Authors: Edmund White
Catherine came back in with a bottle of airport whiskey. Charles bit his tongue. An English Cocteau scholar was planning a monograph on Charles’s life and works and suddenly Charles thought he’d give each of his two biographers different, conflicting versions of all the same events. There was something
entirely despicable about being the subject of a biography. The subject alternately preened and cowered, the most deplorable grandiosity in him responding to the promise of an immortal portrait while his cowardice told him he was about to undergo the worst of all possible fates—to have his fleshly body copied in granite, to have all of his past faults, which he excused because they were redeemed by future aspirations, quarried out of a strong eternal present: nothing but the pitiful facts.
And yet, after all, writing a biography was a métier. Tremble would need to establish a chronology, put together a bibliography, interview friends and colleagues from each period, each intellectual domain, each country. But when Charles gingerly touched on these professional matters, Tremble said, “I’ve got my own method, the Tremble System. I don’t research, I don’t take notes, no Xeroxes—I just absorb, absorb, absorb, and then one day I start writing, it all comes out.”
Charles nodded, frowning seriously out of respect for the Tremble System, though he hazarded that such an approach might be more appropriate to an article than a book, even the slimmest—unless, of course, the writer had a prodigious memory (something he, Charles, was renowned for, though even he’d found that details dropped out after a few weeks unless he took notes, especially during a period of heavy interviewing).
Charles said, “I’m curious how you’re going to reconstruct the Beirut years—how pretentious that sounds, to refer to one’s own idle, haphazard life as though it represented a meaningful sequence.”
Tremble had found a yellow spot on his trouser leg that he started scratching furiously. “You’re the biographer—how would you go about it?”
“If I were Canadian and didn’t speak Arabic or French?” Charles asked.
“Oh, that’s easy, I can always hire translators. I suppose I’ll just go there, to Beirut.”
“A visit could always provide a certain sense of … atmosphere, although our house is rubble and my father’s office was leveled and all our friends and family members are dead or have emigrated.”
Catherine apparently had decided Tremble was hopeless; she changed the subject to Asia, which she knew interested him. She asked him constant questions about his years as a teacher in Hong Kong and his interlude leading tourists to Tun Huang. Tremble kept pouring himself large tumblers of Scotch; after the third full glass he’d brightened up, undone his tie and taken off his jacket to reveal a very old white shirt stained yellow under the arms.
Catherine expressed her ideas on the Far East, which were idiotic since she knew next to nothing about that part of the world. She, too, was drinking more red wine than usual; her English, sketchy at best, sometimes gave out altogether, but Tremble, fully awake and on his way to enthusiasm, assured her, as all North Americans do, that he knew exactly what she was saying and that her way of saying it was delightful. After every compliment he cast his eyes balefully, like a spavined workhorse, toward Charles, as though these compliments might be annoying the Master. Charles had spent his life siding with women and children against authoritarian men; he’d been the Artful Dodger, yet now he was being treated as the witless tyrant.
For Catherine it was all a game; she even said, “I hope Charles isn’t
vexé
that we speak on other subjects, not only his
life.”
She laughed merrily; she had a Gallic disregard for the American language and American pursuits—such as a biography of a living man, virtually unknown and not even sixty years old. Like many French tourists in the States she liked to collect examples of American madness to exhibit later,
colorful snaps of “typical” deformities. She chortled over gay studies, guidelines for politically correct usage on all university publications, student evaluations of, if you please, professors; she smiled with curatorial glee when she learned that a local lesbian powwow had gone unattended since no map of the rural location had been provided lest it favor the seeing over those who were visually challenged and thus be guilty of sightism. She rubbed her hands together over the solemn, heavy-handed way young Americans were systematizing only now the whimsical provocations tossed off so long ago by Barthes, Derrida and that impenetrable, illogical Lacan.
Now she was trying to draw Tremble out in order to isolate another amusing curiosity. “But aren’t you afraid that Hong Kong will be destroyed by the Chinese?” she asked.
“No, no!” Tremble shouted, though twenty minutes later he lapsed, as Anglophones always do, into anecdotes, which were so complicated he lost his point, if he’d ever had one other than the desire to show his expertise.
Charles the professional biographer was conscious of a mental clock ticking away. He’d told Tremble that he’d be able to see him just two or three times altogether; he’d explained that whereas he in no way opposed the book he thought it would be fatuous to collaborate on it with too much lip-smacking self-regard.
After the cheese, the dessert, the coffee and the chocolate
truffes
(sent in a CARE package from Brittany), Catherine discovered she had a migraine and went to bed with Elizabeth Taylor (the English comic novelist, not the American activist).
Charles found a dusty half bottle of brandy that belonged to the owner of the house. He’d have to replace it before the proprietor returned. Tremble proceeded to toss the brandy back. He was raving intermittently about Singapore for some reason (Charles hadn’t followed every twist and turn in his monologue). He was sitting on a rag rug in front of the small
fire Catherine had lit before retiring. His shirttail had come out on one side and the earpieces of his glasses had worked their way up his scalp so that the lenses were tilting down toward the blue flames emitted by the chemical log.
“She’s great, Catherine,” Tremble shouted. “What a lovely lady. What class! I’ve never been entertained so royally. Her English is impeccable. And her knowledge of Asia is encyclopedic.”
“Yes,” Charles concurred. “Living with such an é
rudite
can be a humbling experience.”
“And a looker, too, though that may sound sexist.”
“Not to our Old World ears,” Charles assured his biographer.
“You’re a lucky man, Charles, though—” He suddenly lowered his voice. “Do you think your wife can hear us?”
“No, her room is on another floor. You were saying?”
“Well, one of my informants,” Tremble said conspiratorially, “has suggested you’re not indifferent to the attractions of other women.”
His informant must be that infernal Tom Smith, Charles thought. He murmured, “An elegant periphrasis for adultery.” He despised Tremble and recognized that the book, in the unlikely event it would ever be finished, would
soil
a life, several lives, which seemed all the more precious now that they were about to be desecrated.
“Of course,” Tremble admitted, pouring himself another brandy and making a cursory effort to serve Charles, who didn’t even have a glass, “in Canada and the States there’s a saying bachelors always use against marriage, ‘Why buy a cow when you can get milk through a fence?’”
“Charming,” Charles said, going over to his desk and jotting it down. “You’re helping me improve my English by leaps and bonds.”
“Bounds. It’s ‘leaps and bounds.’”
“D’accord.
But tell me, frankly, why you took up this thankless project?” Charles came back to his stool next to Tremble, who was now soggily propped up on one elbow on the floor.
“You really want to know? The real bottom-line reason?”
Charles nodded vigorously.
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t tell you, you might be hurt, ’cause I never was especially interested in you and it does sound like a lot of work, I mean what with all these exotic locales, Lebanon and France, whereas I’m really an Orientalist, but I met a young editor at Doubleday who’d read that
Vogue
profile somebody did on you after
Passports
hit the list and they asked me if I knew someone who could write a bio on you and I said, ‘What would the advance be?’ and they said, ‘Roughly fifty thousand, with twenty-five grand on signing,’ and I said, ‘Done! I’ll do it,’ because that was exactly the sum I owed American Express. I’d never even read a word by you till then, though now I’m plowing through that book on, how do you say it, Jew-Hand-Do?”
“How did your bill get to be so high?” Charles was now mentally sneering not only at this grubby hack sprawling on the floor beside him but at his own vanity in wondering, earlier in the day, how he would present himself to a biographer he had ridiculously assumed would be at least an admirer.
“Gee, I don’t know if I can tell you.” Tremble writhed on the rag rug and—could it be?—looked as though he were actually blushing.
“Have you forgotten where you spent the money?” Charles ventured.
“Not at all. You see, I kind of fell for this one dominatrix, I guess you could say I’m sort of a masochist, and—that’s why I think I’m good at understanding and forgiving your sexual excesses, Charles, you know, all the banging you’re doing on the side? Anyway, I became a complete slave to Mistress Quickly and she did some amazing things to me, I’ve still got
the scars to show for it, but of course that doesn’t come cheap, the old meter was ticking on and on and after twenty-five thousand dollars Amex cut me off.”
Tremble launched into a discourse about his estranged wife, who’d been “unbelievably cruel,” although Charles couldn’t sort out whether cruelty in her case had been a desirable or deplorable attribute.
Suddenly Tremble began to heave with sobs, strange hyena yelps that were so immoderate and convulsive that Charles assumed he must never have wept before in front of another human being, unless that person might be a Venus in Furs. Charles, who was always lamenting that he no longer felt anything, was reminded now of the inconvenience of emotion. Did he really want to go back to these humiliating sounds and writhings? For some reason he remembered the ancient metaphor of the poet as a flute played on by the breath of a god, so seized was Tremble by an outside force, an inspiration that flowed from his eyes and barked out of his mouth. Together perhaps Tremble and Charles could make one whole man.
Charles disliked touching men but he knelt beside Tremble and patted him comfortingly on the shoulder.
Charles thought, Tremble will never finish this biography but if by some chance he does he’ll make me pay dearly for this sympathy I’m showing him.
After Charles had helped an excessively grateful Tremble into a taxi bound for the train station, he laughed out loud and said to himself, “Perfect! I can’t think of a better biographer for me and my absurd life.” But he was trying to convince himself that he found this bizarre coupling of subject and biographer “amusing” (that word Parisians always resorted to in order to cool down their irritability and to aestheticize their indignation).
Until today Charles had thought his life was banal and would make dull reading but suddenly, confronted with this drunk,
incurious incompetent, Charles sighed, remembered Lebanon and thought of his family’s destiny, at once so idiosyncratic and so emblematic of the comic, tragic last days of the Diaspora. He found a cabalistic symbolism in his need to seduce women other men had forgotten and “put out to pasture” (the cruelty of the English language!) because they were getting “long in the tooth.”
As he made himself a chamomile tea in the kitchen, Charles thought how tiresome it would be, though, if his biographer were an intelligent, sensitive man capable of understanding his life from within. If the real materials of his life, expertly ferreted out and felt, were to be forced into the mold of a traditional biography, a form in search of a trajectory, an imperative that produced a destiny—well, that would be truly intolerable. He was an elusive man, a seducer, a diplomat, an artist in reticence, a genius of the vague. No, Tremble was perfect; he’d found his ideal biographer.
After George died, Ray went through a long period of uncertainty. George’s disease had lasted fifteen months and during that time Ray had stopped seeing most of his old friends. He’d even quarreled with Betty, his best friend. Although she’d sent him little cards from time to time, including the ones made by a fifty-year-old California hippie whom she represented, he hadn’t responded. He’d felt all the more offended that she’d forgotten how sickening he thought the pastel leaves and soppy sentiments were.
George had been a terrible baby throughout his illness, but then again Ray had always babied him the whole twelve years they’d been together, so the last months had only dramatized what had been inherent from the beginning. Nor had George’s crankiness spoiled their good times together. Of course they’d lived through their daily horrors (their dentist, an old friend, had refused to pull George’s rotten tooth; George’s mother had decided to “blame herself” for George’s cowardice in the face
of pain), but they still had had fun. Ray leased a little Mercedes and they drove to the country whenever George was up to it. A friend had given them a three-hundred-dollar Siamese kitten he’d found at a pet show and they’d named her Anna, partly because of Anna and the King of Siam and partly in deference to an ancient nickname for Ray. They both showered her with affection.
Which she reciprocated. Indeed, the more they chased away their friends, the more they relished her obvious liking for them. When they’d lie in bed watching television at night, they’d take turns stroking Anna. If she purred, they’d say, “At least
she
likes us.” After George became feeble and emaciated, he would ignore his mother and father and would play with Anna if he had the strength and berate Ray for something or other.
George would become very angry at Ray for not calling to find out the results of his own blood test. “You’re just being irresponsible,” George would say, “to yourself.” But Ray knew that the test would tell him nothing—or tell him that yes, he’d been exposed to the virus, but nothing more. And besides, there was no preventive treatment. Anyway, he owed all his devotion to George; he didn’t want to think for a second about his own potential illness.