I made no effort to reply.
Don’t you know that? she said, her voice rising.
Frankly, no! said I.
You mean you swallow all those fantastic tales she hands you?
If you mean that I regard it all as an innocent little game, no.
But why should she want to deceive you when she loves you so dearly? You know you mean everything to her. Yes, everything.
Is that why you’re jealous of me?
Jealous? I’m outraged that you should treat her as you do, that you should be so blind, so cruel, so…
I raised my hand. Just what are you getting at? I demanded. What’s the game?
Game? Game? She drew herself up in the manner of an indignant and thoroughly astounded Czarina. She was utterly unaware that her fly was unbuttoned and her shirt tail hanging out.
Sit down, I said. Here, have another cigarette.
She refused to sit down. Insisted on pacing back and forth, back and forth.
Now which do you prefer to believe, I began. That Mona loves me so much that she has to lie to me night and day? Or that she loves you so much that she hasn’t the courage to tell me? Or that you love her so much that you can’t stand seeing her unhappy? Or, let me ask this first—do you know what love is? Tell me, have you ever been in love with a man? I know you once had a dog you loved, or so you told me, and I know you have made love to trees. I also know that you love more than you hate, but—do you know what love is? If you met two people who were madly in love with one another, would your love for one of them increase that love or destroy it? I’ll put it another way. Perhaps this will make it clearer. If you regarded yourself only as an object of pity and some one showed you real affection, real love, would it make any difference to you whether that person was a he or a she, married or unmarried? I mean, would you, or could you, be content merely to accept that love? Or would you want it exclusively for yourself?
Pause. Heavy pause.
And what, I continued, makes you think you’re worthy of love? Or even that you are loved? Or, if you think you are, that you’re capable of returning it? Sit down, why don’t you? You know, we could really have an interesting talk. We might even get somewhere. We might arrive at truth. I’m willing to try. She gave me a strange, startled look. You say that Mona thinks I like complicated beings. To be very honest with you, I don’t. Take you now, you’re a very simple sort of being … all of a piece, aren’t you? Integrated, as they say. You’re so securely at one with yourself and the whole wide world that, just to make sure of it, you deliver yourself up for observation. Am I too cruel? Go ahead, snicker if you will. Things sound strange when you put them upside down. Besides, you didn’t go to the observation ward on your own, did you? Just another one of Mona’s yarns, what! Of course, I swallowed it hook, line and sinker—because I didn’t want to destroy your friendship for one another. Now that you’re out, thanks to my efforts, you want to show me your gratitude. Is that it? You don’t want to see me unhappy, especially when I’m living with some one near arid dear to you.
She began to giggle despite the fact that she was highly incensed.
Listen, if you had asked me if I were jealous of you, much as I hate to admit it, I would have said yes. I’m not ashamed to confess that it humiliates me to think some one like you can make me jealous. You’re hardly the type I would have chosen for a rival. I don’t like morphodites any more than I like people with double-jointed thumbs. I’m prejudiced. Bourgeois, if you like. I never loved, a dog, but I never hated one either. I’ve met fags who were entertaining, clever, talented, diverting, but I must say I wouldn’t care to live with them. I’m not talking morals, you understand, I’m talking likes and dislikes. Certain things rub me the wrong way. It’s most unfortunate, to put it mildly, that my wife should feel so keenly drawn to you. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Almost literary. It’s a god-damned shame, is what I mean to say, that she couldn’t have chosen a real man, if she had to betray me, even if he were some one I despised. But you … why shit! it leaves me absolutely defenceless. I wince at the mere thought of some one saying to me—What’s wrong with you? Because there must be something wrong with a man—at least, so the world reasons—when his wife is violently attracted to another woman. I’ve tried my damnedest to discover what’s wrong with me, if there is anything wrong, but I can’t lay a finger on it. Besides, if a woman is able to love another woman as well as the man she’s tied to, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? She’s not to be blamed if she happens to be endowed with an unusual store of affection, isn’t that so? Supposing, however, that as the husband of such an extraordinary creature, one has doubts about his wife’s exceptional ability to love, what then? Supposing the husband has reason to believe that there is a mixture of sham and reality connected with this extraordinary gift for love? That to prepare her husband, to condition him, as it were, she slyly and insidiously struggles to poison his mind, invents or concocts the most fantastic tales, all innocent, of course, about experiences with girl friends prior to her marriage. Never openly admitting that she slept with them, but implying it, insinuating, always insinuating, that it could have been so. And the moment the husband … me, in other words … registers fear or alarm, she violently denies anything of the sort, insists that it must be one’s imagination which invoked the picture … Do you follow me? Or is it getting too complicated?
She sat down, her face suddenly grave. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me searchingly. Suddenly she broke into a smile, a Satanic sort of smile, and exclaimed: So this is your game! Now you want to poison my mind! With this the tears gushed forth and she took to sobbing.
As luck would have it, Mona arrived in the very thick of it.
What are you doing to her? Her very first words. Putting an arm around poor Stasia, she stroked her hair, comforted her with soothing words.
Touching scene. A little too genuine, however, for me to be properly moved.
The upshot—Stasia must not attempt to go home. She must stay and get a good night’s rest.
Stasia looks at me questioningly.
Of course, of course! I say. I wouldn’t turn a dog out on a night like this..
The weirdest part of the scene, as I look back on it, was Stasia’s turn out in a soft, filmy night-gown. If only she had had a pipe in her mouth, it would have been perfect.
To get back to Feodor … They got me itchy sometimes with their everlasting nonsense about Dostoievsky. Myself, I have never pretended to understand Dostoievsky. Not all of him, at any rate. (I know him, as one knows a kindred soul.) Nor have I read all of him, even to this day. It has always been my thought to leave the last few morsels for death-bed reading. I am not sure, for instance, whether I read his Dream of the Ridiculous Man or heard tell about it. Neither am I at all certain that I know who Marcion was, or what Marcionism is. There are many things about Dostoievsky, as about life itself, which I am content to leave a mystery. I like to think of Dostoievsky as one surrounded by an impenetrable aura of mystery. For example, I can never picture him wearing a hat—such as Swedenborg gave his angels to wear. I am, moreover, always fascinated to learn what others have to say about him, even when their views make no sense to me. Only the other day I ran across a note I had jotted down in a notebook. Probably from Berdyaev. Here it is: After Dostoievsky man was no longer what he had been before. Cheering thought for an ailing humanity.
As for the following, certainly no one but Berdyaev could have written this: In Dostoievsky there was a complex attitude to evil. To a large extent it may look as though he was led astray. On the one hand, evil is evil, and ought to be exposed and must be burned away. On the other hand, evil is a spiritual experience of man. It is man’s part. As he goes on his way man may be enriched by the experience of evil, but it is necessary to understand this in the right way. It is not the evil itself that enriches him; he is enriched by that spiritual strength which is aroused in him for the overcoming of evil. The man who says I will give myse
lf up to evil for the sake of the enrichment never is enriched; he perishes. But it is evil that puts man’s freedom to the test…
And now one more citation (from Berdyaev again) since it brings us one step nearer to Heaven…
The Church is not the Kingdom of God; the Church has appeared in history and it has acted in history; it does not mean the transfiguration of the world, the appearance of a new heaven and a new earth. The Kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, not only the transfiguration of the individual man, but also the transfiguration of the social and the cosmic; and that is the end of this world, of the world of wrong and ugliness, and it is the principle of a new world, a world of right and beauty. When Dostoievsky said that beauty would save the world he had in mind the transfiguration of the world and the coming of the Kingdom of God, and this is the eschatalogical hope … Speaking for myself, I must say that had I ever had any hopes, eschatalogical or otherwise, it was Dostoievsky who annihilated them. Or perhaps I should modify this by saying that he rendered nugatory those cultural aspirations engendered by my Western upbringing. The Asiatic part, in a word, the Mongolian in me, has remained intact and will always remain intact. This Mongolian side of me has nothing to do with culture or personality; it represents the root being whose sap runs back to some ageless ancestral limb of the genealogical tree. In this unfathomable reservoir all the chaotic elements of my own nature and of the American heritage have been swallowed up as the ocean swallows the rivers which empty into it. Oddly enough, I have understood Dostoievsky, or rather his characters and the problems which tormented them, better, being American-born, than had I been a European. The English language, it seems to me, is better suited to render Dostoievsky (if one has to read him in translation) than French, German, Italian, or any other non-Slavic tongue. And American life, from the gangster level to the intellectual level, has paradoxically tremendous affinities with Dostoievsky’s multilateral everyday Russian life. What better proving grounds can one ask for than metropolitan New York, in whose conglomerate soil every wanton, ignoble, crack-brained idea flourishes like a weed? One has only to think of winter there, of what it means to be hungry, lonely, desperate in that labyrinth of monotonous streets lined with monotonous homes crowded with monotonous individuals crammed with monotonous thoughts. Monotonous and at the same time unlimited!
Though millions among us have never read Dostoievsky nor would even recognize the name were it pronounced, they are nevertheless, millions of them, straight out of Dostoievsky, leading the same weird lunatical life here in America which Dostoievsky’s creatures lived in the Russia of his imagining. If yesterday they might still have been regarded as having a human existence, tomorrow their world will possess a character and lineament more fantastically bedeviled than any or all of Bosch’s creations. To-day they move beside us elbow to elbow, startling no one, apparently, by their antediluvian aspect. Some indeed continue to pursue their calling—preaching the Gospel, dressing corpses, ministering to the insane—quite as if nothing of any moment had taken place. They have not the slightest inkling of the fact that man is no longer what he had been before.
2.
Ah, the monotonous thrill that comes of walking the streets on a winter’s morn, when iron girders are frozen to the ground and the milk in the bottle rises like the stem of a mushroom. A septentrional day, let us say, when the most-stupid animal would not dare poke a nose out of his hole. To accost a stranger on such a day and ask him for alms would be unthinkable. In that biting, gnawing cold, the icy wind whistling through the glum, canyoned streets, no one in his right mind would stop long enough to reach into his pocket in search of a coin. On a morning like this, which a comfortable banker would describe as clear and brisk, a beggar has no right to be hungry or in need of carfare. Beggars are for warm, sunny days, when even the sadist at heart stops to throw crumbs to the birds.
It was on a day such as this that I would deliberately gather together a batch of samples in order to sally forth and call on one of my father’s customers, knowing in advance that I would get no order but driven by an all consuming hunger for conversation.
There was one individual in particular I always elected to visit on such occasions, because with him the day might end, and usually did end, in most unexpected fashion. It was seldom, I should add, that this individual ever ordered a suit of clothes, and when he did it took him years to settle the bill. Still, he was a customer. To the old man I used to pretend that I was calling on John Stymer in order to make him buy the full dress suit which we always assumed he would eventually need. (He was forever telling us that he would become a judge one day, this Stymer.)
What I never divulged to the old man was the nature of the un-sartorial conversations I usually had with the man.
Hello! What do you want to see me for?
That’s how he usually greeted me.
You must be mad if you think I need more clothes. I haven’t paid you for the last suit I bought, have I? When was that—five years ago?
He had barely lifted his head from the mass of papers in which his nose was buried. A foul smell pervaded the office, due to his inveterate habit of farting—even in the presence of his stenographer. He was always picking his nose too. Otherwise—outwardly, I mean—he might pass for Mr. Anybody. A lawyer, like any other lawyer.
His head still buried in a maze of legal documents, he chirps: What are you reading these days? Before I can reply he adds: Could you wait outside a few minutes? I’m in a tangle. But don’t run away … I want to have a chat with you. So saying he dives into his pocket and pulls out a dollar bill. Here, get ourself a coffee while you wait. And come back in an hour or so … we’ll have lunch together, what!
In the ante-room a half-dozen clients are waiting to get his ear. He begs each one to wait just a little longer. Sometimes they sit there all day.
On the way to the cafeteria I break the bill to buy a paper. Scanning the news always gives me that extrasensory feeling of belonging to another planet. Besides, I need to get screwed up in order to grapple with John Stymer.
Scanning the paper I get to reflecting on Stymer’s great problem. Masturbation. For years now he’s been trying to break the vicious habit. Scraps of our last conversation come to mind. I recall how I recommended his trying a good whorehouse—and the wry face he made when I voiced the suggestion. What! Me, a married man, take up with a bunch of filthy whores? And all I could think to say was: They’re not all filthy!
But what was pathetic, now that I mention the matter, was the earnest, imploring way he begged me, on parting, to let him know if I thought of anything that would help … anything at all. Cut if off! I wanted to say.
An hour rolled away. To him an hour was like five minutes. Finally I got up and made for the door. It was that icy outdoors I wanted to gallop.
To my surprise he was waiting for me. There he sat with clasped hands resting on the desk top, his eyes fixed on some pin point in eternity. The package of samples which I had left on his desk was open. He had decided to order a suit, he informed me.
I’m in no hurry for it, he said. I don’t need any new clothes.
Don’t buy one, then. You know I didn’t come here to sell you a suit.
You know, he said, you’re about the only person I ever manage to have a real conversation with. Every time I see you I expand … What have you got to recommend this time? I mean in the way of literature. That last one, Oblomov, was it? didn’t make much of an impression on me.
He paused, not to hear what I might have to say in reply, but to gather momentum.
Since you were here last I’ve been having an affair. Does that surprise you? Yes, a young girl, very young, and a nymphomaniac to boot. Drains me dry. But that isn’t what bothers me—it’s my wife. It’s excruciating the way she works over me. I want to jump out of my skin.
Observing the grin on my face he adds: It’s not a bit funny, let me tell you.
The telephone rang. He listens attentively. Then, having said
nothing but Yes, No, I think so, he suddenly shouts into the mouthpiece: I want none of your filthy money. Let him get some one else to defend him.
Imagine trying to bribe me, he says, slamming up the receiver. And a judge, no less. A big shot, too. He blew his nose vigorously. Well, where were we? He rose. What about a bite to eat? Could talk better over food and wine, don’t you think?
We hailed a taxi and made for an Italian joint he frequented. It was a cosy place, smelling strongly of wine, sawdust and cheese. Virtually deserted too.
After we had ordered he said: You don’t mind if I talk about myself, do you? That’s my weakness, I guess. Even when I’m reading, even if it’s a good book, I can’t help but think about myself, my problems. Not that I think I’m so important, you understand. Obsessed, that’s all.
You’re obsessed too, he continued, but in a healthier way. You see, I’m engrossed with myself and I hate myself. A real loathing, mind you. I couldn’t possibly feel that way about another human being. I know myself through and through, and the thought of what I am, what I must look like to others, appals me. I’ve got only one good quality: I’m honest. I take no credit for it either … it’s a purely instinctive trait. Yes, I’m homiest with my clients—and I’m honest with my self.
I broke in. You may be honest with yourself, as you say, but it would be better for you if you were more generous. I mean, with yourself. If you can’t treat yourself decently how do you expect others to?
It’s not in my nature to think such thoughts, he answered promptly. I’m a Puritan from way back. A degenerate one, to be sure. The trouble is, I’m not degenerate enough. You remember asking me once if I had ever read the Marquis de Sade? Well, I tried, but he bores me stiff. Maybe he’s too French for my taste. I don’t know why they call him the divine Marquis, do you?
By now we had sampled the Chianti and were up to our ears in spaghetti. The wine had a limbering effect. He could drink a lot without losing his head. In fact, that was another one of his troubles—his inability to lose himself, even under the influence of drink.