Free Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller Page B

just the time, as luck would have it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion. I was telling Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly said – “why don’t you let me lend you a hundred dollars?” The next night I brought her home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars. I was amazed how well the two of them got along. Before the evening was over it was agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house the day of the abortion and take care of the kid. The day came and I gave Valeska the afternoon off. About an hour after she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the afternoon off also. I started towards the burlesque on Fourteenth Street. When I was about a block from the theatre I suddenly changed my mind. It was just the thought that if anything happened – if the wife were to kick-off – I wouldn’t feel so damned good having spent the afternoon at the burlesque. I walked around a bit, in and out of the penny arcades, and then I started homeward.
    It’s strange how things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child. You take the dominoes and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull the tablecloth on which the battleships are floating until they come to the edgeof the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall on to the floor. We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got so sleepy that she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep. The dominoes were lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor too. Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down my throat, my hand between her legs. As I laid her back on the table she twined her legs around me. I could feel one of the dominoes under my feet – part of the fleet that we had destroyed a dozen times or more. I thought of my grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day that I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as he pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought of the attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture of Teddy charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which I used to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship Maine that floated over my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral Dewey and of Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy Yard which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered that we had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the doctor’s office I didn’t have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings … We had hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the slaughter house. I was still buttoning my fly as I went through the hall to open the gate. She was as white as flour. She looked as though she’d never be able to go through another one. We put her to bed and then we gathered up the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on the table. Just the other night in a
bistrot,
as I was going to the toilet, I happened to pass two old fellows playing dominoes. I had to stop a moment and pick up a domino. The feeling of it immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they made when they fell on the floor. And with the battleships my lost tonsils and my faith in human beings gone. So that every time I walked over tile Brooklyn Bridge and looked down towards the Navy Yard I felt as though my guts were dropping out. Way up there, suspended between the two shores,I felt always as though I were hanging over a void; up there everything that had ever happened to me seemed unreal, and worse than unreal –
unnecessary.
Instead of joining me to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge seemed to break all connections. If I walked towards the one shore or the other it made no difference: either way was