollars for it, a matter of covering the cost of the materials if nothing more. And all the while he was thinking that the ultimate painting would be the one of the girl plunging down through the air.

It was true that as a painter and as a man, Christopher Grey was somewhat handicapped, but neverthe-

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less it was possible that his lack of an arm made him a better painter, for sometimes it seemed that he had the strength and the decision of both his arms in the good one that was left. Chris could not, of course, hold a palette while painting. He put his palette on a table beside his canvas and this arrangement worked out well enough. Nor could he build his own frames and stretch his own canvases, but had to pay to have this work done at an art supply shop. Yet, except for these two small matters, his missing arm was no handicap at all, and his severe misfortunes may even have sharpened his perceptions and widened his view. More important than all of this was the murdered girl, hidden and blocked deep in Chris’s consciousness by his frantic activity.

The life of a great American city, its bustle and its bother, its color and its calamity, the land and the sea and the air of it, the dream and drama of its citizens and its crowd and its street scenes and its private worlds halfhidden and barely glimpsed through the billion windows of its million walls—New York—slabbed and monumented with sheer architecture stacked sixty, one hundred, one hundred and thirty stories up into the graphic blue Manhattan sky—flat-bottomed women, yes, barges on

78 • Robert Lowry

the Hudson and flimsy, oh flimsy nighttime honey-haired girls streaming in bands through the ragged streets of Christopher’s Greenwich Village—harried shopkeepers haranguing their customers while bums bedded down in a midnight of doorways and reaching hands prodded silks at Gimbel’s and Macy’s and stills of naughty nudes called in the soldiers and civilians to houses of cinema on Forty-Second Street and sirening police squad cars shrilled up the avenues—all found their echoes in Christopher Grey’s paintings. Art made him listen more closely and look more quickly at everything, as if a ghost, his second self, his double, had emerged from his efforts and were walking through his days side-by-side with him, giving a second sense, the echo of Art, to all of his perceptions. His ghost, Christopher’s double, made him drunk. He was drunk with Art—with the labors of Art. And drank less now, for in his heightened state of mind he forgot to remember how much he liked to drink.

And the murdered girl artist Christine, whose violent death at Christopher Grey’s hand had driven him to the distraction of painting in the first place, no longer tormented him by making his eyes search the passing crowds for a glimpse of her—the impossible sight and

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sound of her. The oil paint that she had introduced him to that day last autumn when he had met her now helped obscure her behind a sympathetic wall of art. It even occurred to him at one point that he was painting the pictures that she might have painted if she had lived. And tears came into his eyes at this thought, for Christopher was truly sorry that he had killed her.

Mystery surrounds the creative processes of a painter—mystery that begs and aches to be fulfilled. It is not true, as many people assume, that only the sense of sight inspires a painter. Touch and taste and smell and sound can sometimes be overwhelmingly more important than what he sees with his eyes. One late afternoon on Seventh Avenue South, a blind beggar with a tin cup who kept chanting to the passing crowd, “I’m a Jew! Thank you “I’m a Jew! Thank you!” inspired Chris to paint his first crucifixion, a triptych done on three canvases of equal size and fastened together with hinges so that they could either be framed as a single unit for hanging or folded slightly to grace the rear of a table. In the middle panel of his triptych, Chris painted his hanging Christ in flesh tones smeared with blood against a blueblack starry night background. Both the thief and the

80 • Robert Lowry

murderer, crucified on either side of Christ Crucified, resembled Chris without his ever having intended it, and he worked to change the resemblance, making the thief plumper and the murderer hairier. Chris painted no loin clothes on his Crucifixion Trio. All three hung now naked to the world as uncircumcised Gentile men. In the left panel the Roman Army in armor and carrying spears stood at attention, lined up rank on rank. In the right panel a lone figure knelt and prayed. It was Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and Chris painted an exquisite highlight of a single pearly teardrop on her cheek as she knelt haloed and gazing at Her Son. Because he still saw a resemblance to himself in the murderer and the thief on their crosses flanking Christ, Chris took his triptych back to his hotel room with him and never let anyone see it.

One day in the bar across the street from Chris’s studio where Chris and Bill went to have a beer, Bill Harrison said, “Have you ever thought of painting your dreams, Chris?”

“My dreams?”

“Yes. Just something you dreamed, and with a dreamlike quality. I’d like to see what you’d do with a dream.

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All of your painting so far has a sort of—well, almost reportorial quality. Your immediate surroundings have been suggesting your subject matter. But why don’t you go deeper than that, Chris? Why don’t you paint one of your dreams? It would be a new departure for you, you know. That’s the modern way of painters, too, so why resist it? Make your paintings your dreams and vice versa. Might be very refreshing. Eh?” Chris thought of his triptych, concealed in the closet of his hotel room.

“All right,” Chris said. “I’ll do that sometime. But first I’ll have to have a dream.”

Bill smiled at him. “Good cold bottle of beet they give you in this place, eh Chris?” he asked inconsequentially.

Now Chris did not give Bill’s suggestion any more thought after they had parted that afternoon, but strangely enough, almost in response to Bill’s suggestion, he fell asleep rather earlier than usual that night and dreamed a vivid dream.

He dreamed of a knife—a huge gleaming steel knife as big or bigger than a great airplane, sailing through

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“I’m sorry, Chris,” Bill was saying, with no trace of a smile on his florid face now. “I’m going to have to take you in. You’re under arrest for the murder of Christine Lust.”

Chris whirled with a powerful bashing movement of his good arm against the pistol and heard it explode behind him and the crash of glass around him as he went through the window to his death on the street down below.

Geschichte, Typographen und Schriften der untergegangenen VEB Typoart von den Typoart-Freunden an der Bauhaus-Universit채t Weimar.

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