Why not, indeed?
She is so authoritative!
I find myself doing whatever she says I must do. During our twenty years of marriage, my dear Edith never once thought of something for me to do. In the Army, I knew several colonels and generals like this new woman in my life, but they were men, and we were a nation at war.
Is this woman a friend? I don't know what the hell she is. All I know is that she isn't going to leave again until she's good and ready, and that she scares the pants off me.
Help.
Her name is Circe Berman.
She is a widow. Her husband was a brain surgeon in Baltimore, where she still has a house as big and empty as this one. Her husband Abe died of a brain hemorrhage six months ago. She is forty-three years old, and she has selected this house as a nice place to live and work while she writes her husband's biography.
There is nothing erotic about our relationship. I am twenty-eight years Mrs. Berman's senior, and have become too ugly for anyone but a dog to love. I really do look like a gutshot iguana, and am one-eyed besides. Enough is enough.
Here is how we met: she wandered onto my private beach alone one afternoon, not knowing it was private. She had never heard of me, since she hates modern art. She didn't know a soul in the Hamptons, and was staying in the Maidstone Inn in the village about a mile and a half from here. She had walked from there to the public beach, and then across my border.
I went down for my afternoon dip, and there she was, fully dressed, and doing what Paul Slazinger does so much of: sitting on sand and staring out to sea. The only reason I minded her being there, or anybody's being there, was my ludicrous physique and the fact I would have to take off my eye patch before I went in. There's quite a mess under there, not unlike a scrambled egg. I was embarrassed to be seen up close.
Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.
So I elected not to swim, but to sunbathe some distance away from her.
I did, however, come close enough to say, "Hello."
This was her curious reply: "Tell me how your parents died."
What a spooky woman! She could be a witch. Who but a witch could have persuaded me to write my autobiography?
She has just stuck her head in the room to say that it was time I went to New York City, where I haven't been since Edith died. I've hardly been out of this house since Edith died.
New York City, here I come. This is terrible!
"Tell me how your parents died," she said. I couldn't believe my ears.
"I beg your pardon?" I said.
"What good is 'Hello'?" she said.
She had stopped me in my tracks. "I've always thought it was better than nothing," I said, "but I could be wrong."
"What does 'Hello' mean?" she said.
And I said, "I had always understood it to mean 'Hello.'"
"Well it doesn't," she said. "It means, 'Don't talk about anything important.' It means, 'I'm smiling but not listening, so just go away.'"
"Tell Mama!" Can you beat it?
She had straight black hair and large brown eyes like my mother--but she was much taller than my mother, and a little bit taller than me, for that matter. She was also much shapelier than my mother, who let herself become quite heavy, and who didn't care much what her hair looked like, either, or her clothes. Mother didn't care because Father didn't care.
And I told Mrs. Berman this about my mother: "She died when I was twelve--of a tetanus infection she evidently picked up while working in a cannery in California. The cannery was built on the site of an old livery stable, and tetanus bacteria often colonize the intestines of horses without hurting them, and then become durable spores, armored little seeds, when excreted. One of them lurking in the dirt around and under the cannery was somehow exhumed and sent traveling. After a long, long sleep it awakened in Paradise, something we would all like to do. Paradise was a cut in my mother's hand."
"So long, Mama," said Circe Berman.
There was that word Mama again.
"At least she didn't have to endure the Great Depression, which was only one year away," I said.
And at least she didn't have to see her only child come home a cyclops from World War Two.
"And how did your father die?" she said.
"In the Bijou Theater in San Ignacio in 1938," I said. "He went to the movie alone. He never even considered remarrying."
He still lived over the little store in California where he had got his first foothold in the economy of the United States of America. I had been living in Manhattan for five years then--and was working as an artist for an advertising agency. When the movie was over, the lights came on, and everybody went home but Father.
"What was the movie?" she asked.
And I said, "Captains Courageous, starring Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew."
What Father might have made of that movie, which was about cod fishermen in the North Atlantic, God only knows. Maybe he didn't see any of it before he died. If he did see some of it, he must have gotten rueful satisfaction from its having absolutely nothing to do with anything he had ever seen or anybody he had ever known. He welcomed all proofs that the planet he had known and loved during his boyhood had disappeared entirely.
That was his way of honoring all the friends and relatives he had lost in the massacre.
You could say that he became his own Turk over here, knocking himself down and spitting on himself. He could have studied English and become a respected teacher there in San Ignacio, and started writing poetry again, or maybe translated the Armenian poets he loved so much into English. But that wasn't humiliating enough. Nothing would do but that he, with all his education, become what his father and grandfather had been, which was a cobbler.
He was good at that craft, which he had learned as a boy, and which I would learn as a boy. But how he complained] At least he pitied himself in Armenian, which only Mother and I could understand. There weren't any other Armenians within a hundred miles of San Ignacio.
"I am looking for William Shakespeare, your greatest poet," he might say as he worked. "Have you ever heard of him?" He knew Shakespeare backwards and forwards in Armenian, and would often quote him. "To be or not to be ..."for example, as far as he was concerned, was, "Linel kam chlinel ..."
"Tear out my tongue if you catch me speaking Armenian," he might say. That was the penalty the Turks set in the seventeenth century for speaking any language but Turkish: a ripped-out tongue.
"Who are those people and what am I doing here?" he might say, with cowboys and Chinese and Indians passing by outside.
"When is San Ignacio going to erect a statue of Mesrob Mashtots?" he might say. Mesrob Mashtots was the inventor of the Armenian alphabet, unlike any other, about four hundred years before the birth of Christ. Armenians, incidentally, were the first people to make Christianity their national religion.
"One million, one million, one million," he might say. This is the generally accepted figure for the number of Armenians killed by the Turks in the massacre from which my parents escaped. That was two thirds of Turkey's Armenians, and about half the Armenians in the whole wide world. There are about six million of us now, including my two sons and three grandchildren, who know nothing and care nothing about Mesrob Mashtots.
"Musa Dagh!" he might say. This was the name of a place in Turkey where a small band of Armenian civilians fought Turkish militiamen to a standstill for forty days and forty nights before being exterminated--about the time my parents, with me in my mother's belly, arrived safe and sound in San Ignacio.
"Thank you, Vartan Mamigonian," he might say. This was the name of a great Armenian national hero, who led a losing army against the Persians in the fifth century. The Vartan Mamigonian Father had in mind, however, was an Armenian shoe manufacturer in Cairo, Egypt, to which polyglot metropolis my parents escaped after the massacre. It was he, a survivor of an earlier massacre, who persuade
d my naive parents, who had met on a road to Cairo, that they would find the streets paved with gold, if only they could find their way to, of all places, San Ignacio, California. But that is a story I will tell at another time.
"If anybody has discovered what life is all about," Father might say, "it is too late. I am no longer interested."
"Never is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day," he might say. These, of course, are words from the American song "Home on the Range," which he had translated into Armenian. He found them idiotic.
"Tolstoi made shoes," he might say. This was a fact, of course: the greatest of Russian writers and idealists had, in an effort to do work that mattered, made shoes for a little while. May I say that I, too, could make shoes if I had to.
Circe Berman says she can make pants if she has to. As she would tell me when we met on the beach, her father had a pants factory in Lackawanna, New York, until he went bankrupt and hanged himself.
If my father had managed to survive Captains Courageous, starring Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew, and had lived to see the paintings I did after the war, several of which drew serious critical attention, and a few of which I sold for what was quite a bit of money back then, he surely would have been among the great American majority which snorted and jeered at them. He wouldn't have razzed just me. He would have razzed my Abstract Expressionist pals, too, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and Terry Kitchen and so on, painters who are now, unlike myself, acknowledged to be some of the most brilliant artists ever to have been produced not just by the United States but by the whole damn world. But what sticks in my mind like a thorn now, and I haven't thought about this for years: he would have had no hesitation in razzing his own son, in razzing me.
So, thanks to the conversation Mrs. Berman struck up with me on the beach only two weeks ago, I am in a frenzy of adolescent resentment against a father who was buried almost fifty years ago! Let me off this hellish time machine!
But there is no getting off this hellish time machine. I have to think now, even though it is the last I would ever want to think about, if I had a choice, that my own father would have laughed as hard as anybody when my paintings, thanks to unforeseen chemical reactions between the sizing of my canvases and the acrylic wall-paint and colored tapes I had applied to them, all destroyed themselves.
I mean--people who had paid fifteen-or twenty-or even thirty thousand dollars for a picture of mine found themselves gazing at a blank canvas, all ready for a new picture, and ringlets of colored tapes and what looked like moldy Rice Krispies on the floor.
It was a postwar miracle that did me in. I had better explain to my young readers, if any, that the Second World War had many of the promised characteristics of Armageddon, a final war between good and evil, so that nothing would do but that it be followed by miracles. Instant coffee was one. DDT was another. It was going to kill all the bugs, and almost did. Nuclear energy was going to make electricity so cheap that it might not even be metered. It would also make another war unthinkable. Talk about loaves and fishes! Antibiotics would defeat all diseases. Lazarus would never die: How was that for a scheme to make the Son of God obsolete?
Yes, and there were miraculous breakfast foods and would soon be helicopters for every family. There were miraculous new fibers which could be washed in cold water and need no ironing afterwards! Talk about a war well worth fighting!
During that war we had a word for extreme man-made disorder which was fubar, an acronym for "fucked up beyond all recognition." Well--the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles, but, back in the early 1960s, I was one of the first persons to be totally wrecked by one--an acrylic wall-paint whose colors, according to advertisements of the day, would "... outlive the smile on the Mona Lisa."
The name of the paint was Sateen Dura-Luxe. Mona Lisa is still smiling. And your local paint dealer, if he has been in the business any length of time, will laugh in your face if you ask for Sateen Dura-Luxe.
"Your father had the Survivor's Syndrome," said Circe Berman to me on my beach that day. "He was ashamed not to be dead like all his friends and relatives."
"He was ashamed that I wasn't dead, too," I said.
"Think of it as a noble emotion gone wrong," she said.
"He was a very upsetting father," I said. "I'm sorry now that you've made me remember him."
"As long as we've brought him back," she said, "why don't you forgive him now?"
"I've done it a hundred times already," I said. "This time I'm going to be smart and get a receipt." I went on to assert that Mother was more entitled to Survivor's Syndrome than Father, since she had been right in the middle of the killing, pretending to be dead with people lying on top of her, and with screams and blood everywhere. She wasn't all that much older then than the cook's daughter, Celeste.
While Mother was lying there, she was looking right into the face of the corpse of an old woman who had no teeth, only inches away. The old woman's mouth was open, and inside it and on the ground below it was a fortune in unset jewels.
"If it weren't for those jewels," I told Mrs. Berman, "I would not be a citizen of this great country, and would be in no position to tell you that you are now trespassing on my private property. That's my house there, on the other side of the dunes. Would you be offended if a lonely and harmless old widower invited you thence for a drink, if you drink, and then supper with an equally harmless old friend of mine?" I meant Paul Slazinger.
She accepted. And after supper I heard myself saying, "If you'd rather stay here instead of the inn, you're certainly welcome." And I made her the same guarantee I made many times to Slazinger: "I promise not to bother you."
So let's be honest. I said a little earlier that I had no idea how she had come to share this house with me. Let's be honest. I invited her.
3
SHE HAS TURNED me and this household upside down!
I should have known how manipulative she was from the very first words she ever said to me: "Tell me how your parents died." I mean--those were the words of a woman who was quite used to turning people in any direction she chose, as though they were machine bolts and she were a monkey wrench.
And if I had missed the warning signals on the beach, there were plenty more at supper. She behaved as though she were a paying customer in a fancy restaurant, screwing up her face after tasting a wine which I myself had sipped and declared potable, and declaring the veal to be overcooked and ordering Slazinger to send his serving back to the kitchen along with hers, and saying that she was going to plan the meals while she was here, since Paul's and my circulatory systems were obviously, since our complexions were so pasty and our gestures so listless, clogged up with cholesterol.
She was outrageous! She sat across from a Jackson Pollock for which I had just been offered two million dollars by an anonymous collector in Switzerland, and she said, "I wouldn't give that houseroom!"
So I asked her tartly, after a wink in Slazinger's direction, what sort of picture might please her more.
She replied that she wasn't on Earth to be pleased but to be instructed. "I need information the way I need vitamins and minerals," she said. "Judging from your pictures, you hate facts like poison."
"I suppose you would be happier looking at George Washington crossing the Delaware," I said.
"Who wouldn't?" she said. "But I tell you what I'd really like to see there since our talk on the beach."
"Which is--?" I said, arching my eyebrows and then winking at Slazinger again.
"I'd like a picture with some grass and dirt at the bottom," she said.
"Brown and green," I suggested.
"Fine," she said. "And sky at the top."
"Blue," I said.
"Maybe with clouds," she said.
"Easily supplied," I said.
"And in between the sky and the ground--" she said.
"A duck?" I said. "An organ-grinder with his monkey? A sailor and his girl on a park bench?"
"Not
a duck and not an organ-grinder and not a sailor and his girl," she said. "A whole lot of dead bodies lying every which way on the ground. And very close to us is the face of a beautiful girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She is pinned under the corpse of a man, but she is still alive, and she is staring into the open mouth of a dead old woman whose face is only inches from hers. Out of that toothless mouth are spilling diamonds and emeralds and rubies."
There was a silence.
And then she said, "You could build a whole new religion, and a much needed one, too, on a picture like that." She nodded in the direction of the Pollock. "All anybody could do with a picture like that is illustrate an advertisement for a hangover remedy or seasick pills."
Slazinger asked her what had brought her to the Hamptons, since she didn't know anybody here. She replied that she hoped to find some peace and quiet so she could devote her full attention to writing a biography of her husband, the Baltimore brain surgeon.
Slazinger preened himself as a man who had published eleven novels and he patronized her as an amateur.
"Everybody thinks he or she can be a writer," he said with airy irony.
"Don't tell me it's a crime to try," she said.
"It's a crime to think it's easy," he said. "But if you're really serious, you'll find out quick enough that it's the hardest thing there is."
"Particularly so, if you have absolutely nothing to say," she said. "Don't you think that's the main reason people find it so difficult? If they can write complete sentences and can use a dictionary, isn't that the only reason they find writing hard: they don't know or care about anything?"
Here Slazinger stole a line from the writer Truman Capote, who died five years ago, and who had a house only a few miles west of here. "I think you're talking about typing instead of writing," he said.
She promptly identified the source of his witticism: "Truman Capote," she said.
Slazinger covered himself nicely. "As everyone knows," he said.