Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust [55]
Just as he was about to light a second cigarette, Homer called him.
“Tod!”
“I’m here, Homer.”
He hurried over to the couch again.
Homer was still crying, but he suddenly stopped more abruptly than he had started.
“Yes, Homer?” Tod asked encouragingly.
“She’s left”
“Yes, I know. Drink some coffee.”
“She’s left.”
Tod knew that he put a great deal of faith in sayings, so he tried one.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
“She left before I got up,” he said.
“What the hell do you care? You’re going back to Wayneville.”
“You shouldn’t curse,” Homer said with the same lunatic calm.
“I’m sorry,” Tod mumbled.
The word “sorry” was like dynamite set off under a dam. Language leaped out of Homer in a muddy, twisting torrent. At first, Tod thought it would do him a lot of good to pour out in this way. But he was wrong. The lake behind the dam replenished itself too fast. The more he talked the greater the pressure grew because the flood was circular and ran back behind the dam again.
After going on continuously for about twenty minutes, he stopped in the middle of a sentence. He leaned back, closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep. Tod put a cushion under his head. After watching him for a while, he went back to the kitchen.
He sat down and tried to make sense out of what Homer had told him. A great deal of it was gibberish. Some of it, however, wasn’t. He hit on a key that helped when he realized that a lot of it wasn’t jumbled so much as timeless. The words went behind each other instead of after. What he had taken for long strings were really one thick word and not a sentence. In the same way several sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph. Using key, he was able to arrange a part of what he had so that it made the usual kind of sense.
After Tod had hurt him by saying that nasty thing about Faye, Homer ran around to the back of the house and let himself in through the kitchen, then went to peek into the parlor. He wasn’t angry with Tod, just surprised and upset because Tod was a nice boy. From the hall that led into the parlor he could see everybody having a good time and he was glad because it was kind of dull for Faye living with an old man like him. It made her restless. No one noticed him peeking there and he was glad because he didn’t feel much like joining the fun, although he liked to watch people enjoy themselves. Faye was dancing with Mr. Estee and they made a nice pair. She seemed happy. Her face shone like always when she was happy. Next she danced with Earle. He didn’t like that because of the way he held her. He couldn’t see what she saw in that fellow. He just wasn’t nice, that’s all. He had mean eyes. In the hotel business they used to watch out for fellows like that and never gave them credit because they would jump their bills. Maybe he couldn’t get a job because nobody would trust him, although it was true as Faye said that a lot of people were out of work nowadays. Standing there peeking at the party, enjoying the laughing and singing, he saw Earle catch Faye and bend her back and kiss her and everybody laughed although you could see Faye didn’t like it because she slapped his face. Earle didn’t care, he just kissed her again, a long nasty one. She got away from him and ran toward the door where he was standing. He tried to hide, but she caught him. Although he didn’t say anything, she said he was nasty spying on her and wouldn’t listen when he tried to explain. She went into her room and he followed to tell about the peeking, but she carried on awful and cursed him some more as she put red on her lips. Then she knocked over the perfume. That made her twice as mad. He tried to explain but she wouldn’t listen and just went on calling him all sorts of dirty things. So he went to his room and got undressed and tried to go to sleep. Then Tod woke him up and wanted to come in and talk. He wasn’t angry, but didn’t feel like talking just then, all he wanted to do was