Eleven
Our relationship started falling to pieces like The House of Usher I’d analyzed for her the week before. Fissure, crack, gap and down into the dark tarn.
She’d suddenly become very sensitive to my joking remarks on the cult. I’d taken the initiative on the subject now. I may have been a little aggressive about it as though to reconquer the territory I’d lost to her that stormy night. She took my remarks as ironic criticism of her husband and tried to talk about other things. She was careful now not to leave the cult leaflets hanging around.
But one evening in the kitchen, getting ice cubes, I came across one on the kitchen table. I took it back to the living room. She saw me ostentatiously reading the outrageous thing but said nothing. The leaflet was full of celebrated faces, among others, Ramses II (“The Mightiest of the fabulous Egyptian Pharaohs”), Benjamin Franklin (“The Founding Father and Eminent Inventor”) and Ludwig von Beethoven (“The Celebrated Composer of The Moonlight Sonata”). They’d all been members of The Golden Galaxy. I asked her what she thought of those extravagant claims. She said, why not?
I said I’d thought nothing was known about Ramses II’s associative life, but maybe so. I said that I had doubts about Benjamin Franklin. Where’d he find the time? Pretty busy man, it seemed to me, coping with stoves and lightning-bolts and diplomacy. Did a lot of tomcatting too in his spare time. Maybe so, though. But Beethoven, absolutely out.
To my surprise, she counterattacked. Could I prove that Beethoven hadn’t been a member of The Golden Galaxy? And when of course I said I couldn’t prove that any more than I could prove he’d not been having a steamy affair with the reigning Hapsburg Emperor, she looked as though she’d won the argument.
It irked a little. A few minutes later, during the music break, I noticed something new on her finger. I took her hand and scrutinized the massive brass ring consisting of three intertwined serpents with red-stoned eyes. I asked if it was another present from her husband. She reluctantly said it was. I asked how much she’d had to pay for it. She withdrew her hand and dropped it out of sight on her lap.
She didn’t remember. Approximately? She didn’t remember even approximately. I persisted.
“Two hundred dollars? Two hundred dollars is what you said he charged you for that thing around your neck.”
“It’s not a ‘thing’. It’s a unique piece of hand-crafted jewelry.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t know what you’re implying by ‘ah.’”
“That he picks up those things for maybe five dollars and sells them to you for forty times the price. It’s exploitation. Can’t you see that? I’m trying to help you. By all rights you’re the one who ought to be getting money. Isn’t there something like alimony for desertion?”
“They’re not worth five dollars! And it’s not desertion. It has something to do with a phase of spiritual development. You have to step back from certain kinds of involvement for a while, take stock and then you return to them on a higher level.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“I believe him. I believe him. I have a very bad headache. I’d prefer not talking about this private matter any more.”
She went back to the Brahms Opus 111 quintet with exaggerated attention, staring past me at the wall. When it was over she said:
“I wouldn’t try to price your ring if it was still on your finger.”
Right from the start there’d been problems with the camera. My first opportunity had occurred one Saturday afternoon when she went into the kitchen for more pretzels. It almost ended then and there. I whipped the camera out of my pocket, backed up against a wall and wide-angled as much of the living room as I could.
The flash was unexpectedly indiscreet. She came out of the kitchen instantly. I barely had time to shove the camera back in my pocket.
“What was that? A short-circuit?” She sniffed. “Didn’t that come from here?”
I told her it had come from outside, like a flash of lightning. She went over to the window and examined the sky which was largely blue. She frowned then shrugged. After all, she said, there was that expression, “like a bolt out of the blue”, so it sometimes happened. But this was the first time in her experience.
In each of the rooms I operated in I stood in a corner to take in as much as possible, the lens briefly zooming in and out in search of the correct focus. For some reason I was bothered by the phenomenon of parallax, the discrepancy between what I saw through the viewfinder and what the lens saw. I didn’t share its vision. Things lay beyond the margins of the viewfinder. I don’t know why it bothered me.
By the end of the second week I’d managed by hook or crook to photograph all of the rooms of her house with the exception of the unvisited room at the end of the corridor and the second-floor bathroom. I urgently wanted to finish the job not just for the money (the days) involved but also to end the strain. There was a certain harmless duplicity to the operation.
One afternoon in the middle of another Poe story, Ligeia, I excused myself. “There’s a bathroom on this floor,” she reminded me as I headed for the stairs. I continued as if I hadn’t heard her.
I tried the door of the room at the end of the corridor but it was locked. I went into the bathroom. The cramped quarters posed a technical problem even at the widest focal. I backed up in various spots and ended by knocking over a hair-dryer poised on the washbasin. It clattered to the floor, making a hell of a racket. Finally the only spot that allowed a general view of the bathroom was the shower. I slipped my shoes off. The porcelain unit underfoot proved to be wet.
The flash went off and I got a good part of the bathroom including the door which was now open with Beth Anderson framed in blinded stupefaction. Was it the clatter of the hair-dryer or had she been suspicious already?
I was caught off base. Usually I can come up with expert instant rectification of reality, a form of creativity in a way, I used to think. “Sculpting the sad gray clay of facts into ideal beauty,” I used to say. Time had taken its toll. The best I could manage, standing with graying hair soggy-footed in her shower, was: “Trying out a new camera.” She nodded briefly and groped down the staircase in silence.
She hardly opened her mouth that evening and abridged the session saying she had a bad headache. Maybe she really did. She had the hunted look she must have had when Hanna decapitated Sutter’s Gold. I could imagine her sleepless that night, pitching and tossing away, trying to digest other things: that alleged flash of lightning in a largely blue sky, my pacing off her living room to remedy a supposed back complaint, the revelation of a cash-nexus between me and Harvey Morgenstern.
And that was the moment Harvey chose to start harassing me to convince her to let us set up the sensors in her house.
By this time he was tired of his time-exploration of the dead room. He showed me a long list of the people he’d encountered on the screen. His body-count included his mother and father and himself in varying stations toward decay, four cousins, two uncles, eighteen family friends, the Negro maid he claimed to have caught stealing twenty years after the act, a reform rabbi, a cat and a Fuller Brush man. And my mother, twice. He hadn’t been able to locate her a third time, he said. New catches were becoming less and less frequent.
He wanted other dead rooms. He kept after me vocally and in writing. There would be money in it for her and for me, plenty of money. It shouldn’t be hard for me to convince her now. He made broad vulgar allusions to imagined intimacies. You’ve got her wrapped around your finger. He didn’t say “finger.” He’d gotten things all wrong.
The idea of time-exploring that space, brought out into the open like that, disturbed me deeply. It couldn’t be done, I said flatly. She’d never agree, no matter how much money he offered her. Who could stand the company of those multiplied Cyclops eyes whirring and tracking? Her nerves were already fragile.
Moreover, I continued, she prided herself on her interior decoration scheme. Her living room was all scatt
er rugs and delicate glass vases and blond imitation Scandinavian furniture. Time-sensors would be jarringly out of place in her pastel corners. She was a superstitious woman as well. She’d believed, all evidence to the contrary, in Indian good-luck charms, in zodiacal signs, and maybe in the efficacy of the cross. She wouldn’t take to necromancy.
“Necromancy. That’s summoning. The dead. We’re not summoning. The dead. We’re bringing back. The living.”
He added that in any case she wasn’t to be told what the sensors really did. I should never do that. He was confident I could cook up a plausible explanation unless I’d radically changed from my younger days.
When one day he demanded (a practical ultimatum) that I submit the proposal to her that very evening I tried to come up with an alternative strategy. If he could manage with a single sensor instead of the present four then conceivably it could be smuggled into a gift, a sizable decorative object, something bulky, maybe a statue with the sensor within, a 19th century Negro groom thing, for example, with the lens masquerading as one of the goggling eyes.
Impossible, he said: there had to be four of them. Anyhow the lens whirred and visibly moved about. Goddam it, Jerry, leave the technical side to me. He’d have shouted if he’d been able to. Invent a reason, he commanded.
He overestimated my powers of invention, I said, thinking of the recent bathroom fiasco. That, like so many other things, had been eroded by time. Why not tell her the truth about what the sensors really did? She might be flattered to participate in an historic time-experiment.
I suggested this because I was certain at first that she would refuse. I suspected she’d be deeply alarmed to learn that diachronically, in vertical cross-section, her living room was as crowded as the IRT 42nd St station at 6:00 pm. Then, too late, at the very moment I submitted the idea I wondered if after all she mightn’t accept the presence of the sensors in her living room in the hope of recuperating her son normal and her husband loving, if only in the form of shadows.
Fortunately, Harvey rejected the idea, as explosively as he could. I hadn’t been opening my mouth to her, had I? I didn’t like his tone and choice of words and felt like telling him so. I said, of course not, I hadn’t spoken a word about them to her.
Just to say something, I asked him how much money he was prepared to pay for the sensors to be set up in her house. He told me the sum.
The sum for her.
The sum for me.
A talking-session was scheduled – as he knew – the very day I learned what it was worth to him to get those sensors into the space Beth Anderson’s house intruded on.
I was apprehensive about it (the tutorial) but she opened the door all dressed up for class as usual and smiling. She’d digested the flash-shot in the shower-unit. She was even a little apologetic about the headache that had abridged the last session. She was that way, I was discovering: quick to flare up, quick to feel guilt about it.
As usual, we drank and chatted before getting down to business. I steered clear of The Golden Galaxy.
I didn’t position her for it. She positioned herself. It began by her complaining about the noise that night which had been particularly bad.
“I know I ought to be tolerant and all, but it’s crazy at that time of night, he must be insane!”
Immediately I said that, well, maybe not insane but certainly more than a little peculiar. Sometimes he reminded me of my grandmother on my father’s side. In the last years, I said, she used to throw dollar-bills out of the window. I wasn’t positioning her for it, not consciously I wasn’t, even though money was central to the perfectly authentic anecdote.
“Don’t tell me he does that!”
“Manner of speaking,” I said evasively, retreating from it now. “No, he’s not completely normal, poor Harvey.”
“Poor me you mean. Oh I realized he wasn’t normal a long time ago. Hounding me day and night for me to sell my house. I had to leave the phone off the hook to get some sleep. I even threatened to call the police though they say he’s got the police in his pocket.”
It wasn’t thought out. It was like a fencer’s arm autonomously exploiting a split-second opening:
“He’s still got a thing about your house. Only this time he doesn’t talk about a purchase. He talks about a rental. All the time.”
It was like my feet that morning five months before, autonomously heading me to the bank with his check. Money had been central to that too. She laughed.
“He wants to rent my house now? With that awful woman too? Where am I supposed to live?”
“As far as I can understand, people wouldn’t be involved in the rental. You’d go on living here. It’s for a device. He wants to rent a spot in your house for a device.”
“A device? What kind of a device? Is it a big device?”
“Size is a relative concept. They’re knee-highish, say.” I didn’t add: knee-highish to an elephant.
“They? I thought you said there was just one device.”
“In a sense there is. It’s the same device but multiplied four times. A little like quadraphonic speakers. As a matter of fact they look a little like speakers. Make less noise though. Forget about it.”
“Noise? They make noise too? He must be out of his mind.”
“Pretty far out. And it’d be so easy to take advantage of him in that condition. It’s pathetic, actually. It’s like that grandmother of mine. He says he’s willing to give you $20,000 if you keep them in your house for a while.”
She echoed the sum in astonishment, reflected and then asked suspiciously what was so special about her house.
I told her it wasn’t the house, he didn’t care about the house. It was the ground the house was standing on apparently.
“Buried treasure?”
“Nothing like that. Nothing commercially exploitable like oil or gold either. Telluric waves. Whatever that is. Your house occupies a nodal point, it seems.”
She reflected again for longer. “Could they be covered up with a cloth? Not that I’m tempted.”
“Maybe if you made holes for the lenses.”
“Lenses?”
I explained that it was for the telluric waves. She stepped back from the whole thing at that. She didn’t see how lenses fitted in with invisible waves. I didn’t myself. She could be pretty sharp sometimes. She also said she didn’t understand the business about telluric waves in the first place. Hadn’t I told her he was working on a machine to cure himself of his illness?
When I replied that he had more than one string to his bow, that he took himself for some kind of universal genius like Leonardo da Vinci, that he worked simultaneously on different things, she blinked and said nothing. The silence lengthened. Didn’t she find my answers too glib?
“Forget it, it’s all craziness,” I said and pushed the bottle out of the way and unclasped my black briefcase to get to safe things.
Everything went radically wrong then.
It was sheer carelessness on my part. I’d been late for the talking session and had grabbed the black briefcase without looking inside. I did notice that it was unusually heavy for something as lightweight as Steinbeck but supposed it was a bottle. When I took everything out of the briefcase the blue box containing her son’s poems was revealed. I remembered having stuck it there the day before while cleaning to get it out of the way.
Her face switched on.
I said, “Still working on them,” shoved it back in the briefcase and took out Of Mice and Men.
Her face switched off.
Half an hour later I excused myself and went to the bathroom, the ground floor one this time. The last time I’d visited a bathroom in her house things had gone very badly.
It was much worse this time.
The first thing I saw when I returned was her rigid back and then the blue box before her, opened for the first time since it had been in my possession. The poems, like a royal mummy, were protected by a sealed kraft envelope further protec
ted by criss-crosses of scotch-tape. Her face was as rigid as her back. I said, “Ah.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“You didn’t read them at all. You didn’t savor a single one.”
I recalled the pitiless priority she gave to sincerity. I was absolutely sincere now when I explained that those poems had seemed to mean so much to her, that I hadn’t wanted to wound her with the truth, that it was something I had trouble lying about. Call it a private code. Or a phobia. I’d had certain bad experiences I’d rather not talk about.
I couldn’t talk about the Bulgarian woman. Could I talk about the repetition of the experience twenty years later with my closest pal, gentle Marty Stein in the hospital, leaden-faced and terminal? He’d alluded to a secret activity. I thought it was clandestine women. It turned out to be clandestine poetry for the past two years since he’d learned how ill he was. Would I mind reading them and telling him the truth? Oh, it wasn’t the truth he wanted, not about his sojourn in the hospital and not about his poems either, bits of survival for him. Who wants the truth about anything?
So I didn’t tell him the truth about his poems. I couldn’t condemn him to total void. For hours every day for three weeks I recited those poems at his bed-side and had to invent quiet sincere-sounding things like: “It’s beyond analysis, Marty, like, I don’t know, certain chamber music, that Mozart viola and violin duo, you know the one: dum-dum-dee-da-da.”
Day after day. He went out with that. I wept for my best friend out of grief and guilt for relief. My dead suffocate me. It was nothing to talk about to a practical stranger even in justification.
“It’s something I simply can’t lie about, it takes too much out of me,” I repeated.
“But you did lie about it saying you’d savored them.” She was very close to tears. “And how could you know they’re bad? How can you possibly know that? You haven’t even read them.”
I was being hounded. What right did she have ferreting in my briefcase? I took the folder and started attacking the criss-cross of scotch-tape, saying: “I wanted to spare you and myself.” She started to say something. I cut her off. “Please say nothing until I’ve finished,” I said imperiously.
I had the pile between my clenched fists and plunged a little theatrically into the first of the things. It was like a high drum-rolled circus dive into a tub of water. I was aware of the uncompromising set of my features, my knotted brows and tight lips (didn’t it age me?) and I felt the balance between us shifting back. She was gazing at me with the old timidity. She sat down at a safe distance on the sofa, on the very edge, like a job-applicant.
The atmosphere was electric with her anxiety as sheet after sheet went into their appropriate pile. Time went by. Once she started to say something again. I cut it off instantly with a curt palm-forward gesture without looking up from the sheet. Once she approached the table and softly placed a glass on it. I frowned at the soft clink of the bottle’s neck against the glass, the gurgle. Dying for it I pushed it away. Nothing must be allowed to disturb the painful totality of my attention was what I wanted to convey. I couldn’t help hamming it up. I remembered again the quality she prized most.
Back on her sofa, she now had a magazine open on her lap and turned the pages but I felt her eyes on me. Sometimes she would get up and tiptoe about the place, straightening out this and that. Once the phone rang and she sprang for it and whispered (to a certain Johnny) that she’d take the call on the bedroom phone.
Later in a pause as I was reaching for another poem and still wondering who Johnny could be, she whispered: “Do you want to eat something?” By then the whole afternoon had gone by. I shook my head briefly. Soon she had to turn the lights on.
“OK,” I finally said, took a deep breath, slowly expelled it and leaned back.
I let another minute go by, visibly concentrating on correct formulation.
“Get this straight. He’s no Keats.”
That was to place my remarks under the sign of forthrightness, pitiless frankness, so she wouldn’t question the veracity of what I’d saved up for her out of compassion, number two on her list of virtues.
It was a mistake. She wouldn’t even concede that he was no Keats. She said that he was only fifteen when he wrote some of those poems.
It was a bad start. She didn’t yield an inch when it came to that son of hers.
I didn’t answer. In the silence she stared down at her pale blue carpet. Don’t look like that.
“I’ve sorted them into three piles as you can see.”
She didn’t look up. I went on with the forthright strategy.
“The first pile consists of the bad poems. It’s the biggest of the three piles as you can see. The second pile, a sizable one, consists of poor poems.”
Now she looked up at me. I’d aged her by ten years. As though I’d condemned him to overdose. Stop looking like that, you good person.
Her premises were all wrong, I felt like telling her. She’d blown up this idea in her head that acknowledging merit for his poems would somehow get him off drugs. When you’re in that situation – not the addict but the family – you grab for the most waterlogged of straws. Genius and addiction weren’t incompatible. Hadn’t she ever heard of Coleridge, Baudelaire, Modigliani? Coleridge, maybe.
“So much for the first two piles. There’s the third pile. The third pile is very small, maybe twenty poems. They have talent. Some are surprisingly good. In particular the one called Spring Morning in the BMT.”
I expected her face to light up at my gift, the painful invention. I expected her to exclaim something like: Oh Jerry you’re not saying that just to comfort me, are you?
Instead, she went through the rejected poems, picking and quibbling, dissenting and hassling at the presence of this poem and that poem. I pointed out that in the Kimberly mines there were five tons of gravel for every diamond. She didn’t at all appreciate the word gravel. It was just a metaphor, I said. She recited the poems with great expression to convince me of my error.
Hours went by. But you’re the expert, she kept on saying. She didn’t act as if she thought I was one. When she placed the poems back in the folder she undid my categories of bad, mediocre and promising, shuffled them all together.
She saw me to the door in silence and grudgingly wished me a good night. The thing that had stuck with her, stuck in her throat, I felt, wasn’t so much my criticism of the majority of the poems as it was the original invention. A lie, she’d called it plainly.
Original sin, I supposed, for someone with her hierarchy of values.
She begged off from the next bi-weekly talking sessions because of another one of her headaches. Then the second one she canceled because of “company,” she said. Apparently I wasn’t company.
That evening from my room I saw her brightly lit picture window and behind the gauzy curtain, as in artistic soft-focus, a man she’d invited over for drinks. The table was set for two. I couldn’t see how old he was. I made out the low glass-topped table with two bottles and between them cut-glass dishes probably containing anchovy-stuffed olives and toothpicked cheese-cubes. Did he drink single malt too? Did he have pedagogical talents? Or did his talents lie in another direction?
I saw her leaning forward in the eager posture of communication and the other in receptive immobility, then talking and gesturing himself. I almost had the illusion that I was looking at myself earlier with her.
Then Harvey called me down into the cellar for carpentry work on the new housing-units for the second-generation sensors. He intended reducing their size in the interest of mobility, he’d said mysteriously.
When I returned to my room two hours later the drapes of the picture window across the way had been drawn. There was soft light behind them. After a while the front door opened and she stood in a tasteless gold lamé décolleté she’d never worn for me, smiling and chatting with a young man of astonishing beauty, far too young to be her husband. Besides, he had a fine carnal head of
hair.
I assumed the old schedule would resume the following Tuesday evening. I went over and pressed her melodious chimes into action and waited. That suburban music used to materialize her, smiling, almost instantaneously. When she finally opened the door she stared at me blankly for a second. She wasn’t even dressed up in my honor.
She nodded acknowledgement, hesitated and finally let me in. The low glass-topped table where we worked and drank was bare of book and bottles. She’d forgotten, she said, following my gaze. She went and got the bottle of scotch and a glass and an unopened box of pretzels.
“I’m trying to cut down on my intake,” was how she explained the solitary bottle. She made unconvincing attempts at conversation. Her face was set in tragic lines. Wasn’t that overreaction to the flash-shot under the shower and the business with the poems? Or was it something else?
“Is everything all right?” I asked, breaking another silence.
“Everything is fine,” she replied.
Then she noticed the book in my hand. I’d been careful to leave the black briefcase in the other house.
“I haven’t read your chapters. I’ve been too busy this week.”
“No tragedy.”
“You look as if it was. Didn’t it ever happen that your students didn’t hand in their papers on time?”
“That happened. But it was an economically defined situation then. Papers or no papers I got my salary at the end of the week. What we do is extracurricular, for pleasure, yours, I had hoped.”
“I can’t concentrate anymore. Not with the problems I have. Never mind that. Anyhow I think I’m too old and stupid for that kind of thing. It was very kind of you and I did appreciate it.”
She didn’t sound as if she had. I didn’t insist. That was the end of the talking sessions. I finished my drink and left a quarter of an hour after I came, pretexting work for Harvey and adding that I too was trying to cut down on my intake. We were perfectly synchronized at least in that respect, I said. She made no effort to keep me there a little longer. Her door closed on me. Then it opened again.
“Oh, I forgot. You can tell Mr Morgenstern that I’m not at all interested in his proposition. I don’t want any of your prying machines in my house, not for all the money in the world.”
The door closed before I could protest that the prying machines weren’t mine.
Back in my room I told myself that the end of our relationship wasn’t really important. I concentrated on her physical and intellectual insufficiencies as one pathetically does in such situations. But I couldn’t help picking about again for other reasons for her changed attitude. Maybe it wasn’t just the camera and poem fiascoes. She’d spoken of worries. Her job? Her health? That son of hers? If so she clearly didn’t regard me as worthy of being confided in. “Everything is fine,” she’d said and then when it had slipped out that everything wasn’t fine: “Never mind.”
I didn’t like confidences, that was true, and apparently hadn’t concealed the fact well enough. But to be undisguisedly excluded from them that way was almost insulting, an uncharitable pointing to an insufficiency that wasn’t physical or intellectual, something worse from her point of view I suppose.
***