Cast in Doubt (6 page)

As we walk out of the theater, several men make quite a show of watching her bottom—her ass—and I pretend not to notice them. But Helen turns on her heel and in Greek tells them to fuck off. They are as astonished as I am. My Smitty, my Helen, is full of surprises. She has yet to disappoint me in any important way and if she’s now being crude, it is her right, for, I ask myself, why should she let those men devour her with their greedy eyes and make rude comments? Yet the speed and harshness of her attack is a shock. Helen takes my arm and we walk back to the harbor.

These are the only Westerns she likes, she tells me, she can’t sit through the others; they’re too straight. Instantly I feel a twinge of sadness, even futility, at this blatant expression of the gap between us; the sadness settles just below my breastbone or in my solar plexus where anguish resides, I think. Certainly I can’t adequately explain to her my nostalgia for the older American ones, mendacious as they are. She’d be mystified and out of sympathy with me, though I’m sure she’d listen attentively and without malice. Helen doesn’t make fun of me. Were I to express myself, she’d respect my opinion and be very interested, intrigued at how differently I thought from her. Still, I’m embarrassed, as if mentally enfeebled, hobbled for a moment by age; I am determined not to let that show. Jovially, I invite her to dinner. But no, she won’t join me. And no, I can’t find the words to ask her about John, and besides I’m not supposed to. She expects she will encounter the Gypsy and intends to speak to her soon, maybe tomorrow. But will she visit John, I wonder, but I don’t dare ask. Helen says she may travel, take a short trip, for a few days perhaps. Each of us—Alicia, Roger, Helen—comes and goes. We often do not see each other for days; but we do not monitor each other’s movements. There is a way in which time is not of the essence here. It is a luxury each of us cherishes.

I might visit John. I just might. Later, that came into my mind—rather than having to ask Helen anything. She might not like my doing it, but I’m free, as is she. I could pay him a call in the hospital—do a good deed, be a good Samaritan. Tell him Alicia said he needed company. She didn’t say he didn’t. Alicia never mentioned the idea of his needing company at all. John could be entirely harmless, a blessed event, or a malevolent soul, and it would be perfectly within reason for me to want to see if what Alicia thinks of him is true or has any relation to reality. Even a trace. Since Helen is my good friend.

The water dashes against the harbor, excited by something stirring beneath it. A beast, a hideous octopus is moving down below, a war is being waged between monsters of the deep, that kind of thing. I have been working steadily for some hours. Helen is not on her terrace.

The restaurant beckons, and I take my usual table. The wine is cold and tingles in my gullet and on my tongue. Alicia is not here again, which is good, as I might feel compelled to reveal something I oughtn’t, but that awful Wallace is. Is he out of jail so soon: Do I have to talk with him? He’s not really one of our crowd, such as it is, but an interloper on the scene, a madman, different from Stephen, whom I haven’t seen in months. Perhaps Wallace will tell me again his idea for irrigating the Sahara—planting a gigantic rubber tube in a fertile source, from which it will suck water, carry it miles and miles, then expel it into the parched desert. He talks about his invention with such unwarranted excitement he means it to be taken seriously.

Wallace plops down at my table, uninvited, pulling along his Dutch girlfriend, who understands his Afrikaans. I ought to feel pity for Wallace, in and out of mental asylums and jails, this last time for indecent exposure, which could have gotten him thrown out of the country, but someone—probably Roger, he plays chess with one of the judges—interceded. Wallace’s parents own one of the major newspapers in South Africa, and all of this must have been trotted out—Wallace’s respected books of poetry along with his mother and father, whom Wallace despises for their politics and so on. On the basis of this, no doubt, he was set free. And here he is. I wish I’d been on the beach last week when he ran into the water wearing a red net bikini bathing suit. Not the thing to do here, even if men expose themselves, and certainly touch themselves, regularly. They do it furtively—but not Wallace, he’s a flaunter. I ought to have sympathy for him—committed to a mental institution when he was just a boy of sixteen, deemed insane for opposing apartheid. He was sane then but has over the years lost whatever marbles he had, I think, though occasionally he’s lucid and amusing. I find it hard to tolerate him. He talks so much, in that annoying accent.

I cut my fish, lifting the flesh away from the bone. My hand is steady and as usual I wonder if I oughtn’t to have become a surgeon, since I enjoy doing this so much. I always think this when I cut flesh, exactly the same thought, and always wonder, in precisely the same way, if others have the same thought when they do simple tasks over and again, and then what would it be like, if that were so, to be working in a factory, on the line, doing the same job daily, repetitively? I do a good job with my fish and feel satisfied. Little things please me. My mother could never serve fish that was not riven with bones. I hated fish, the way most children do, and it took me years to develop a taste for it, and if I hadn’t I couldn’t have made my home in Greece.

At the moment I seem to be invisible at my own table, which is to my liking. Wallace and his friend chatter away in Afrikaans. I’m sure his Dutch girlfriend is kind but I have an antipathy to the Dutch and may be the only non-Belgian or non-German so inclined, or disinclined. Years ago I visited Amsterdam and had a most dreadful time. I stayed a few months, it rained constantly, and I met no one and found the Dutch barely civil. Everyone says they’re so nice, so I never interject that I think they are dull. Actually I don’t know if they are, but I nurse my secret dislike, my prejudice, and allow it to develop unhindered by scrutiny. The Dutch, I want to tell Wallace, have given tolerance a bad name.

I don’t know how Wallace held up in court, if he did, or whether he had to face the judge at all. What does his girlfriend find appealing about him? This is a man who is never at a loss for the ladies, to be euphemistic about it. He’s had more lovers than one would ever guess from looking at him; only a distorted notion of sexual freedom could have allowed this outrage, this flourishing of a lunatic Don Juan. Wallace professes to adore the female sex and has set many poems in bedrooms where his beloved lies
déshabillée
on a bed, which allows him to describe in fanatic detail the beauty of the female body, the pearl he nuzzles with his nose and licks with his tongue, that sort of thing. Of course the French have a word for poems celebrating the woman’s body—
blasons
. But what do women see in him? Perhaps when he was young he had a certain
je ne sais quoi
….

But now? He has a paunch and is disheveled. He has the worst set of caps I’ve ever seen. He whistles through them when he speaks. His eyes protrude like mine. And he tends to leer when he looks, projecting a mad intensity; I suppose someone else might say it signaled genius but to me it is most hilarious, signifying nothing like intelligence. His girlfriend’s not laughing. Oh dear, Wallace is reading his poetry aloud, in English, something about a dog. I’m barely listening. Where the hell is Roger? Roger might relieve me of the burden of seeming to listen to Wallace. I know Roger plans to relieve Wallace of some of his money, to pluck it from him for some scheme or other, to buy property here through a Greek lawyer, to open a café. Roger always has something on the boil; he’s one of those kinds of people who keep things moving by concocting ideas—for money, usually—which other people ought to invest in or become involved with. A magazine he’d edit or a property he’d administer. Sometimes they do give him money, but I never have. It’s a point of pride with me.

Wallace has stopped reciting his poem. Now he’s defending Pound to the Dutchwoman. She must be completely uninterested. He’s whistling on about T.S. Eliot, being fierce as usual about Pound, about whom he’s ambivalent. Whatever sympathy he has for Pound was aroused because he—Wallace—and Pound are both considered traitors by some of their countrymen. I think Pound’s support of Fascism was a type of temporary psychosis, to which Wallace is no stranger either, I might add. Wallace is more paranoid than I could ever be; and he is rabidly heterosexual. Though, again, I can’t see why any woman would want to sleep with him.

I’ve often noticed that even the most unpleasant men attract reasonable and kind women; these women put up with and serve these men for ages. They cook and clean for them, tidy up their social messes. And what for? The love of genius. It’s not likely that genius could be attached to so many miscreants. Sometimes the women are masochistic, but then so am I, I should think, in some ways, and I’d never want a man like Wallace. He’s unbearable.

He seems to think he saw Pound in St. Elizabeth’s, insisting that he did visit him and even hid behind a tree to watch him after he was supposed to have left the hospital grounds. I hope Wallace was sane when he did so, although it doesn’t sound as if he was. Imagine how Pound must have felt being incarcerated in a mental hospital, locked up with and surrounded by manic depressives and schizophrenics, and then to have an ambulatory lunatic like Wallace pop up, scot-free, raving as wildly as any in there with him! I don’t believe Pound was truly insane. He was an arrogant and disagreeable man but an important poet, nonetheless. In this I agree with Wallace. T.S. Eliot was playing possum, Wallace now declares. Wallace has dropped to the ground to imitate a possum, and his girlfriend is urging him to stand up or sit down. This is tiresome.

I look away. Helen has returned and is now on her terrace. The sun has almost entirely set, leaving behind glorious slashes of red and purple in the darkening sky. She’s turned one light on; it’s hanging above her head but she’s not reading. Drawn to the light as I am, Wallace looks in Helen’s direction and says that he met “that young woman”—he knows her name—at the market and asked her if she ever intended to marry and would she consider him if she did. Wallace says that he dropped to one knee to ask her for her hand and that Helen laughed and told him to get up and relax. Wallace’s girlfriend is not amused. What is her name? Something guttural—Brechje, I think. Wallace explains that he asked Helen to marry him only to make her feel better, for surely a woman on her own is lonely. The life of a spinster is barren, he warned Helen. I can just picture Wallace doing that and imagine Helen’s disgust. He seems to have a penchant for dropping to the ground.

Once, when he was in Paris, Wallace trotted about the city wearing a pith helmet and dunked his head under the cascading waters of several stone fountains. He filled his pith helmet with water to throw over himself. It was a hot summer. He showered in the street and lay on the ground next to Notre Dame until the gendarmes removed him. That was the summer his mother came to Paris to see him, to rescue him from the Beats and so forth. But Wallace was not for rescuing. He enjoyed the bohemian life and also enjoyed throwing himself at his mother’s feet, accusing her in a loud moan of driving him crazy. When he tells this story he always notes: My mother shook and so did her gold jewelry. Wallace loves making a scene.

Roger is approaching, affecting his usual manly gait, and I spy a peculiar little smirk on his lips that I’d like to rub off. Or rub out, rub him out. I must be drunk or Helen is right and I hate him. He kisses the Dutchwoman’s hand elegantly and Wallace sits up, like a well-trained dog, to pay attention to him, as if to a teacher. To my eye Roger is in no way commanding. He can be pedantic, though. They all chatter together aimlessly for a bit and Roger asks how my book is going and if I didn’t finish a big chunk the other night. My work is progressing, I lie, and yours, dear? I’m past the hurdle, he says. I act as if I believed him. Then he goes on to talk about his novel, its structure, as if all one wanted to hear about were his artistic trials and tribulations. It is one thing to discuss a literary subject, it is quite another to complain endlessly about the difficulty of writing. These things, I believe, ought never be the topic of discussion. Would a carpenter take up the dinner hour telling all assembled how hard it was to finish this or that job? No, he’d get on with it. If he were intelligent he might talk about an aspect of carpentry from which all assembled might learn something. Carpentry affords many metaphors.

You’re airing your clean laundry again, I say to Roger. In this you and I have no meeting of the mind. Unhappy with my castoff, he responds and points to Yannis, who’s dying of boredom, I assume, at another table. Oh Roger, I retort, in mock horror, you strain credulity. You are tres transparent. And you, Horace, he answers, are in no position to talk. I am sure Yannis has heard Roger’s remark; this bodes ill for the rest of the evening.

The evening ends as most do. It blurs into a watery mass of colors, amorphous moments and words, the night’s palette. Helen’s light is still on but she is no longer on her terrace. Her curtains are drawn. I wonder if she is making love. I want to make love, though that is not what Yannis and I often do. He sometimes permits me to love him and occasionally he responds to or services me. I content myself with the past. There was a love of my life, years and years ago. He and I shared a bed and a home for fifteen years, and it ended finally and suddenly, broken off mysteriously and mutually after a petty quarrel, and I’ve never understood it. That was many years ago, and he’s been dead for ten, and I never again truly shared my life and lived with anyone that way, so profoundly, not after him. I was involved with a few, but none like him.

Yannis is no grand passion, not even a small one. He’s a comfort to me, and sometimes he is not, as when I am irritable from drink and he is sulking about some wound that is probably self-inflicted. I do have a sharp tongue and say things I don’t mean, most of which I’m sure he doesn’t understand, but the boy has a terrific capacity for dark moods, which sometimes frighten me. I try to cheer him up with gifts and small trips. I don’t understand him and he certainly doesn’t understand me. He thinks I putter about and just type, for example, and I think—I don’t know what I think. I am too old to expect more. I am ridiculous. My body is decaying, the flesh literally weakens and drops from the bone, gravity is pulling at me. I grow old, I grow old. Alicia says it’s the drink and perhaps she is right.