Authors: Daniel Stern
She told me, too, that I was only concerned with the appearance of things, that I had lost all sense of place in the world, and I thought My God does everyone know that song now, and she told me that the insomnia I was developing was an affectation and we broke up. She had told me, as well, that I spent too much time in bars and that I was not really trying to learn to make stories, only trying to give the appearance of making stories but by that time it was true and she was not to blame for saying it.
Bars are, finally, places of appearance, which means illusion and perhaps that is why so much business is transacted in them; theaters in which the unbilled character is alcohol, sometimes a small character part, sometimes a main role—and that is trouble. But I am getting older and have fears that the drinking, which was never what those places were about for me, might be getting more important and I think with some nostalgia of the foolishly old-fashioned bustle of the bar at 21, if bars were people it would be someone living beyond their means; I think of the Ritz in Madrid, gloomy, hushed, poised with a sense of secret sorrow, and I think of the bright and proper bar at the Connaught in London, where one would not dare have a thought which was too personal.
I think, too, of bars in Hollywood on sunny sad exposed streets, Fountain Avenue or LaBrea, bars with names like the Hopalong or the Tarpit, places in which, even at night, the interior light suggests a depressing late afternoon in which disappointment fills the lines on every face, bars in which miserable men and women sit in stiff and stately failure until drink loosens bones and tongues and evenings end in violence, though sometimes only verbal violence; evenings so many years ago, long before I’d met Noah or myself, when I had lost nothing yet because I’d gained nothing yet, except what I’d brought with me; all that hope.
And the public spaces in which we encounter each other, glasses in hand like magic talismans, cannot help or harm if what Noah said is true—if we have lost our places and are drifting about, unmoored, in time. And finally it is possible to be quite alone in the busiest of bars and sometimes we return home to sleep or lie awake in beds full of uninvited guests.
It ended up in one of the bars neither of us cared for, which doubled as a hotel lobby. At one of those unsatisfactory hybrids I learned that Noah had died. Sitting at a table at the Anglo-Americano in Florence, a small bar in that small city, in a hotel which used to be sweet and awkwardly eager to please and is now smooth and plays host to business conventions, I was told by a German producer who had invited me to discuss returning to the making of money via a lovely movie deal. In the middle of the conversation he’d remembered that I knew Noah and he told me.
To cover my confusion at hearing this from a stranger I said, “Yes, all the men in his family died young.”
“What do you mean,” the German producer said over his metal-rimmed glasses, “I met his father in New York—he was at least seventy-five and he has an older brother.”
To make matters worse he showed me the obituary in the International
Herald Tribune,
which told us all that Noah had “passed away” after a long illness. (He would have been amused at the euphemism—“Which way,” he would ask with bursting bladder at a first-time bar, “to the euphemism?”) I was glad of this last, strangely, because I’d sometimes been afraid of a much more abrupt end for Noah. He had, after all, come apart that night in Chasen’s and had cast himself as the older waiter in the Hemingway story, the waiter who had sympathy for the suicidal old man. But, infantile insomnia notwithstanding, Noah went a draftee not a volunteer into the army of Death.
The German producer went on and on; he knew Noah well, it seemed. He even knew that the scar had a story; only, after dinner and after being joined by a beautiful young woman, thin-boned arched nose, a woman who listened with intent gray eyes, she seemed as delicate as the man was gross, and after a certain amount of wine it seemed that his story of the scar was entirely different, no anti-Semitic sergeant, something about a poker game and an accusation of cheating and a fight and being sent home before the Battle of the Bulge, the last part matched all right.
Back in the hotel lobby, formica tables and fluorescent lighting, sterile, successful, relentlessly international, over a fresh, clean-tasting Poire eau de vie, I tuned him out; all I could think to do was recite to myself Noah’s and Hemingway’s parody of the Lord’s Prayer,
Our nada which art in Nada, nada be thy name …
And I felt the weight of years, of months, of minutes whose foolish nature was simply to pass, felt this along with a weird joy at the moments still to come. It was late at night and the woman was gazing at me sympathetically while the producer kept alternating reminiscences of Noah with pieces of the film deal. “I never met your friend,” she said in some accent I could not place, “but I am sorry.”
I would have liked to have dumped the man and spent the rest of the time telling the beautiful young woman with sympathetic, oriental eyes about my hopeless attempt to write stories so that one of them could be mine and would be my place and how that had not worked out, which was why I was listening to her friend or lover talk death and deals alternately in Florence.
Instead, before the evening finished I hit the German producer—hit him for no other reasons than that I wished to believe that Noah had refused to tell the sergeant that he was not Jewish, gaining a scar and an end to his war in the process; that I wished to believe that the men in Noah’s family died young and that Noah’s sense of doom had some roots in reality, which did not seem to be so, hit the innocent German producer for no more sensible reasons than that Noah was dead before his time, and that I had lost any place I might have had, and the German producer was in Florence with a woman who looked like a woman I could have been happy with.
At least for a time, which is not a small point, not
nada
since apparently what we spend in bars, clean, well-lighted, or otherwise, apparently what we spend everywhere is not money, stolen or earned, not energy, not talent, not love, but ourselves.
I
PUT THE LITTLE
book down on his desk. It was hard to find a place for it; there were hundreds of loose manuscript pages, books, bound galleys, copies of
Publisher’s Weekly,
letters from God knows who all squashed for an inch of space on that desk.
I noticed how gently I placed it there, even though I’d planned to rage in like a storm. Gideon did that to me; I don’t know why. I didn’t like that in myself, being so careful with a cripple.
“Why’d you give me that book?”
“I thought it might help.”
“If you didn’t think I could write the book why’d you sign it up?”
“I didn’t! I signed
you
up.”
He wheeled around briskly, his round face—an angel’s face except for the shadow-beard that would never go away, always back by lunchtime—ignoring the pushing of those tough, stubby, chubby hands, zipping his wheelchair across the room to the window overlooking Fourth Avenue. He slammed it shut.
I jumped. Sudden noises get to me. Not that I ever saw real combat. I was always in the back streets of town making deliveries—personnel, matériel—sometimes deliveries, sometimes pickups—but every now and then one of those little babies would whistle by. A few of those and you stay jumpy a long time.
Gideon turned on the air-conditioning but he kept sweating. Working that wheelchair was work. Now they’ve got these automated ones, electronic, but Gideon’s gone. I don’t think he would have wanted them anyway. He liked resistance.
“Look,” he said. “This is going to be one very good book and a lot of people are going to buy it. But the funny thing about a book is: somebody’s got to write it. Till that happens nobody can buy it or read it.”
“Pretty funny,” I said. “And you think I need this little manual here, to write it?”
Gideon twisted his lips in a weird way; not a real smile and certainly not what you’d call a sneer. It was an internal smile. For all his tough act Gideon was very internal. He was talking to himself a lot when he talked to you.
“You think you can write this book because you were there? Because of all the right word-sounds—Nam, wasted, gook, whatever, because they were your natural language for three years …”
“Four.” I loved to catch him.
“And because you
had
the experience.” He ploughed ahead as if I hadn’t said anything. “Because you wore that green beret.”
“Because I was there,”
I said. “And you ought to know the difference by now—I was A.I.D. Agency for International Development. They just let me wear the green beret for laughs.”
He looked at his watch.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”
Gideon knew I wasn’t supposed to drink anymore. But he always pushed you to the limits. He wouldn’t use an expression, “Buy you a coke,” while he drank his whiskey sours. That would have been too gentle, too easy on you. It would have sent the wrong message to himself and his soul. You felt he was always sending messages to himself and his soul. Sometimes I deliberately tried to get in the way. This time I said, “You going to have one of those whiskey sours of yours?” while he struggled, alone, to get his jacket on and then swing his briefcase, heavy with manuscript, onto his lap. I hated to think what that struggle with inanimate objects might be like in the winter: scarf, gloves, overcoat, all to be gotten on with a lower body frozen stiff, forever.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
“That drink marks you World War II just the same as my addiction to white alcohol and what the Government likes to call “substances” marks me and my war.”
He laughed and hit the sidebar of his wheelchair. “This marks my war,” he said.
We went to the Cote Basque. Gideon always took us to posh places for lunch, drinks, dinner. “Small salary big expense account,” he said. “That’s publishing.” But Cote Basque was his favorite for another reason, as well. Gideon always had at least two reasons for doing anything. But he only told you one. Sometimes he didn’t tell you any. With the restaurant it was simple. They didn’t want cripples in wheelchairs depressing their patrons. Once they made that clear to Gideon they had him for life. He had not been shot in the spine, flown back from Germany to endure eighteen operations, and consigned to a wheelchair, all in order to have some clown in a tux tell him where he could or could not sit in a restaurant.
He’d told me about the loud arguments with the manager—after which they were sure he’d never come back again—but there he was, round-faced, smiling, and ready to go again. Time after time. Finally, they give in. He didn’t have to use talk of legal action or anything like that. He used his stubborn will. It was all he needed. They got the idea, at last, that he wasn’t ever going away, wheelchair, grubby battered briefcase, and all. At the end of it they gave him a house charge account.
I was having my own taste of Gideon’s will. Every time I thought a revised chapter was all set he’d come back at me, again. I would do the changes we’d agreed on—sometimes whether I agreed or not—and he’d take them home and brood. Then, another round of comments in the margin of the manuscript:
needs sharpening
…
t’aint funny … whose POV(point of view)? … klutzy …
That was one of his favorites. I didn’t want to ask Gideon so I asked Kim what it meant. She’d had an affair with a Jewish soldier in Kyoto.
“It’s Yiddish,” she said. “Slang. I think it means lumpy or heavy-handed.”
“That figures,” I said. I never mentioned it to Gideon.
It was a tough time for me: drinking nothing but Cokes—sometimes a dozen a day—just to have some liquid going in and out. It was even tougher because Kim was home a lot. She was in training to sell cosmetics. Going to college had been her first choice, but there wasn’t enough money. Disappointment made her thirsty and she drank around the house in between training sessions. All the while I wrestled with
Aspects of the Novel
by this Englishman and tried to figure out what Gideon wanted of me and what I could do to make sure I wrote the novel that would change everything for us.
I’d started her off drinking in Tokyo where we met when she was only nineteen. Later in San Francisco just before I went over the edge and had to stop or die. She thought it was fun from the start—and she was still an innocent drinker, even when the bad reasons started. I was always a deadly drinker; it was never fun the way it was for Kim. For me it was salvation or damnation. And now that I didn’t do it anymore, salvation and damnation sat on the small slabs of typewriter keys and the wheels of Gideon’s metal chair.
I had been on my way back to the States to turn the last five years or so into my fortune by writing a memoir. And also to get my story organized on paper in case things got ugly. But on the way back from Saigon the last time I ran into a State Department guy—a career man getting ambivalent about the war because all his wife’s friends were. He was working on the Paris peace talks and he gave me a lift via special plane and via Paris. I had a week or so before I had to meet Kim’s plane in New York, so I went.
I had been all the hell over Southeast Asia and in Germany before that but I’d never once put a foot in France. The State Department guy’s name was Smith and he introduced me, I swear, to a guy named Jones who had this place on the Île St. Louis with an astounding view of the Seine. I was looking out at the water and wondering about things—water always makes me think about direction, looking backward or forward. Most of the time I just think about what I have to do next. It’s a good way to be until it breaks down. It had broken down in Tokyo about six months before. To show you how wrecked I was, I told a lot of it to my host, who I had just met: a square, squat bullet of a man with a cigar resting in his hand.
I had told him a lot, about how I’d gotten turned in, about Kim, about the possible criminal charges, including about how I was going to write about it all. It turned out he was interested. He thought a memoir about the business side of the Vietnam War could be a good thing to tell about. It also turned out he was the Jones who wrote
From Here to Eternity
—James—and he scribbled Gideon’s name and publishing house connection on a napkin.