Cast in Doubt (18 page)

Yannis enters the room, carrying freshly brewed coffee. He is smiling engagingly. One must be engaged to be engaging. Engaging, engaged, these words trigger a memory that is in its own way surreal. For something surreal happened the other night—or was it just last night?—something between John and Gwen. I must concentrate. A vague pattern of sounds clusters about my ears; the memory of sound is even more elusive than that of images. But aromas have enormous vitality. And an equally vague set of images forces itself before my eyes. Gwen and John are dancing; Christos is playing music tapes on his tinny machine. Yes, I see that now. I rub my eyes. But what occurred next? I am circling about it with my mind. An engagement ring. No, a circle pin. Yes, something about a circle pin. They come off the dance floor and sit near me. Gwen is going on about how she would have worn a circle pin in the fifties, in college, that she’d always wanted to, but couldn’t because she was black—a Negro, yes, she may have said a Negro, and she drew out the two syllables. Circle pins were for Breck girls with blond hair, she said. It is not like her to mention her race, as I’ve explained, but she was high. She is especially adamant when inebriated. John simply couldn’t understand her. He kept repeating, A circle pin—man that’s weird, man. He didn’t get it, he said, and made fun of Gwen for being straight. Circle pins aren’t hip, I believe he announced—without irony. He was, I suppose, merely trying to be playful or amusing. Gwen wasn’t having it. She pulled up her small frame—she tends to curl into herself like a cat—and hissed to John that he was a privileged tot who wouldn’t know anything about what life was or was not like for her. He was, I think she berated him, a hopelessly unhip white boy, and she may have used the epithet “white Negro.” which was a fifties term, if memory serves. At this juncture I believe I attempted some witticism about how the circle pin itself might symbolically shed light on the problem. I tried my best to put it all on a different plane, but such attempts are mostly futile. She may have slapped him. I think she did. Someone slapped someone that night.

This is why I don’t believe they slept together that night, although I could be wrong. Aggressive behavior is often a prelude to sexual encounters. It has been so in my life, in any case. Some insects bite each other’s heads off when mating. Rémy de Gourmont, in that curious book
The Physiology of Love
, produced many remarkable examples of sexual love between animals and between insects that if enacted between human beings…well, perhaps they are enacted between human beings. I recall some bizarre incidents in the sexual life of bees; de Gourmont adored queen bees. About the males, the drones, his language was excessive and damning. Useless, parasitic, he called them. I’m sure Gwen may have used the very same language about some of her beaux-drones.

Isn’t it odd that that particular anger, or rage or life force, libido, courses with such virulence, with such peculiar physicality, and is activated and erupts within one’s body like a volcano, and that its lava—molten, heedless lust—can be aroused by the most unpleasant people? One often feels such hatred and disgust for one’s partner of the night before. He may have been attractive then, fierce, pleasant, indolently sexy, whatever, and in the morning those very same characteristics appear loathsome. Sex itself can be so unpleasant. Sometimes one experiences such terrifying feelings. A good lover isn’t necessarily in himself magnificent; it is that he makes one feel at least proficient or unencumbered by restraint. Oh, for those precious nights!

If she hasn’t already, Gwen will tire of John, another pretty white boy, a drone, useless. She will tire of him soon. I have faith in Gwen. In truth, she desires a true connection, but I—I need only have a muse. An amusement.

I can’t bring myself to work on the Stan Green book today though it is due soon. I shall be just a little late. My publisher knows that I always come through. Even my agent once telephoned from New York and said, They know you’ll come through, Horace, you’re a trouper. A trouper. When she said that, Gloria is her name, I imagined I was a fusty vaudevillian meant to be brought out on stage during a lull between better acts. I am wearing too much rouge. I don’t want to go on—yet I have been indoctrinated to believe I must. The show must go on, Horace! This tired exhortation rings in my ears as I wait in the wings, or in the seen-better-days dressing room. Fussily, I walk out on stage and stand before a hostile audience. I bow, clear my throat, and steal the show.

For the record, I do recall another incident. Though whether it happened here or in the restaurant, I haven’t the foggiest: John stole the show rather uncharacteristically. With some elaboration he spun a tale. As he is some years older than Helen, he had already spent time bumming around Europe, as he put it. He bummed around Amsterdam. This was a couple of years ago. Timothy Leary, a sixties character whom Helen would laugh at and whom Gwen knows, of course, had just been captured in Afghanistan. According to John—I did not follow Leary’s travails, nor have I ever tried LSD, not eager to simulate madness, unless assured of transcendent visions!—Leary had been living under state protection in Austria. For the price of appearing on television to denounce drug-taking, he could escape the U.S. government, which was eager to imprison him. He could have lived happily ever after in Vienna, if people do live happily there. But he was restless, or his lover was. It seems that Leary’s wife or lover encouraged him to adventure to the East and desert his safe house, Austria, which he did. They were immediately caught, busted in the airport, and deported to the States, where Leary was imprisoned.

This is the point at which John’s story became extremely interesting to me. A man named Dennis entered the scene. He appeared in Amsterdam just after Leary’s capture in the Afghan airport. Dennis said he had been traveling with Leary and the woman—Joanna, I think her name was—but he himself somehow escaped Interpol, and came to Amsterdam to broadcast the truth of Leary’s capture in Afghanistan and his previous life in Algeria and so on. In fact, John says, Dennis was carrying a Leary manuscript, which he claimed would never be published in the States, as it did indeed tell the real story in Algeria—Leary’s wife Rosemary’s adventure with Kathleen Cleaver, for one thing. Eldridge was also there, and he was involved with an Algerian girl, much against the prevailing customs and Muslim religion. Rosemary was wretched, as was Kathleen, it seems. I would be too, I should imagine, in such a situation, and with those men, neither of whom do I find appealing. But no matter.

Dennis ingratiated himself to the Dutch artistic underground community, such as it was, along with his pallid, untalkative wife and their child. They seem to have resembled typical hippies. Then, shortly after a mimeographed edition of Leary’s book surfaced in Amsterdam, courtesy of a member of the underground who felt obliged to make it available, the American edition appeared, with wholesale elisions from the Amsterdam manuscript, but appear it did. And Dennis, who said it would never see print, himself disappeared, simply vanished. But, said John, who received one letter from him, written from California, where Leary was in jail, Dennis surfaced, finally. He was lately found murdered, execution-style, in a Spanish hotel room. He’d been working for the CIA, a lowly agent, but an agent nonetheless. It was likely that he had turned Leary in, more than likely, which explained why Dennis himself had escaped Interpol. According to John, Joanna too was CIA, but captured with Leary so as to give the operation the ring of truth. Leary was not a good judge of character; LSD had perhaps made him oblivious to the possibility of deceit. Acid, John told me, makes one love everyone and feel at one with the universe. What an idea! Universal love certainly did not stand Leary well.

The Dennis story endeared John to me as much as his beauty already had. There is nothing more appealing than beauty and intrigue. Can something be beautiful without mystery? Beauty would be incomplete—ugly—without it, would it not? Mother suspected that I turned everything into drama. I am drawn to the mystery and inconclusiveness of life, which is dramatic; life is allowed to hold unwieldy surprises or at least uncertainty. Yet I demand a kind of perfection, which must be definitive—perfection is never ambiguous or incomplete. Not finding it, I seek to study imperfections as if they would reveal clues to a secret existence, one living in tandem with or parallel to ordinary existence, a life that would be complete and conclusive. Perhaps this makes no sense, but surely it explains some of my interest in crime and criminals.

I don’t necessarily want always to make perfect sense; but I do want to find reason and motives. Life is crazy, Smitty more than once insisted to me; and to her, I think, the pursuit of sense, of reason, was itself nonsensical, irrational. I argued points like these many times with her, yet in some ways I had to concede she was right. But she was—is—so young. I am running ahead of myself. And running ahead of Smitty. My Smitty.

There was a grocer in our town named Smitty, and everyone loved him. He was a man I visited with my mother, at his store, two times a week, let’s say, a man so jovial and friendly, he was above and beyond suspicion. But one day it was discovered that he had a dark side. I don’t even remember precisely what his crime was—which is odd—but at the time, I was only seven, it shocked me into realizing that life wasn’t what my mother and father, when he spoke to me at all, represented it to be. Life was filled not just with incivility and occasional outbursts and rudeness, but with the terrible unexpected, with bad people, even evil ones, and one could never trust appearances. Still, one learned one must, compelled to even by the difficulty of the task, and one kept up those appearances. One had to keep up appearances for just these contradictory reasons.

What did we all hide? I remember dwelling on that perplexing question the whole hot summer after the grocer was incarcerated. I enjoyed taking long walks by myself in the woods, where I became fascinated with worms that crawled under rocks, with what might be hiding in the forest, banal experiences of that sort. And in my imagination Smitty the grocer was always somewhere nearby, a fantastic shape, a shadow hovering near a brook, and he was ready to pounce. Children have such vivid imaginations. It is a singular, exacting and herculean task of our society to damp those down, to tame children with ice-cream cones and dreary television. Helen thinks my ideas about what she calls pop culture entirely old-fashioned. Helen.

What I want to do most of all is to find Helen. I would be Stan Green were I able. And to find Helen, my Smitty, I did and do commit myself. Mentally, that is. I wished no one else to know of my quest, as I had concluded that I could not engage John in the adventure and was sure Gwen would try to put me off it. So I was to sleuth alone, and I was to begin at the beginning. I would go to Helen’s house, that is, Bliss’ house, and look for clues. For better or worse I am goal-directed.

With the goal tucked inside me, I walk determinedly to the open window through which the sun pours itself promiscuously into this room; its mission is natural, part of nature, and perhaps mine is too. I am watched by Yannis, who has often seen me walk to this very window. But he has no idea, of course, what’s in my mind. I look toward Helen’s terrace. There is no life there. Nothing stirs at Helen’s house, I announce in a stage whisper. I dress quickly, as if suddenly and urgently called to action, to move and to see for myself that rickety abode where Helen greeted and loved sailors and read books and made watercolors and wrote in her diary. I am thinking this as I pull on my tennis sneakers and throw over my shoulders a favorite cable sweater. Then, as if on a whim, I grab a sharp knife from the dining table. Yannis gives a yelp of surprise and moves to stop me, but I am determined, I suppose this is what I felt, to protect myself at all costs. None of this was conscious. Thought was liminal, a pink streak of light blushing in the sky after a crimson sun had disappeared.

Sometimes one advances toward a specific destination with not just a sense of purpose and direction, but with a sense of what to expect, and one progresses assured in the knowledge that the world one knows will be as one knows it and has always known it. When I walked to Alicia’s house the other week, I knew what I would find there. I did not know of course that her cheeks would be flushed or that she had sung to John, or for him, but I knew where her furniture would be and that her books would be on shelves; I knew how her paintings would be hanging, that there would be flowers in vases, and so on. I knew John might be there, and if he wasn’t I knew he would be on another day. One exists with the sense that life goes on in a regular manner, that one can breathe because one is meant to and air is air, that hello, yá sou, or bonjour will greet one, that fruit and vegetables will be sold where they were sold yesterday—in short, that one can recognize oneself in a recognizable world. And that much of life is ordinary. Even persons in concentration camps were able to adjust, over time, to the most horrific of circumstances, having come to know the routine, which was terrifyingly and mercilessly life as they were compelled by fate to know it, to live it, for however long.

As I walked to Helen’s house, I had lost this sense of assurance. I did not know what to expect, which alone unnerved me. I was already unnerved—or nervous—because I didn’t understand her disappearance, but when I imagined the consequences of this ignorance, I became confused. I had never even been inside her house. Years ago, when its owner Bliss was still in residence, I visited him there, but that was a long time ago. Much as I tried to envision Helen’s house, its contents, and to create it in advance of seeing it, I could not. I simply did not know what awaited me.

Now one may want to interject—part of me does—that I, Horace, sought to feel compassless, to experience the vertiginous highs and lows of the unexpected, having already insisted upon my pleasure in the unknown, having insisted upon how much I needed to invent my life, to make it closer to fiction. But I am a writer and given to such musings. One mustn’t believe everything one reads, after all.