Cast in Doubt (17 page)

John probably has no idea what I’m doing. For his sake I ought to have imitated Mick Jagger. It is for his sake I am dancing the tango of the gloves, is it not? For whose sake then am I dancing? Does one commit mischievous acts for oneself or another? Murder, a tango, a striptease. How I wish my body were beautiful! I toss myself here and there, hither, thither, and yon. My ecstatic positions are ephemeral, sublime, ludicrous, but they do have a logic, even if it is only internal. They make sense to me.

I stop prancing just as suddenly as I started, mentally patting myself on the back for bravado, nothing else. I offer to treat them both to a wonderful meal at the only restaurant on the harbor. John hesitates. Is he thinking of Alicia? Gwen notices his hesitation or reluctance. Damned hungry, she declares and grabs me by the hand, pulling me toward the door. This action leaves John standing alone in the middle of the room, with the empty wine bottles on the floor about him. They look like sinking ships.

We must go, I declare to John. John’s hands dangle foolishly from his long thin arms. He himself is in some way dangling foolishly, even dangerously. Ah, I muse waggishly, a pretty boy is considering his options. He must soon come to a decision, having weighed the pros and cons of doing this or that, I suppose. He blinks, clears his throat, but says not a word, and then follows after us penitently, nay, passively. He’s a young man easily led.

Will I be the leader or Gwen? Am I in any condition to lead? Actually the idea of Gwen and me as leaders is marvelous; in our present state, we ought to be inflicted on the public! To Gwen I bellow, in a mock English accent, Where will it all end? Hell, she mutters, just hell. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I, I answer. I recite this line in the manner of Olivier, I’m almost positive of that. Dear Gwen, perverse Gwen. Perverse me. To dinner we three!

I am losing too many nights, if nights can be lost. How do I love thee, let me count the nights. They do count, whether or not they are lost. Perhaps Gwen and the boy have scooped it up, whatever it was that was lost. I must have been asleep for a generation—accounting for the generation gap—and they have taken my—that—night from me, sharing it between themselves. What a foul idea. I don’t even remember if Roger made an appearance at the restaurant when we three were there. If he did, I think he and Yannis were scowling at each other, quite ferociously. I can see their contorted faces before me. How ugly anger is! John must have deposited me at my door. Or Gwen. Or both. Though for some reason I believe it is unlikely they were together. Something happened between them, I think. Perhaps it will come to me as the day goes on.

The sun glares into the room. The curtains were not drawn. Yannis forgot to do it. I don’t want to open my eyes. Not yet. But even though I think that, I do open them, just to demonstrate to myself that I can think one thing and do another. My small world comes into view—bureau, slice of sky, books on floor, and so on, and I ask myself again: why has Helen disappeared? What is the reason? There must be a reasonable explanation. But I cannot, for the life of me, find one. I am, I decide, obsessed by this, and I know it’s weird, as John might put it. I think he did put it that way, the other day, come to think of it, when I talked to him about Helen. John thinks me strange, I think. Yet I must find the bits that I do not know and join them together into a reasonable, a functional whole. This makes me a sort of quilter on the order of Great-Aunt Sarah, a loathsome woman, but most talented in her homely way.

I am reminded of an unfinished piece of writing about Helen. But where is it? If only Yannis acted as my secretary. I get out of bed and shuffle through some papers and come to it.

We were at the restaurant, at my table. Helen was rubbing her foot. Then she began tapping her foot on the ground in an arrhythmic pattern that annoyed me but I did not complain. She asked about my past, friends, college, Boston, New York, as she did from time to time, and very easily did I relate anecdotes and tales that I believed she enjoyed and which I would not so willingly tell others. Helen was a wonderful listener. One simply felt her appreciation. I told her about a fatal disagreement between two artists, both of whom developed a certain kind of technique or effect. They fought about who did it first and who could claim it. Each was adamant. It ended their friendship. Helen was astonished. What did it matter, she wanted to know, who did it first? I explained that it had to do with originality, with thinking up something first, with being the first to have fostered a new idea, to have changed definitively a field—in art, in science—to have produced a theory or form, which established a new way of thinking, in writing, even a locution, and that that ought to be credited. Helen thought it was funny. She declared that she would never care about something like that. Why did it really matter who did it first; didn’t it only matter that it was thought or done, she wanted to know. I was hard-pressed to get to the heart of it, to why it mattered ultimately. But I elaborated that it was important, for instance, in science, to mark the link from one idea to another, and to give credit where it was due. Human beings strive for immortality, for recognition and acknowledgment, to make their mark, to encourage progress, and to move civilization forward, I went on. Later, we laughed about the fifteen minutes any of us might be given in this regard, but my sweet young Smitty accepts this short span on the stage more readily than do I, I think. Indeed I was winded by the end of my short speech. I waxed and waned with it.

I never finished recording the events of that day and night which we spent together. What did we do that day? I cannot remember now. It’s so odd what one forgets and what one holds and stores inside one, good memories as well as bad ones. The oddest occurrence of all is when a friend remembers much too well an event you have no memory of and yet it struck the friend as worth preserving, consciously or unconsciously, and in the friend’s memory you are a vivacious actor in the scene.

I reread the page. What did it mean really, that conversation with Helen? As a piece of writing it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. It may not. It does not explain anything to me. But I am not sure. There may be clues in it that are hidden from me. I put it away again but this time place it in a clean new folder which I mark, Questions about Helen.

In the great scheme of unknowable things, Helen’s absence is unimportant, a speck of dust in a vast and unseemly, filthy world. Still, a mystery is a mystery. I rub my eyes; they are coated, a film over them. I cannot see properly. While this may be a metaphor, it is also true that my sight has bothered me for years, and as I age I worry more and more that one day I will not be able to read, that I will go blind, and end life as one of those poor souls with a white cane who is forced to walk the streets waving it in the air about him, a spectacle who cannot see what kind of spectacle he makes. I am susceptible to humiliation, while the people I admire most are indifferent to how they appear to others. Could I, like Milton, train young people to read for me, and would I be as cruel—to teach them to read without understanding? I have no daughters. I nearly thought, I have Helen. How comic, how predictable. Now a pang—a kind of hole—lodges just under my heart, a register of longing or emptiness, which may be the same. This hunger I experience—to be full and whole. Do terribly obese people suffer this in the extreme? Still, why shouldn’t one long for eternal life? Why shouldn’t one crave immortality? Or is this pang an intimation of heart disease?

Immortality is one thread in the quilt. I try in all matters to find the significant thread—or theme—that if pulled would rip apart the sweater, unravel the yarn. It’s why I enjoy writing stories based on real-life crimes. People usually have motives for what they do, foolish ones, perhaps, ones spurred on by the least attractive qualities in men and women. Jealousy, greed. Ignobility. There are always motives in the crime stories I’ve written. Thus I can move from event to event unselfconsciously and with a degree of fluidity: someone wasn’t named in a will and took revenge; he stole his girl; she took a lover and her husband found out, then murdered them both; and so on. A murder is committed or two murders, the second to conceal the first. There is a chain of events, a series of links, and one need merely trace the links back or begin at the beginning, moving forward to the penultimate event, to understand the ultimate one. Increasingly, life is not like this.

Yannis arrived home late last night, his tail between his legs. He is sporting a ghastly black-and-blue eye, a shiner, we used to say, and is terrifically vague about his lost days and nights. Lost to me, not to him, I suppose, as he knows what he was doing and I do not. Yet because of the palpable presence of John and the comfort of inimitable Gwen—at least in some respects—I’m indifferent to his evasiveness. I do not press him as I would have in the recent past. I refuse to react to his shenanigans. I do not cajole and barter. Yannis is startled by the change in my attitude: my lack of reaction has sharply shifted things for him. He doesn’t know what to do to catch hold of me again. I see him thinking, plotting how to do it. It is the same look that overcomes his normally placid features when he is fishing at the harbor and something tugs on his line. He snaps to with a mixture of stealth and cunning, a tiger about to pounce, then he jerks the rod to fix the hook in the poor fish’s gaping mouth. Thus is he thinking about me, with the same determined expression on his face. One day Yannis may find he’s lost me, that I have not been adequately hooked. That I have not taken the bait. Look, I am saying to him, I am swimming away. You cannot catch me. You do not have the right bait and lure. And soon, I say to myself, seeing his power diminish, he may leave me—I can sustain this thought—and that will be all right. Nothing is forever, after all, except common death.

Distracted—or perhaps in order to distract myself—I choose a book from the night table, one of Alicia’s, entitled
The Gypsies
, and I turn to the index, where I discover a citation for Death. Under the subheading, “Death and Funeral Rites,” I read that “a Gypsy does not die in his bed…no more than birth, may death pollute the home.” “On the announcement of death, the whole tribe begins to weep or cry out, even yell.” I should have liked to have witnessed such behavior at my mother’s funeral. My brother would never wail; even the need to wail and cry out would be beyond his comprehension. Actually he would be incapable of wailing, I’m certain. At our funeral rite for Mother, there were some wet eyes, and several cheeks were damp with tears, the teardrops pressed into or blotted onto the skin with handkerchiefs.

But oh I have wailed, I have brayed at the moon, I have found myself on my knees, howling. I have seen the best minds of my generation…and really I disdained the Beats then. Yet even I, in that funereal group, was contained, tight. In fact, I was tight. How else to get through such a sad ceremony, surrounded by the living dead.

It seems the Gypsies have a different conception of death from us. Once they bury one of their own, they forget the place of burial. That makes sense for a nomadic people, for travelers. Fascinating, fascinating, I mutter aloud—Yannis is not, I hope, within earshot. I converse with the invisible interlocutor who, I often imagine, stands near me to hear my amazement, to absorb my thinking, and to encourage and feel my rising excitement. At times I recognize that this other must be my mother, as she was the first person who shaped and shared my intellectual concerns; she did encourage them, and me.

I read on, “There remains the matter of protecting oneself against the return of the deceased in the form of a ghost, a vampire or a mulo.” (I look up mulo: “The mulo really seems to be in effect ‘Death’s Double. He is not the corpse; he is the man himself in the form of his double.”) My mother must have become a ghost, one I cannot yet see. Perhaps I have not earned the right to see her. But why not? I squint and try. I rub my eyes and try again. I can nearly discern her face, but her pale image dissipates and dissolves into the air. This would not count as her making a visitation, in any case, but rather as my failed attempt at bringing her back. Why wouldn’t she want to visit me? I oughtn’t read on.

A weight settles upon my chest. If I close my eyes I can see her, I can see her next to my bed, reading to me. She was a lovely woman. My unfortunate looks come from my father. I touch my nose, which is like his, bulbous. How palpable the past is! I shift in my bed as if to throw sadness off. Yet her loss weighs me down. Loss, oughtn’t you be light? I find my notebook and pen, sit up straight in bed, fluff the pillows behind me, touch my back, notice I’ve lost weight, and, even without coffee, read on.

There are five to six million Gypsies distributed throughout our world—the book was published in English in 1963, in French in 1961. In the introduction, it states that “Above all else, Gypsies are feared…400,000 Gypsies were shot, hanged or gassed in the Nazi concentration camps…” I skim along and my eye lights upon this: “The Gypsies represent an exceptional case: they are the unique example of an ethnic whole perfectly defined, which, through space and time for more than a thousand years, and beyond the frontiers of Europe, has achieved success in a gigantic migration—without ever having consented to any alteration as regards the originality and singleness of their race.” The writer of this is a Frenchman, as many Gypsiologists, as they’re called, seem to be.

It must be the Gypsy originality and singleness that attract Helen. I would venture this analysis even at this early date. Except that she is not interested, she said, in originality. But perhaps if it applied to people, she might make an exception. I take a few notes. It could be their lack of having been altered by others, of being a defiant race. But are they a race? I wonder if the surrealists, who were primarily French—or at least one could say the movement bloomed, centered in Paris—I wonder if they too were fascinated by the Gypsies. I must research this. If I believe in anything, anything at all, it is in the value of research. It is one of my household gods. These notes will go into the file marked Questions about Helen.