Agnes Mallory (14 page)

‘
So,' I said – hoarsely – after a long pause. ‘You're some kind of artist then
.'

That took the child aback – to her, there still seemed so many other possibilities. ‘Well … yeah,' she said, surprised. ‘At least, I mean – I want to be
.'

I struck the match. I torched the briquette. The flames danced quickly up into the dry wood
.

Soon, the fire was snickering merrily, and the girl was posing on the sofa with downcast eyes. Arranging her face into various expressions of milky sensitivity with which she hoped, I guess, to meet this last, long silence of mine. I was standing by the window, looking at the window, drink in hand. Secretly studying her reflection there, searching it for vestiges of that other face I remembered – and for vestiges of Agnes too, for any resemblance at all. Then, after another moment, my eyes shifted and I saw myself, my own reflection. If it had been a movie, I thought, there'd have been my transparent image upon the pane and, through that, the water trickling down the glass like tears, the tumult of the storm in the silhouetted trees – visually representing my turbulent inner state, see, with maybe a symbolic commentary on the veil of perception. And well, that's how it was, that's just what I did see. Which galled me. Because it was her movie. Because, I mean, it must've been something like this when she imagined it, in the movie that went through her mind when she was deciding to defy her poor old Dad and come: First, I'll lurk in the trees, then I'll hang out in the graveyard, then, by the fire, I'll be beguiling – mysterious yet somehow innocent and poignant – and the gruff but lovable old exile, touched, will wrestle with his inner anguish and finally purge his autobiography into my inspired eyes, freeing his tortured soul and mine at once and giving me the power to go forth, tra-la
.

I swallowed my gorge. Gruff but lovable. Dear God, had it really come to that?

In college, in Byronic mood, I used to follow girls down the street sometimes – nothing threatening; at a distance, I mean – if they had black hair and small heads and a certain sinuosity: that was the way I imagined Agnes had grown up, you see. It was funny, because that wasn ‘t what I wanted at all – in women, that is – in the long run. I took what I could get, of course, but fey blondes were what I set my hat for. Fey blondes with crystal blue eyes. Large-ish round breasts were also a favorite or small, shy, refined ones that perked up when you touched them. I taught a few such girls what it was to be adored, anyway. My little letting-outs of breath when they'd strip down, the more off-handedly the better. My raptures at the sight of their vaginas and buttocks – the fact that they had vaginas and buttocks – how wonderful! – I could go on and on about it. What must they have thought, the poor creatures, sitting on the things all day, casually crossing their legs this way and that over them, to have some dreamer go all religious about it? They must have wanted like crazy to believe me – who wouldn't? – especially at that age, feeling all misshapen and messy and secretly deficient – to be told, no, no, it's the greatest, it's the Coliseum. Well, I was tied to the cock-rocket like any young man and the transcendence went out of me with the gism and the girls would be hurt and disappointed, having gotten their hopes up. But fey blondes and their pudenda – call it a third-generation American trying to dive dick-first into the melting honey-pot, but I was there, and the physical facts took precedence – these still, always, drew me on
.

And yet – and yet, I'd follow a sinuous black-haired girl down the street now and then, someone like Agnes, my version of Agnes, though the rest of it, of our time together, had more or less receded from me. I'd forgotten the details, the actual incidents. I never thought about them anymore. And it was only much later that I began to think she might have had any real, any lasting effect on me, or have left a part of herself in what I hankered after. To give an example: I think I've always been a fairly conservative sort of person, in spite of my youthful liberalism. Work and money, living in houses, dressing in ties, I've always liked all that stuff. Even at NYU, in the early seventies, leftism fading but still a habit, a glow: even then, when I was sitting tailor-style in the dorms, wearing jeans and shaggy hair, smoking hashish, calling the president a fascist and so on, I always admired his suits – Nixon's. Even then, the Jewish tradition of extravagant condemnations of the corrupt and the hard-lined, while convenient for the time, sat uncomfortably on me. Later on, I made a philosophy out of this. I would point out that the embattled bourgeoisie, for all its complacencies, was really the last bastion of practical tolerance; that the left and the right were always imposing their wills on others, and finally forging their perfect worlds with censorship and guillotines and gulags and concentration camps. Only the middle ground knows how to live and let live, I'd say. But that was just a philosophy. The real point was that always, in my heart of hearts, I was a bourgeois, always. I always suspected that even the very best rock songs were simplistic, poorly written tripe, and that eventually, in every system everywhere, the sedate, the industrious, the pleasant were meant to inherit the earth. All right. So – that said – I studied Zen. This is what I mean about Agnes. I was deep down a practical, thoroughly un-mystical kind of a guy. Except when it came to yellow-haired pussy, satori was nowhere on my deepest agenda. Yet twice a week, all through college and law school too, I would close my books and tramp down to the Washington Square subway; ride the train all the way to and from Amsterdam Avenue; walk to the rundown brownstone off Columbus Avenue, and climb the narrow stairs to the shabby, plant-infested third floor one-bedroom apartment where Janet Hastings held her Transcendence Seminars. Pretzeling my legs with deep, cynical and witty groans into the half-lotus position I would sit narrow-eyed in a circle with six others, a candle burning among us on Janet's thinning living room carpet. I would try to carry out her solemn instructions to ‘Follow your energy,' or ‘Visualize your breath.' This, even though such language struck me as incredibly vague and silly. And the discussions afterward – gad, they made me downright squeamish. Janet was into the New Testament in a big way and always quoted Jesus as if he were some great guy she knew personally, a dutch uncle whose advice was so clear, so in keeping with eastern principles of inner vision that all this Catholic and Protestant nonsense that had been going on these past twenty centuries would just make him slap his knee with holy hilarity. The joy of clarity and revelation would well up in her throat when she talked and into the others' throats too and even into my throat sometimes, which just made my hair stand on end. I distrusted it entirely. But – but the meditation itself – helped along sometimes by Janet's mystifying Zen tales of broken buckets and tasty strawberries – that kept me coming back for more. And I think
–
think now though it would never have occurred to me at the time – that it was Agnes I was after, my lost Sole, that Walk Home From Her House feeling. It didn't come naturally to me without her and I missed it. I wanted it back
.

I would even go so far as to say that this had something to do with my marrying Marianne. Marianne with her fairy tendrils of corn-colored hair, and her upstate dairy farm childhood, and the gray leotards she meditated in which served to inflame my suspicions that she sure enough possessed the articles of my one true faith. She was one of Janet's students too. In fact, she worshipped Janet. She would tell me, breathily, ‘Janet is so deep. She understands so much.' The goof. This made me jealous, on the one hand, but it also suggested a talent in her for selfless devotion, something I wanted in a wife, and which I saw confirmed in her vulnerable, domitable not to mention crystal blue eyes. She was – not to oversimplify, but to make the point – everything I was looking for, yet with just that added flip of kookiness that was the legacy of my lost little girl companion
.

Turned out there was no resemblance. Not only between Marianne and Agnes but between the soggy ghost on my sofa here and the dead sculptress of beloved memory. She, the girl on the sofa, was more my type, the Marianne type. Light hair, apple cheeks, bright, pellucid, innocent eyes. And it saddened me to realize this, oddly enough. As if America were rinsing the mad Jewish witch out of its bloodlines and leaving this pale spectre of itself to go searching across the graveyards of the earth blah blah blah … Dear Christ, listen to the bullshit. The big thoughts, the stupid generalizations. She was doing it to me. Sucking me bodily into the cinema of her soul
.

I tore myself away from the window and, in doing so, rounded on her dramatically, which must've been just what she wanted. God, how to break the fetters
.

‘
All right then,' I said, ‘what do you want? We've done the root cellar, we've done the graveyard. The journalist lie, the age lie.' She tried to look smart-assed but her cheeks colored. ‘What do you want?' I said again
.

And surprise, surprise
–
call me a feather and blow me away – she leveled her baby greens at me and said – said gravely as if expecting a chord to strike:

‘I
want to know about Agnes Mallory
.'

Her letters started twenty years later, in the era of Buckaroo Umberman. Buckaroo was a Manhattan real estate attorney. Also a part-time tax commissioner. Also the president of the MacBride Democratic Club, with offices in the heart of the Deuce. He was also, I've come to suspect, my id, foul as he was. I think that had to be it, else how could he have corrupted me so easily? Of course in those days, when I was young and so half mad, everyone was something to me. Ralph Myers was my father, Marianne my mother, Umberman my id, and so on. Some hooker who called herself Juliet I think was my vacuous, beautiful, sold-out soul. Everything fit in somewhere. That's what craziness is: imposing the template of your psyche on an indifferent world. Of course, that's also what sanity is, which is what causes so much of the terror and confusion about the two states. But crazy or sane is not the point: it was youth. I was young, and as far as I was concerned, everyone had a role to play in the extravaganza of my existence. That's what they were there for.

So the lights come up on me again when I'm twenty-nine. Briefcase in hand, I'm storming with virile and righteous anger past the reception desk at Myers & Weiss. The secretaries loved me when I was like that. They'd go slack, their pupils dilating. Six feet tall and very thin, blond still, with boyish features, I usually tried for an expression of old-fashioned, square-jawed rectitude tempered by man-of-the-world cynicism which of course failed to quite conceal my indomitable fighting spirit. It was good stuff. Even Weiss, the junior partner, wanted a piece of it. When I passed his open door, he called out to me. ‘Hey! Harry! Hold on!' When I stopped, all impatient and dynamic, he came around his big desk to me, partner though he was.

In my arrogance then, I could find no easy way to relate to Weiss. I liked him, but looked down on him too. Even literally, down on his amiable pug features, his bald head with the frizzy black fringe. At forty or so, he had gone where he was going more or less, whereas I radiated a Big Future. He liked, therefore, to play adviser to me, get his licks in, secure his mentor role in my biography. The pleasanter I was about it, the more he sensed I was merely tolerating him and the more desperate and pushy he got. It was not a comfortable relationship.

‘What's up?' he said, laying a friendly hand on my shoulder.

‘Plunkitt Towers,' I said grimly. ‘The fix is in.' I'd been reciting this phrase to myself all the way in from the Bronx and thought it sounded great.

‘This is the Article Five case.'

‘Yeah.' It was one of my favorites. Its outrageousness made it a tale worth telling, especially as I was on the side of the angels. Having left Legal Services a couple of years back, it was just the sort of thing I had to root around for more. Briefly, Plunkitt Towers was part of a Fifties slum-clearance project: subsidized low-income housing on the West Side. Originally, it was packed with deserving, mostly Jewish, mostly socialist types. According to the law, as these people prospered or died or moved away, the new low-income groups, namely blacks, Hispanics, Orientals and so on, were supposed to move in. But that's not the way it happened. When the Lincoln Center theater complex went up, the value of the neighborhood went up with it. Suddenly, the Plunkitt Towers residents found themselves living in a very low-rent goldmine. In the meantime, some of those same residents had become fairly powerful themselves, with connections to the city government and political clubs. So, while the city Housing, Preservation and Development Agency turned a blind eye, the residents stacked the building's waiting list with friends, relatives and heirs, and the new low-income people had to go fish for somewhere else to live. Okay – now, in Washington, president Reagan and the Republicans had arrived. Real Estate Summertime: the borrowing's easy and the market runs high. On top of which, the City's contract on Plunkitt was about to expire, which meant that, with a two-thirds majority vote from the co-opers, the building could go private, ensuring large profits all around and leaving legitimate low-income folks out in the cold. Just another New York scam: fine speeches and good intentions twisted to line the pockets of the powerful. But wait! What's this on the horizon? Is it? Yes. Sir Harry of Bernard, riding in
pro bono
to stop the vote on the grounds that a lot of the voting residents shouldn't have been in the building to begin with. A cry of ‘Huzzah!' Followed by a loud: ‘Shit!'