PARTISAN REVIEW
319
Leonard Michaels
THE CAPTAIN
1
From course to course Stanger smiled at my wife. She
smiled at him and ate dessert, her pinky so nicely hooked it tore my
heart. The dessert was pear under chocolate and flaming brandy. It
slipped from spoon to blubbery dissolution, tricking Fat Red, the
ancient scientist, who wallows in every head. When I tried to taste
I swallowed. Then came a flickering city of liqueurs. Then marijuana,
green and gold, like another language popping around the table
from mouth to mouth. No cigarette went by me unlipped and
sucked. But nothing tasted, and nothing had. Throughout the meal
I'd
devour~d
textures, not tastes, like a cat gobbling kill. I'd eaten
tremendously. I wanted to eat. The other guests flashed marvels
achieved, readiness to die. Music began in the drawing room, black,
full of drum, summoning us to further pleasures. Actual blacks, sta–
tioned around the table, looked stiff and smug in their tuxedos, their
faces gleaming consummation. I assumed they'd pissed in the soup.
Stanger smiled at her. She at him. Through glass, silver, a wall of
flowers, and the ministrations of swift black hands, everyone at the
table had smiled for the last two hours. Servants were the price
elegance pays to pain. The Stangers alone couldn't have made this
occasion for forty guests without threatening every institution upon
which our society stands. To that sentiment I drank piss. A ritual
initiation. I'd never been to such a dinner party; but I could tell it
was first-rate. Teeth stabbed out of my ass to eat the chair. However,
the meal was over. Stanger rose and his hand claimed my wife's
lower back. They strolled to the drawing room, a sight very flattering
to me, the lovely valley of her back appreciated in his hand, yet it
gave me a feeling I didn't know what to do with, couldn't under–
stand, act upon, or use. Like Hamlet's in Elsinore. But this was
no dingy, boozy castle in barbaric Denmark. This was Now Town,
Sutton Place. The windows triangulated, above the East River, north
to Welfare Island, south to the Statue of Liberty. I couldn't make
a speech or kill. I did what I could. I tried not to look at them and
joined the other guests, wondering what brought them here. Did
