The Puttermesser Papers (27 page)

Yet as Puttermesser sat alone in her bedroom under the green lamp, with the magisterial Mann pressed against the framework of her skeleton, it was still one whole instant before her death, and she was as far from entering Eden then as she had been at the moment of her birth. The radiator exhaled its familiar little winter sigh, and over bed, books, and desk the green lamp threw out a cavelike velvet halo. Under Puttermesser's hand and eye Mann was speaking:

There are deeply chamfered trains of thought out of which one does not escape, once in them; associations cut and dried from old time, which fit in each other like rings in a chain, so that he who has said A cannot help saying B or at least thinking it; and like links in a chain they are, too, in that in them the earthly and the heavenly are so interlocked one into the other that one passes willy-nilly, and whether speaking or silent, from one to the other.

Puttermesser's mind flew into and behind these phrases like a spirit that can pass through walls. Exegetical onomastic Puttermesser!—what was she musing on in the nanosecond of life still allotted to her? She was thinking of Paradise, yes, but (because the earthly and the heavenly are so interlocked
one into the other) she was also thinking how names have their destiny, how they drive whoever holds or beholds them. For instance: the poet Wordsworth giving exact value for each syllable. Or Mann himself—Man, Mankind, seeking the origins of human character in Israelitish prehistory. Or how one Eliot reins in the other Eliot: “the jew squats on the windowsill”—that's Tom—rebuked by Deronda's visionary Zion—that's George. And James the aristocratic Jacobite, pretender to the throne. Joyce's Molly rejoicing. Bellow fanning fires; Updike fingering apertures; Oates wildly sowing; Roth wroth. And so on. Puttermesser: no more cutting than a butterknife.

The earthly and the heavenly are so interlocked that one passes willy-nilly, and whether speaking or silent, from one to the other
. Without transition? Without interim or hiatus or breath? Without fear?

Puttermesser is about to be murdered and raped—in that order. She was murdered before she was raped. The intruder—the murderer, the rapist, in that order—slid, slipped, crept into her bedroom through the slightly raised window behind Puttermesser's reading chair. The window was raised because, though it was February, the apartment, like so many apartments in New York, was stifling. The radiator was a fiery accordion, belching out its own equatorial weather.

There was a kind of kick or knock; the intruder was standing on top of the radiator. The rubber on the soles of his sneakers gave out a burning smell.

She saw him then; she saw the knife, a long blade on a spring, as far in its intent from the work of a butterknife as
Tom is from George. “Frank,” he said; and how strange it was that he spoke his own name! Or perhaps, whatever the deed to come, it is not within the scope of human aspiration to remain anonymous. “It's me, Frankie,” he said. And then, in familiar movietone, “Do what I tellya or ya dead.”

So, in those last seconds, she secretly undertook to call him Candide—for his frankness, for his candor. His face she did not see; it was fully hooded in what she supposed was a ski mask. She supposed it was a ski mask not from ever having glimpsed one of these—when had exegetical onomastic urban Puttermesser, now close to the biblical threescore and ten (but she was not to reach it), ever scaled a magic mountain capped with snow? It was all newspaper knowledge: who hasn't read of muggers in ski masks?

Candide inquired: “Whatchoo got in here's worth some-thin?” Under the ski mask a pair of eyeglasses glinted; his head was horrible, supernatural, a great woolly maroon knob with two ferocious headlights. In the bedroom closet he found Puttermesser's old typewriter. He didn't want it. He gave it a kick. He opened a dresser drawer and scrabbled around in it and pulled out Puttermesser's papa's silver watch; it went right into his pocket. It was an old-fashioned wind-up watch.

Candide inquired: “Rings? Earrings? Where you put em?”

But she had none of these things. Exegetical onomastic urban puritanical Puttermesser! A necklace or two might have saved her life.

Her eyes fled to the one possibly desirable object within reach: on the teak table in the corner of her bedroom stood a computer. Puttermesser had acquired this device as a hand-me-down; she was now technologically ascended. Harvey Morgenbluth, upstairs in 6-C, had bought himself a newer model. The old one was already obsolete; superseded—though good enough for a novice like Puttermesser. These machines were spawned in “generations,” Harvey Morgenbluth explained, and succeeded one another with the rapidity of fruit flies. Puttermesser was reluctant to give up her workhorse typewriter for a fruit fly; she felt much as her turn-of-the-century predecessors had felt when they were obliged, willy-nilly, to move from gas lighting to electricity, or from Dobbin's warm flanks to a motorcar. Still, humanity was turning on its temporal hinge, and Puttermesser was obliged, willy-nilly, to turn with it.

“You can take that,” she said to the horrible woolly knob, with its lit-up peepholes. “Just take it and go.”

“You got rings? Earrings? No?” He lifted the computer off the table, wrenching it free of the keyboard; the wires trailed. Then he set it down on the floor and gave it a kick. “Where you keep em? Rings, bracelets, hah?” She watched him shut the bedroom door and barricade it with Harvey Morgenbluth's obsolete old model. There was no escape. The computer's silent glass mouth was indifferent, though she had brought it to life often enough, a genie spewing alphabets. Lately Puttermesser had begun to type out improbables; or the genie had.

Secreted inside the computer's dead mouth, improbable, impalpable, were these curious fragments:

My father is nearly a Yankee:
his
father gave up peddling to captain a dry goods store in Providence, Rhode Island. In summer he sold captain's hats, and wore one in all his photographs. From Castle Garden to blue New England mists, my father's father, hat-and-neckware peddler to Yankees! Providence, Rhode Island, beats richly in my veins.

My younger sister was once highly motivated as a scholar, but instead she married an Indian, a Parsee chemist, and went to live in Calcutta. She has four children and seven saris of various fabrics.

Not a single syllable of any of this was true. She had no sister, whether younger or older. There was nothing of New England in her veins. Her history was bare of near-Yankees. She had never known her grandfather, dead now for more than seventy years; that grandfather, sickly, had never left the wretched little village of his birth in cold corrupt old Russia. It was her papa who had run from the Czar's depredations and passed through Castle Garden's great hall: an immigrant speck in an immigrant tide.

The genie in the computer was revising Puttermesser's ancestry, it was dreaming Puttermesser's dreams—even her newest dream of Paradise:

Here is how it will be [the genie had written in Puttermesser's voice]. I will sit in Eden under a middle-sized tree, in the solid blaze of an infinite heart-of-July, green, green, green everywhere, green above and green below, myself gleaming and made glorious by sweat, every itch annihilated, fecundity dismissed. Day after celestial day, perfection of desire upon
perfection of contemplation, into the exaltations of an uninterrupted forever. In Eden all insatiabilities are nourished: I will learn about the linkages of genes, about quarks, about primate sign language, theories of the origins of the races, religions of ancient civilizations, what Stonehenge meant. I will study Roman law, the more arcane varieties of higher mathematics, the nuclear composition of the stars, what happened to the Monophysites, Chinese history, Russian, and Icelandic.

Ah, false, false! Paradise, when Puttermesser was transported there, bore no resemblance to this hungry imagining. Paradise, when Puttermesser was transported there, was . . . but no. No and no. First it is necessary to get through the murder and the rape.

Clearly the computer had no interest for Candide. He was looking for something portable. Puttermesser undid the band of her wristwatch and tossed the watch across the room to where he was standing. He caught it with one hand, examined it, dropped it to the floor, and stepped on it. The plastic face crackled under his sneaker. “Garbage,” he said. “Worth ten bucks. Don't dis me, lady.”

And then she did not know what to do. “Try the kitchen,” she said. “The spoons and things.” She thought: let him just open the bedroom door, and she would fly through it and get away.

“Sterling?” inquired Candide.

“Oh yes,” Puttermesser assured him. There was nothing in her kitchen drawers but stainless steel.

“O.K.,” he said. “I'll go look. But don't you move, lady.”

He shoved aside the computer and opened the door. The green lamp reflected greenly in the ski mask's portholes. “Hey wait,” he said, and felt for something in his pocket.

It was a narrow rope. In no time at all—his fingers were admirably quick—he had tied her wrists to the radiator. With a twist of the rope she was flung to the floor. There she lay, contorted, staring through the rungs of the chair.

He went out and came back.

“You lyin to me, lady. It's all garbage in there.”

“There's cash in my purse.”

“Where you keepin it, hah?”

She was weeping now—a painful mute weeping, as if her vocal cords had been suddenly cut.

He found her purse—it was right there on the dresser—and turned her wallet upside down. Through the rungs of the chair she saw the falling fan of cards and green bills. But there was a raging light in the holes of the mask.

Candide said: “I don't like no credit cards and I don't like no chicken shit.”

How quick and fastidious his fingers were! He wiggled the knife and made it shimmer and shiver; then he put the handle to his lips, like a flute, and kissed it. He pushed the chair out of the way to clear a space, and stood astride her, a sneaker close to each ear. She could smell the rubber soles of his sneakers, but the rubber smell was oddly mixed with vomit and she understood that it was her own vomit; she was vomiting, and she felt defiled by her own vomit, and also by a terror so frigid that it left her unaware of the spasms that must be convulsing her esophagus. It seemed to her important—she sensed this acutely—not to offend
him by crying out, but her breath ran thin, it was anyhow not possible: he had placed the weight of
Joseph and His Brothers
on her breasts, and was heaving downward with one powerful flattened palm. He began efficiently, with the throat—the vocal cords were sliced through instantly—and then crisscrossed the blade rapidly over the ears, lopping off (it was unintended) half a lobe on the right ear. Her breath ran thinner now, but she could taste the rusty wetness that was her blood. Then he repositioned her torso, ripped the knife through her underpants. . . .

But enough. By then Puttermesser was in Paradise. Like the excruciations of labor (but how could Puttermesser know this? she had never given birth), dying, even agonized dying, generates its own amnesia. And since the rape was committed after the last living sigh had left her body, there was nothing to erase from Puttermesser's posthumous cognition. For her, the rape never happened at all.

It is sometimes supposed that in Paradise one is permitted to bend over the bar of Heaven, so to speak, for a final contemplation of one's abandoned flesh. This is a famous untruth steeped in a profound illogic. Had Puttermesser been able to view herself tethered, bloodied, torn, mutilated, stripped, striped, violated—had she taken in so malignant a scene, so degenerate an act: the lower quarters of her carcass still hot, the tissues still elastic, yet resistant to easy penetration because the wall of death has already blinded every cell, death its own stricken fortress; had Puttermesser seen that engorged member crash through the entryway to the lately untrodden tunnel between her elderly thighs, had she seen the ski mask smeared with
vomit, and the wily fingers that held the knife lavish vomit on that ramming organ—she might have been swept and rent by a pity so enduring that Paradise could not tolerate or sustain it.

That is why a last look is not allowed. That is why there is no pity in Paradise. And that is why Paradise is cold-hearted.

A second misconception: Paradise has no gate or door or vestibule. Simply, one arrives—or, rather, since this is Puttermesser's history, Puttermesser was all at once
there
. Or
here
: though this too misrepresents. In Paradise there is no before or after, no over there or right here, no up or down, no then or now, no happy or sad. The last phrase may puzzle. No sadness in Paradise is to be expected; but no happiness? Isn't happiness the
point
of Paradise?

Return for a moment (but in Paradise there are no moments: no hours, minutes, or seconds) to that earliest word in the world's earliest tale:
PARDES
. The orchard, the garden. But
PARDES
is also an acronym for a way of understanding—even for understanding the meaning of
PARDES
itself. Dismiss the vowels and consider:
PRDS
. All the letters tied in a bouquet constitute
PARDES
. (Or Paradise. Or
PARADEISOS
.) But taken one by one, each letter contains its own meaning. Now follow closely:

P. This stands for
p'shat
.

R. This stands for
remez
.

D. This stands for
drosh
.

S. This stands for
sod
.

Now follow closely again; these are words for adepts. (And be patient. We will come back to Puttermesser. Only see how mistaken she was in dreaming that Paradise is a place to study in! In Paradise everything has already been learned; all intellectual curiosity is slaked.) Then let us begin:

P'shat
is the obvious sense: the readiest meaning.