Chez Charlotte and Emily BOOKS BY JONATHAN BAUMBACH The Landscape ofNightmare A Man to Conjure With What Comes Next Reruns Babble The Return ofService...
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Chez Charlotte and Emily
BOOKS BY JONATHAN BAUMBACH
The Landscape of Nightmare A Man to Conjure With What Comes Next Reruns Babble The Return of Service Chez Charlotte and Emily
CHEZ CHARLOTTE AND EMILY
A NOVEL BY
Jonathan Baumbach
Fiction
~
Collective, Inc.
First Edition Copyright © 1979 by Jonathan Baumbach All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog No.: 79-52033 ISBN: 0-914590-56-1 (hardcover) ISB N: 0-014590-57-X (paperback) Published by FICTION COLLECTIVE, INC. Production by Coda Press, Inc. Distributed by: George Braziller, Inc. One Park Avenue New York. N.Y. 10016 Grateful acknowledgement is made to Iowa Review and Statements 2 in which portions of this novel first appeared. I also wish to thank the Guggenheim Foundation for a grant which was of help in the completion of this book. The publication of this book is in part made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency, and the New York State Council on the Arts; and with the cooperation of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative (New York) and the Department of English of the University of Washington at Seattle.
For Georgia again
Everything remains to be done. -JEAN-LUC GODARD
All they talked about for weeks when they were alone was the weather. How little sun they had had that summer, how changeable it was, how disappointing this summer's weather as opposed to last year's or the year before's. Otherwise when they were together, she read a book or the paper-how much time Genevieve could give to the most newsless of newspapers-and he would sit, book open on his lap, in a hard-backed chair on the other side of the room, dead to himself. Sometimes he would be the one reading-it was curious how rarely they did the same things at the same time-and she would sit, emptyhanded, thinking of one thing or another, her large grey eyes closed or focused inward. She wondered (her wonderment kept to herself) if she would ever again have anything to say to him. Sometimes when he was there, when he was silent and there, she thought of the room as being empty. She thought of herself as alone in the room or alone in no place at all, though he was there in the room with her for all eyes to see. I am writing a novel about these two, Joshua and Genevieve Quartz who, each in private crisis, are unable to talk to the other except in displaced language. As I write this, Genevieve sits across from me, characteristically distracted by interior vistas. From time to time, I stop work and read a paragraph to her, eliciting not so much response to my prose as acknowledgement of my presence. I incorporate her muted reactions into the story, elaborate on them, transcribe them into language. The story, while it is being written, is my communication with Genevieve, a spoken letter in the guise of a novel about us and some
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mirror images of ourselves. Listen to this, I say, and she lifts her head. Whatever fails to engage her, I discard or revise. That's not funny, she says at one point. I wasn't trying to be funny, I say, which is only partly true. You tend to go to extremes to hold the attention of someone whose mind is committed elsewhere. "I'm not distracted all the time, am I?" Genevieve asks. I admit to overstatement. "What do you think of what I read?" The newspaper she has been reading rises like a tidal wave between us. "Genevieve, what do you think of what I read so far?" Genevieve is silent for the longest time. "I can't tell," she says. "You'll have to read more or give up on me altogether."
1 The two women were sunbathing. Nora (who was Francis's wife) on her stomach, and Genevieve (who was mine) on her back. The sun this afternoon was vague at best. Flirting heedlessly. In fact, there had been little or no sun for the past forty minutes. Suspicion of its return, a feeling of it not mattering, sustained them in shared experience. When they talked, which was hardly at all, the sun's untimely decline or the whereabouts of one or another of their children were the topics of conversation. One of the men (I was the other), the one whose name was Francis Sinatra, was standing waist deep in the ocean, holding in his gut as if it were a life's work only recently discovered. His feeling about himself, one of several feelings though in momentary ascendance, as he stands chest deep in the ocean, looking out and in, all reflective surfaces mirroring his life, was that various women on the beach were staring at him. This fantasy - he was not altogether out of touchgave him limited pleasure. That so many attractive women coveted him was in his view more curse than blessing, a pressure to extend himself beyond his known capacities. He felt an obligation not to disappoint those eyes that followed him, thought to satisfy expectation with a touch of the unexpected. A man had come over to where the women lay on contiguous towels and was saying something amusing to one or both of them. Genevieve, with one eye open, was smiling at him.
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This is Bobby Mitchum she said when I came up, this is my husband Joshua. We're neighbors I think said Mitchum, holding out a large gnarled hand, a digit missing on the fourth finger. You're in the A-frame, am I right, the Housefeld place. Played Wednesday night poker with Housefeld. The bastard in Capri this summer, his vacation bankrolled on my losses. Uhhuh said Joshua glancing at his wife who was shaking her head at him, a warning of some faux pas he had committed or was about to commit. He spoke his own name and received the other's hand. What do you do? whispered Nora, cigarette in her mouth, eyes narrowed against the smoke. I'm a beachcomber said Mitchum who was a therapist of some obscure denomination. Nora picked up her sunglasses from a folded towel and put them on. Really? asked Genevieve. I'm a fine-toothed beachcomber, he said, laughing his operatic laugh. Joshua sat down on the towel next to Genevieve who seemed to be leaning away to avoid the incidental meeting of their skins. Mitchum excused himself and walked on down the beach, his stomach out like a moon. A boy of five or six came up from the other direction and they embraced. Francis Sinatra, who had been diving into the waves, had a cramp in his side and wondered how he would ever get back to shore. He had been drifting against his will, the event both real and symbolic, and had gone out perhaps beyond his depth. If he didn't get back-he had been prepared for not returning since he turned forty and he realized in the middle of one night that there was no going back-would he (he wondered) make the obit page of The New York Times? In a small way, he thought. The space he got would depend on who else had died that day. He lay on
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his back like a beached whale. The tow (or tide)-he had once edited a novel about a long distance swimmer-was taking him further and further away. A deceiver of the public eye, Francis had always been somewhat undervalued. It was as if the shore line were receding, his observers edging nervously away from him, jealous of his audacity, afraid of that disease. "Come back," he thought to call to the shore. "I meant no great harm." He wondered if they knew that he had gone beyond his depth. (Would his enemies joke about it?) Perhaps a rescue party would be sent out to find him, though he was not one-his wife would no doubt report-to want anyone to make a fuss. Nora contemplated her widowhood, planned the costume and set changes of a new life. To avoid pretensions, to cloak them in mysterious disguise, she would resume her maiden (also professional) name. They would say, occasional strangers touched and mystified by her self-effacing disguise, Excuse me for asking but aren't you Francis Sinatra's widow. To which she would put on her bravest, most luckless and doomed face and whisper hoarsely, Henry would have wanted it no other way. Henry? they would say to themselves, admiring the unassuming bravery of the gold-and-black-weeded widow, how endearing for a man named Francis to be known to his nearest intimate as Henry. She was the embodiment of graceful courage, they would think, and one of the ten best-dressed women in mourning in America. Her husband, you may remember him, was the late irate Francis S, editorin-chief of one of the few surviving independent publishing houses in New York. For the next two or three years all of his authors dedicated their books to him, though no commercial publisher in his right mind would publish them until the widow got on the phone and said, Do it for Francis (or Henry), he had great respect for the talent of
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S B or whoever it was. The book has limited sales potential Nora dear, said the publisher known to have been a friend and admirer of Francis's in their mutual day. We appreciate your interest in S. B.'s script but we're looking this year for multi-levelled writing or books which retail the disguised secrets of the famous and the powerful. Just this one, Townsend, she would whisper. Otherwise D will get it and Francis will turn over in his grave at how they'll give Sam's book all the wrong kind of publicity misconceiving the work's inherent intention. After six or seven of such modest calls, Nora Hellmar became generally thought of as the most influential widow in American publishing. Literary agents pursued her good graces, took her to lunch at the Russian Tea Room where the regulars paid court to her husband's memory and her lively fading beauty. Her sharp tongue was the envy of headwaiters. Young novelists and visiting dignitaries courted her with first editions and jewels, proposed marriage and occasionally got into her East Side apartment. N ora was thinking of writing a memoir of her life with F as a useful corrective to false reports. Shared Vision by Nora Hellmar. She would confide how Francis liked best to make love at 5 A.M., a time when she couldn't get either her eyes or her legs to open. A conjugal rapist, her late husband, who liked his partners tacitly unwilling. They were going that evening, she remembered, to a cocktail party in Truro, the kind of party that made her feel bodiless like some truculent breeze that followed in her husband's swath. She wanted to go to a party for once where she would be the center of things, the one whose company they sought. Nora imagined she saw Francis swimming toward the shore, his progress relentless and infinitesimal, his breath like ashes on the waves. Her vision of him precluded his survival.
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Josh dreamed he was riding in an open car with John F. Kennedy listening to news of the assassination of Lyndon B.Johnson on the radio. The two men rode in the open car while a report of the assassination played over and over again like a recorded message. Does that make you President again? I didn't want it that way, said the other. That loud mouf sonofabitch is always getting himself killed. I thought you were the one, said Josh respectfully. That's the way it reads in the history books. The other said, Well you can't believe everything you read. Not everything, Josh, that passes currency in the world is real. The story of my marriage, for example. I was never married. They all said it and wrote about it, and they had pictures of it-that's the easiest thing, the pictures-so that I didn't want to ruin their party by saying nay. Between you and me, old friend, it never happened. Genevieve was crying when he woke, folded up on the other side of the bed. You're always here when I don't want you, she said. What's the matter? he asked in his dry voice, his voice pretending he was not angry at her, not beyond patience. I don't know, she said, as if to say I can't stand it or I can't stand you or I can't stand whoever I am. Is there anything I can do? No. Nothing? Yes. You can go away. What ifhe never reached the shore, what ifhe continued to swim toward the beach and had his efforts cancelled out by the tide? When lovemaking with experimental writers Nora would wear a black-bordered nightgown in memoriam for her deceased husband. Sleeping with her was like a publication, a getting between covers, a young writer might report. She conferred such recognition on only the most
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outrageous (and unpublishable) of fictionists, doing her part to uphold F's standards, idealistic about literary matters. Francis was dying of frustration, at the mercy of forces he had all his life refused to acknowledge. The undertow cancelled out his most resolute exertions. He moved from back to side from side to back like an insomniac, unable to find a comfortable spot, his cramp never leaving him for more than a moment at a time. Stubbornness kept Franci; afloat, a resistance to the obvious. He went under and came up, drifted with the current, imagined a scenario that would permit him to survive without undue violation of credibility. The current was moving east and carried him beyond a wall of rocks toward a natural cove, about two miles (he estimated) from the point of his departure. It was like the plot of some of the novels he had seen in manuscript that he had not the slightest interest in publishing. Francis's commitment as editor had always been to language and form, mediated by a grudging respect for the mysteries of human behavior. Two strange child-women, sisters, perhaps twins, would find his half-drowned carcass washed up like driftwood sculpture on the shore the next morning. His real name would mean nothing to them or would ring with false associations. He would pretend to himself that he had forgotten that name and invent another unused by anyone of his acquaintance. The girls, intelligent primitives, dropouts from civilization, would nurse him back to sentient life. It would be a return to the beginning as if civilization as we know it (or think we know it) had been dreamt or imagined. Francis's new life is uncomplication itself. The unnecessary, such as it was, has been stripped away. Existence has been refined into eating and jogging and sleeping with his
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rescuers, Emily and Charlotte. His new name, the only name they know him by, is Tom. In the early morning (6:00 A.M.) before Poor Tom, as they call him, is awake, Emily draws water from the well, milks the goats and fills one of Charlotte's old hats with wild blueberries from which she will make blueberry pancakes for his breakfast. She will wake him at 6:45 by whispering a recitation from Andromache by Racine, a bitter tirade against the tyranny of men, the same set piece each morning, the only part she knows by heart. It never, at least not often, fails to get him up. Afterward, lying shyly next to him in the narrow bed, she will say with one or two expressive variations, "I know it can't last, but I'm glad to have you, if only for a while." At 8:35, he will start out on his morning run, taken on a narrow winding path through the woods, sunlight (on sunny mornings) like jewelled dust washing through the trees across his naked back. On his return at abc!!!: 10:45, breath coming in slivers of pain, he meets Charlotte coming toward him on her late morning walk. The narrowness of the path, the intricacies of its twists and turnssometimes you seem to come up behind yourself-makes contact difficult to avoid. Unable to get out of the other's way, holding each other to cushion the impact, they tumble onto a bed of pine needles, creating pleasure out of the raw material of circumstantial connection. "We mustn't," Charlotte will say. And after lovemaking: "Forgive me, Em. Forgive me." These effusions of guilt, coming before and after, give a sense of form to otherwise formless behavior. In between, all prerogatives of self are given up. Their transgression is characterized by uncontrollable appetite, a tearing at each other like cannibals, restraint a lost memory of another life. Charlotte will cover her mouth with her hand to muffle her cries, some slipping through her fingers and singing through the woods and he, Tom, grunting, his heart
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shrieking like the brakes of an old car, will die and come to life, one and the other, not in that order, not necessarily, again and again. When it is done it is done. Her clothing restored, she will continue her walk as if nothing has interrupted it. And he, Tom, will lie on his back in the pine dust, staring at fragments of sky until himself again, resurrected, he returns, walking, from his morning run. A regimen, although imprecise in its repetitions. There are only a few books in the cabin, an odd lot, Holy Bible, Show Boat by Edna Ferber, Richard Feverel by George Meredith, Our Bodies Our Selves, The Sirens of Titan, The Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, Little Women, In France It Was Spring, Kitty Foyle, High Priest, The Rubiyat ofOmar Khayyam, Kidnapped, Corpse in the Waxworks, which he goes through in his first month of exile, needing some lingering vestigial contact with the written word. One cold evening, at Charlotte's request, they burn the books in the fireplace to heat the cabin. It saddens him at first, but later when there is no undoing it-he puts his hand in the fire too late to rescue Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson-he feels strangely exhilarated. Without books, he is forced to invent imaginary experience. Sometimes when alone with Emily he tells her stories, fictions about his life which she takes in her credulousness for truth. As time wears on, he gets better and better at it, persuades himself of the actuality of what he has spontaneously imagined. One day, years later (he conjectures), circumstance will reveal his true identity to Emily and Charlotte. They may forgive him his deception, one of them may, but their lives together will be irrevocably altered. Some tragedy (or pathos) will come of it. In the afternoons, Francis works on the screenplay ofthe life he has imagined for himself, rehearsing it image by image in his head, a hobby at first, a way of passing time, but gradually evolving into an obsession.
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Emily too has her secrets. When Tom leaves her each day for his run through the woods, she writes his stories down, reordered by priorities of memory, in a special notebook she keeps under her pillow. Charlotte, unlike her sister, shows no direct interest in Tom's past, a woman committed (she likes to say) to the everchanging here and now. Although not interested in books, not literary like Emily, Charlotte is attracted to the idea of personal theatre. I like divertissement and change, she says, the cruel flower of the unexpected. Today I'm your sister, she announces, when they meet as usual by accident, your half-sister Corrinne whom you haven't seen in fifteen years which was when tragedy separated us. We were like twins in our feelings for one another. When one of us was sad the other cried .... I recognize you from the first moment you walk into the room, introduced to me by another name. You act as if we're strangers but there is some recognition. Where have you seen this intriguing woman before, you think, where could it have been? You rack your mind. You want to make love to this attractive person, your attraction to her greater than anything you ever felt before, deep and wordless, though you deny what you feel-the extremeness of it frightening-deny it to her and to yourself. At the same time it can't be denied. Your cough, he says, moved by something familiar in its rasp. I have the feeling I know that cough from somewhere. It's nothing, she protests perhaps more strongly than necessary, a minor inflammation of the lungs. He can tell from her flush complexion and the doomed look in her eyes that she is exhibiting exceptional courage. She is the woman, he confesses, that he has been looking for all his life in his desperate unknowing pursuit of the ideal. Where were you born? he asks, taking her off the beaten path where they can be alone. In Vietnam, she says reluctantly, kissing his face many
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times. My mother was Chinese and my father was an ad venturer. Our backgrounds are the same but different, he says. What an extraordinary coincidence! I too was born in Vietnam. My mother, however, was an adventuress and my father a member of the working class. On which side of the people's struggle did your father fight? (Something in her tone, in the manner in which she presents the question strikes a chord of recognition which he chooses to ignore.) We never knew, he says, not exactly. My father was a spy by profession and made deceiving appearances on both sides. At the end he was the only one not to compromise his original intention. Both sides denounced him. He was always at odds with someone else's idea of him. My father too was a spy, she says, though we were never certain of it. We thought it might have been an emotional disorder, some kind of nervousness. His eyes looked all ways at once. (She coughs. The exertion of talking not good for her lungs.) There's something about the sound of your voice, he thinks to say though doesn't, absorbed by the voice itself. Sometime later he is struck by the discovery-so many coincidences one on top of the other-that the spy that was his father and the spy that was hers were one and the same spy. He embraces her as a sister, though it is clearly too late for that. What has he gotten himself into? If she wasn't dying already, she says, she would give up her life to save his reputation. They talk of suicide while in the act of love, desperation taking priority over pleasure and honor. Yet pleasure asserts itself even in denial. Leave me, she says. When he leaves her it is with the promise never to make himself available to her eyes again.
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She calls him back. One last time, she says in a choked whisper. He says no, though returns. She has an open penknife in her hand, waiting for him. This is the last time, she says.
The next morning, Charlotte away on one of her periodic shopping trips, Tom tells Emily another episode from his fictional past, the account transcribed from memory in Emily's journal.
I was once nearly killed by lightning. It was the summer I turned thirty and I was a solemn brooding depressive type, all my marbles invested in lamenting the mischances of the past. I was living at the time in a 12-room house in Vermont with a movie actress who, unknown to both of us, was suffering from an incurable disease. We fought all the time mostly over trivial things like who directed what movie. She was a simple woman, her intelligence preverbal. What I mean is that she couldn't speak a sentence that wasn't hopelessly banal, and I tended to treat her, I'm afraid, with ironic disdain. God knows why she stayed with me. Love, I guess, or masochism, or both. Anyway, one night I was awakened at about four in the morning by an electrical storm. Corrinne was not in bed and I called to her and got no answer. I remembered that the windows in the Mercedes had been left open and
Lightning never strikes the same person twice was the way he started with his reminiscence. He was living with a nottoo-bright film person in Vermont. They were not at all very well matched though they talked oflove to keep the secret of its absence from themselves. She was rich and beautiful. He had turned forty that summer, though he had not yet located his true self. It made him miserablehe was a proud manliving on her money, and he got even by making fun of her when she said silly things. All this was to change when he got hit by lightning. One night he was awakened by thunder-a summer storm unbending-and
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that both of our bicycles had been left outside. I got myself out of bed, put on my sneakers, threw Corrinne's raincoat over my head and went out into what was one of the heaviest electrical storms I have ever seen. First I closed the windows of the car. As I was shutting the left doorI particularly remember it being the left-a bolt of lightning crashed a foot or two from where I was. I had no sense of danger. Still halfasleep (it was as if I were sleepwalking), I grabbed the bicycles and wheeled them toward the garage we used mostly as a storage shed. I was cursing out loud, angry at the storm. Then the raincoat blew off me and I let go of the bikes, propping them against my leg, to retrieve it. At the moment I started to bend toward the coat, I saw a flash of lightning coming at me. There was a moment, time frozen, when I had full awareness that it was going to strike me. All I could do was twist awkwardly away, pulling something in my side and back. The bolt had hit me, had gone through me, or it had created that illusion by coming dangerously close. I felt a shock in my right foot and some pain in my arm and heard a loud crash which I've always assumed was lightning hitting one of the bikes. I was yelling my head off when Corrinne opened the door for me, surprised (she would say later) that I was still alive. "I saw the lightning hit where you were stand-
remembered that he had left his bicycle outside. Corrinne was already up, checking the windows in the house. Although he was tired and wanted nothing more than to return to his bed, Tom went out into the storm to rescue his Frenchmade bicycle which had been a gift from Corrinne. It was a violent storm, thunder and lightning and torrential rains, a really terrifying storm. He got his bicycle and Corrinne's which was next to it and was wheeling them toward a shed where they were usually kept. Suddenly, he saw a bolt of lightning hitting one of the bicycles and felt a shock in his arms and legs. He let out a scream, a combination of shock and anger, experiencing (as he imagined it) the end of his life. For an extended moment he virtually lived through his death. The next thing he knew he heard Corrinne's voice calling his name. "I got hit by lightning," he said. "Oh my God," she said, helping him back into the house, "are
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ing," she told me. "It's a miracle that you're alive." I wish I could say that this brush with death had improved my character-for a few weeks maybe it did-but I can't say that. I tried after that, consciously tried to live more in the present, and to be kinder to the people close to me, though I soon slipped back into old ways. Corrinne and I split up after that summer. We talked of it as a trial separation, though knew better. She was dead eight months later.
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you all right?" Except for shock and a turned ankle, he was unharmed. When he looked at himself in the mirror he discovered six white hairs. It was a recognition of the fragility of life and he decided after that to live for the moment (in the here and now were his words), this former dreamer and complainer. It was too late for that.
2 My characters, Joshua and Genevieve, have just woken up. Joshua is in the kitchen eating an orange and boiling water for coffee. Genevieve lies in bed with her eyes open, watching a spider web form on the ceiling. She is angry that Josh refuses to show his feelings, pretending forbearance and kindness when it is clear to her-how could it be otherwise?-that he is burning up inside. She is right or close to it. Joshua is angry with her, has been for as long as short memory allows, though is not burning up, on vacation this morning from extreme feeling. His eleven-year-old daughter, Olivia, eyes mostly shut, bumbles into the kitchen. What time is it? she asks. I'm not the keeper of time, he says. She groans, superior to this remark, an obligatory response that conceals more affection than she knows how to express.-Isn't it terribly early, Dad. I heard you walking around and I couldn't sleep. It seems to Joshua that they've had this conversation, have had it for the last two mornings in fact, which, not being someone to keep his observations to himself, is what he says. To which she reminds him that the present observation is not new between them either. She never smiles. On occasion, he has seen her laugh. Mostly she laughs as if she were making fun of laughter. He has a better memory for her commentary than for his own, he says, and offers to make her an egg or two the way she likes it. Is Genevieve having one? I think we ought to wait until Genevieve is ready to sit down, says the mimic mother, wiggling her small behind as if an army of ants had bivouacked under her nightgown.
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Why don't you call her? he says. She puts her stubborn hands on her stubborn hips, her face thrust forward at him. Why don't you? She's your wife. Genevieve, he calls, what do you say to some breakfast? That's no way to ask, his daughter says. Genevieve calls yes I'm coming, though continues to lie on the bed in a weatherless funk. In a minute, she thinks. Joshua makes two fried eggs over light but no one will eat them. I'm not really hungry, Olivia says. He eats them himself reluctantly with two burned English muffins he had toasted in the oven. After breakfast (she has half of a half of an English muffin with strawberry jam on it), Olivia goes off somewhere on her bicycle, leaving her father and Genevieve to make their own communication. He imagines that Olivia witnesses a murder on the Bay beach, but (the body removed behind her back) she is unable to get anyone to believe her account. You know I'm sorry we asked the Quixotes to come up, he says while Genevieve sips her lukewarm coffee. She is reading a book she discovered in the cottage, something called The Spy I Married. She is the spy in this family, he thinks. The Quixotes are the most undemanding guests, she says. They usually stay in their room until two in the afternoon. The last time they were here, he says, they conceived a child. Her eyes turn vacant, her mind exiting in silent protest. It is a trick of hers that never fails to provoke him. They have to go to other people's houses to fuck, he says. It's a putting on of new skin, the frisson of being strangers. Her frown lines curl in disapproval. She doesn't like the liberties he takes. His language since she stopped sleeping with him transparently agressive.
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She says: I hope the sun comes out so that we can go to the speech. I mean-she laughs oddly-the beach. She blushes. Her book comes up to her face like a mask. He would like to go down on her while she reads, muses on what she might do if he crawled over to her across the splintery floor. She might in her present chaste regimen kick him in the mouth in unpremeditated self-protection. So vivid was his imagination he could taste his own blood. From behind her book she says, Would you like to go to bed before Olivia returns? It might be a recording for all he can see, or a line from The Spy That I Married, a book about deviousness (he would guess), the book fronting for her. If you want to, he says carefully. I'd be doing it for you, says the Spy .. But you'll have to be quick and not expect too much from me. My pleasure these days, as you know, is in not doing it. In bed she tells him of a recent dream in which she was having dinner on a round bed with Nora and Francis and an older couple that had shown up uninvited. It might have been Henry or Illana, she says, though I don't think it was them. They were like Henry and Illana but older and less-I can't seem to get the right word-elegant maybe. The meal was made up of a number of dishes of really delicious seafood. Not the ordinary things either. Eel and mollusk and stringray and blowfish. They just kept coming out, one dish after another, each more succulent than its predecessor. Nora had hired this black chef, who had been a deep sea diver, to handle the preparation. "Isn't he something?" Nora kept saying in a loud insinuating voice. She was high on some kind of drug, which I found terribly disturbing in the dream. The drug was called something like Hashhead's Smoke and was being sold, she said, in Bloomingdale's at the gourmet counter. Then Nora leaned over me and whispered in a voice I was sure everyone could hear, "You should see the way he's hung, my dear." Then she gave my breasts a squeeze. When I asked her to get hold
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of herself, she said some awful things to me. (When she says the word awful Genevieve smiles to herself.) Then she began to lecture her guests in this awful strident voice, saying we all ought to be free to follow our stars. When I woke up I was so angry at Nora I couldn't bear the idea of seeing her today. As it is, Honey, we see too much of them. You know that's true. Just because Francis was once your editor doesn't mean we have to spend our lives attached to them. When he asks her to tell him the rest of the dream she says that's all she remembers of it, looking away when she says it, fixing on something in the distance. You're a liar, he says. I hate you, she says almost lovingly, you squid, you sting ray. How disgusting men are. Olivia returns when they are entangled, their lives moving momentarily in the same proposition, and she looks into the bedroom and says Hi, I'm back. You could have closed the door, Genevieve says, disappointed in him. Doesn't she know not to come into a private room without knocking first? Olivia returns from her bike ride in tears. Genevieve comforts her as best she can, has difficulty making sense of Olivia's sometimes garbled version of what had happened. This much is known. She rode her bike to the ocean beach through the early morning fog, almost no one else on the road, and perceived the body of a woman at the shoreline, saw it from the vantage of the public parking lot, gulls swirling around like birds of prey. She had, she says, the uncanny feeling that the woman was her mother, though of course she knew better. She walked halfway down the beach to investigate, but never got to the bodyfrightened perhaps of dealing with it alone-going off instead to get someone to help her. She found a feisty little man at the other end of the public beach walking a dog and she told him in her breathy way what she'd witnessed. The
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man was going in the opposite direction and was reluctant to retrace his steps. "The woman may need some help," Olivia said. "You don't want to let her die, do you?" The charge of potential blame made him angry and he felt justified in refusing to come with her. Olivia darted off to find someone else, working herself into a state· of desperation. Ten minutes passed, perhaps more. Finally, she located a sympathetic older woman who seemed to believe her story and was willing to go with her to see if anything could be done. Olivia had trouble finding the spot or thought she had, the body apparently no longer on the beach. She waded into the water, walked up and back, eyes down, as if searching for a pair of glasses or a lost ring. Her companion, a therapist who once played herself in a movie, suggested alternatives to what Olivia supposed she witnessed. "The woman may have been sleeping and then gotten up and walked away." Although this explanation struck her as reasonable, Olivia could have sworn that the woman she saw was half-in, half-out of the water, and had the look of something that the ocean had regurgitated. "Or it's possible that what you saw were configurations of driftwood and seaweed that gave the illusion of being the corpse of a woman. As you say, you didn't get that close, did you?" She was nice about it, says Olivia, but I ought to know what I saw. They informed the police who made a perfunctory investigation, but no one else seemed to have seen or admitted to having seen the body, or anything resembling it, of a woman on the beach. Olivia grieved for the reality taken from her. I'll go back with you, says Joshua, who has just returned. We'll check on it some more, okay? Maybe someone else saw the woman. You don't have to, says Olivia. I mean if you're not doing anything else, it's okay, but you don't have to. I probably didn't see anything.
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Do you mind if I go with her? Joshua asks his wife. I'd be disappointed if you didn't go with her, says Genevieve. Later in the day a woman comes to the door, a neighbor from down the road, carrying a tape recorder which lists her to one side, says she is writing a book on mothers and daughters, her name Haley Kahn. What an interesting idea, says Genevieve. The stranger brightens, nods her head, says she wonders if she could take a few minutes of Genevieve's time, well maybe a little more than that, say twenty minutes. A ghost of distrust moves lightly across Genevieve's face. What kind of information does she want? She doesn't know that she would feel comfortable talking about her difficulties with her mother to a stranger. It's your relationship with your daughter I'm interested in primarily, Haley says. Olivia is my husband's daughter. He'll be back in about twenty-five minutes. Haley makes a joke of sorts to break the ice. - You don't mean to say he had her all by himself, do you? That's what I mean to say, says Genevieve. The truth is, says the other, I knew Olivia is that her name was your stepdaughter which is actually why I came over. I think the problem of stepmother and stepdaughter is a very special one. The two women sit on the deck like captains of rival ships, drinking coffee and smoking small cigars. They discover after fifteen minutes that they went to the same high school (not at the same time), have seven acquaintances in common, and share a former lover, though their senses of that same lover are vastly different. When Josh goes by the two women giggle as if they shared a mildly obscene secret into which he fitted like a piece of odd jigsaw puzzle.
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The following is an unedited transcript of the first taped conversation between Hand G. H:
G:
H: G: H: G: H:
H:
G:
H:
I hope to hell it's recording. Sometimes it gets stuck and nothing happens. [Nervous laughter.] I'm talking this afternoon with a twenty-nine year old woman who has the problem of raising an eleven-year-old daughter. How would you characterize this relationship? How would I characterize it? ... Well. We get along ... much better now. I would say that Olivia and I - I mean my stepdaughter- I assume you don't want actual names-are fairly good friends. What does your stepdaughter call you? I mean, does she ever call you mom or mother? She generally calls me by my name. Would you like it if she called you "mom" or do you prefer it the way it is? I prefer it the way it is. If it were another way, I would prefer it that way. [Unintelligible] ........ Don't let the microphone snow you. A lot of people get tape-shy when they talk into recording machines. Just try to forget, if you can, that there's a mike between us on the table. Okay? I'll shut it off and we'll start again. I'm talking with an attractive young woman named G, a writer, thirtyish, who has the problem of bringing up a twelve year old stepdaughter. May I interrupt a minute. I don't really have that problem if problem is the word for it. 0 lives with her mother most of the time. She visits with us on weekends and for a month or so over the summer. Maybe we'd better start again. Okay. Conversation with G, poet about thirty years old who has a twelve year old stepdaughter from husband's former marriage visiting with her at Cape Cod. The stepmother in myth and legend is a generally malign or evil figure.
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G: H: G:
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Do you think this onus in any way colors your relationship with your husband's daughter? No I don't. You don't? You say that unequivocally. Would you care to elaborate? I think 0 is fond of me but she has difficulty expressing it because she feels conflicted. Uh .... It has almost nothing to do with the idea of a stepmother. I don't believe that the word, which she nevers uses, plays any part in her thinking about me. It's interesting that you say that. ... I'd like to come back to that issue later on, but for the moment I'd like to get on to the idea of conflict if you don't mind. Could you explain or break down your perception of the conflict your stepdaughter experiences? Okay? I'll try. Well, she's under mostly unspoken pressures from her mother not to get too close to me. So in order not to be disloyal, not to feel disloyal to her mother, she tends to shy off. She's got an investment in not liking me, though I think she's fond of me despite that. She affects an unconcern, a remoteness, as a form of self-protection. Excuse me but you talk like a person who has had some therapy which I can say, at least in my own case, proved extremely valuable in enabling me to understand other people. Let me observe that I think 0 is fortunate to have someone like you as a stepmother. Go on. I'm sorry I interrupted. What was I saying? You were saying.... I was talking about her inability to let go with us. She'll be having a good time with us and then she'll stop herself and ask about going home. And what about you, your feelings toward her? Are those also ambivalent? [Unintelligible] You're talking away from the microphone.
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G:
I was saying that there's naturally some ambivalence in my feelings toward Liv. I'm really very fond of her, though I'm not crazy about the way she's been brought up. Sometimes she's a bit of a pain in the ass. H : [Laughter] Again I'd like something specific if you could give it to me. What does she do that you find annoying? Is she too demanding or complaining? Does she not recognize your authority to discipline her? G: I'm afraid this sounds all wrong. Liv's not demanding or complaining. I hope I haven't given that impression. She wants very much to please, which is one of her problems. What puts me off. ... H: Something's wrong. Excuse me. I have the sense that it's not recording. H: Resuming interview with G, stepmother of a ten-yearold daughter. [Laughter] I can't .... [Laughter] G: Why don't we talk without the machine?
Emily has formed the idea from certain things said and certain things left unsaid that the man who called himself Tom was a fugitive from the police. She wondered with a shiver of fascination just what he had done to put himself outside the law. She let herself speculate, thinking the murder of a loved one or some other violent crime, giving full play to a somewhat excessive imagination. She comes on him from behind in a sunlit grove writing notes to himself on the back of an envelope. You can't leave, can you? she says. Why can't I? You know why. I don't have to tell you what you already know. He lets her believe what it pleases her to imagine, a man who has lived too long to disillusion the impressionable. You can stay here as long as you like, she says.
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His smile is without information, open to all kinds of misunderstanding. Are they looking for you? He isn't sure, he says, which is a partial truth. In any event, whether they are or not is not her worry. He is grateful for her offer of sanctuary. Some day I may turn you in, she says. One of us may. (The light in the early afternoon has never been so beautiful.) If you ever lie to me or betray me, I'll have my revenge. (She laughs.) Vengefulness runs deep in our family. My mother once turned my father in, or he her, I forget which. For several days Charlotte's manner had been strange. She seemed restless and distracted, refused to play any of the games she had insisted on in the past. I'm going away for awhile, she announced one day at dinner. Is there anything out of the ordinary either of you want? The crisis that followed had been unforseen. Emily begged her sister not to go, said she would do anything to make her happy. The word 'happy' threw Charlotte into a fit of temperament. Who's ever been happy? she asked the room. It's your happiness I'm thinking of, you little fool. That man doesn't love you. You're just a plaything to him. Don't talk that way, said Emily. Why don't you ask him what he did before he came to us? Francis, who as an editor had always been simpatico to melodrama if done well, could see that something ugly was in the wind. Resentment and jealousy burst from Charlotte's lips in noxious profusion while her observers looked on in amazement. She was like a crazy person, Francis calmly noted as if reporting the event to a bystander years later. I know what he is, said Emily when her sister's torrent of animus briefly subsided, and I don't care. I can't give him up. Even if he committed the worst crime a man could
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commit (she seemed to have something particular in mind), I wouldn't give him up. Ask him what he did, said Charlotte. Are you afraid to ask him? Francis regretted his unwitting part in the present scene and resolved to go his way, whichever it was. He made this intention known in a brief though dramatic statement. The speech produced the opposite effect of its manifest intention, the ensuing silence like a murderer in the room. Why can't you go back? Emily asked him. Did you kill someone? Not yet, he said. In a crazy headlong rush, hands covering her face, Charlotte ran off toward the woods. Emily followed moments after, calling out to her sister in a high piercing voice, pleading for her return. Later, two shots were heard. Two shots or one shot echoing, repeating itself in the mind's echo. Eventually the body of a woman is discovered, but not until weather has so effaced the features as to make her virtually unidentifiable. That's one version of what happened. There are at least two others. Charlotte and Tom are playing a game called Escaped Prisoner in which she discovers that the man she loves is a psychopathic killer. The peculiar trademark of this killer is to strangle his victims with a woman's black stocking while in the act of seduction. The heroine's suspicions intensify when she discovers that her tremulous lover has a scar on the palm of his left hand, one of the identifying characteristics of the "black stocking" killer. A further clue is that the killer tends to whistle "You Are My Sunshine" just when he is about to slide off into murderous obsession. Charlotte had (in the game) confronted him with the incriminating details of her suspicions when Emily, wandering through the woods, discovers them. She overhears voices, first Charlotte's, then her lover's.
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She would turn around and go back, not wanting to eavesdrop, afraid of knowing the worst. Something that she hears arrests her flight. If I am who you say, he says, what's to stop me from doing you? The phrase "doing you" strikes her, leaves her short of breath. She leans against a tree to keep herself from fainting. The ones you did it to you didn't love, not really, says Charlotte. I have the intuition crazy perhaps that you wouldn't do it to someone for whom you had come to care deeply and truly. Emily is mystified. It would be cruel to hold out the illusion of false hope, he says. At the same time, I admit nothing. I'm not asking for your confession, Tom, merely your trust. Won't you trust me just a little? I don't trust anyone. It's the way I was brought up. I pretend to trust those for whom I have no respect, but I don't want to deceive you. Don't you see that? Get away from me while there's still time. Is that a confession, Thomas? It's whatever you make of it. It looks for a moment as though they are about to separate-each takes a few hesitant steps in an opposite direction-then, as if a magnetic field is between them, they turn and come together. We'll go somewhere, says Charlotte, where no one has ever heard of the "black stocking" killer, Unknown to others, eventually he'll become unknown to himself. Emily stifles a cry and runs toward the cabin. She falls heavily, gets up, and staggers, biting a corner of her lip (to ease or increase the pain), into Tom's room.- They've abandoned me again, she whispers and throws herself across the bed. She lies motionless, face pressed into the pillow, emptying herself of grief. Later, eyes dry, unnaturally calm, she unlocks the
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bottom drawer of her father's desk and comes away with a .22 caliber pistol. There are four empty chambers in the barrel out of six chambers, an interesting coincidence. She has no way of knowing if the gun will fire in its present condition. She raises the muzzle to her mouth, then with her other hand, one at war with the other, pushes it away. It is not what she has to do. Her delicate aquiline face takes on a secretive aspect, mouth twisted, eyes dilated. What is she thinking when she goes out? There are two of them and she has two bullets in her father's gun. In the meantime, Charlotte and Tom have completed their game or left it off for the next day, and have gone their separate ways. She smiles coquettishly at Tom when she sees him coming, careful to keep the gun from his sight, inquiring of Charlotte in a careless voice. His life depends on his answer or may (or may not). She may already have decided on a course of action. His answer is that he can't remember having seen Charlotte. Your memory, she says solemnly, used to be better than that. He can tell that something is wrong-her composure on display under glass-though he is unaware of how perilously close he is to being wasted at her hand. Do you want me to come with you? he asks. She says, wagging her head sweetly, tongue passing at the left corner of her lip to taste the air. No. No. No. Tom/Francis returns to the cabin, finds it deserted, sits down at the desk that belonged to the girls' father and drifts off into self-absorption. After a point, images of a film he holds in his mind receding at the failure of the will to keep them alive, his eye is drawn to the mirror which has a crack across it, scarring his reflection. He stares at it a moment or two, impressed by the overlay of one image on another. A sense of foreboding lifts him from his chair.
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When he steps out of the cabin he hears a shot which is followed in one maybe two seconds by another. He rushes from the cabin along the path he has run every morning for the past three weeks. The sun, screened by the latticework of the forest, plays a spiderlike design across his running figure. A lone sea gull circles in the distance. The path is sandy and difficult to negotiate. He has run a long distance, is out of breath-the path longer under pressure of urgency-when he sees Charlotte waving to him in the distance. He experiences a moment of relief and then he discovers as he comes closer (or she) that it is not Charlotte but Emily dressed in Charlotte's clothes. Francis is washed ashore, half-dead, in a lonely cove miles away from the public beach, pulling himself out of the ocean like the first amphibian to crawl out of the primordial ooze. A woman named Emily in her late twenties, recovering from a minor nervous disorder, discovers the unconcious form. She pumps water from Francis's lungs, and brings him food. When he is strong enough to walk she helps him up the hill to a cabin which is obscured from road and shore alike by a dense wood. She and her sister Charlotte (she reports)-the sister not in evidence-share the cabin which was built by their father twenty-six years ago on the very day the twin sisters were born. Where is the other sister? he asks. (Charlotte is away at present getting in provisions.) Francis is installed in what has been the father's room. He is very weak and is running a high fever, a circumstance in which inner and outer reality are sometimes interchanged. He has no way of knowing, since there are no newspapers in the cabin, how long the intoxicating fever lasts. One morning he wakes up to see a woman who looks enough like Emily to be no one else and yet has the noticeable characteristic of being not Emily. She holds out her hand to him.
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I'm Charlotte, she says. What name had he given Emily, he can't remember. I'm ... Thomas. How interesting. That was Father's name, says Charlotte. They have breakfast together on the deck,just the two of them. Emily is off somewhere wherever it is she goes. Charlotte is more sophisticated, has an easier time with idle conversation. The days pass. Gradually, Francis (or Thomas as he calls himself) regains his health and strength. The regimen of his new life is transforming. When he looks at himself in the mirror he seems younger than an image of himself (the picture his wife used to keep on her chest of drawers) of ten years ago. Charlotte was aloof and fascinating, he remembers thinking. Emily, admirable Emily, was an open book. The open book came into the former book editor's bed one morning when Charlotte was away on one of her periodic errands. In time, Francis also became Charlotte's lover, intrigued by her remoteness, her refusal to recognize his existence in any other role. The only thing Charlotte requires of him is that he wear her father's raincoat when fucking her. He does it ungrudgingly and in his view with no particular loss of dignity. The sisters each claim that they will not share him with anyone else and are unaware, or pretend to be unaware that they have been doing that all along. His pleasures are underwritten by perils. The sisters, for reasons neither will make much of, keep clear of one another. Francis can hardly remember seeing them together in the same room. Emily is up early in the morning while Charlotte tends to sleep till early afternoon. Charlotte is away for days at a time on one undefined errand or another. When she returns, usually with only the vaguest indication of where she's been, Emily tends to take the air.
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It is a curious arrangement, though apparently necessary to their mutual survival, writes Francis in his notes. Francis has known, as have we all, marriages that operate out of the same principle. One day, against his intention not to, Francis asks Emily how it is that she and Charlotte never have meals together. It's the way Charlotte wants it, says Emily. My sister cherishes her privacy, is devoted to the idea of being alone. If it were up to you, you would spend more time with one another? he asks. (The same question to Charlotte elicits merely silence and the suspicion of a tear.) Emily says she will make a pact with him. She will tell him about her life-up until now their pasts have been strangers to one another-if he will tell her what he has done that prevents him from returning to the world. You first, he remembers saying; She shakes her head, lowers her eyes. You, she whispers. And so Francis invents a life for Emily, which he doles out morning by morning in improvised installments. I have no memories, Emily confides one day. Sometimes fleeting glimpses of a past, fragments like pieces of puzzle that mean nothing to me. I think it may have been the shock treatments, that's Charlotte's theory, that obliterated the past. (These women, notes Francis, talk like characters out of some soapy thirties movie with Paul Henreid and Bette Davis.) Nora, bird-watching with high-powered binoculars, spots a human bird running through a dense wood, a bearded figure who bears an unnerving resemblance to her late husband. The episode leaves her in a state of suppressed excitement. That was ten months after Emily, one bright morning, walked into the ocean for a final swim. They had passed the time in bed together without undue incident; he had told her another story, his imaginary life running thin; she had said bye, nothing more, and gone.
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Francis, dozing, trapped in a dream, has a premonition of unspecified danger. Something Emily said comes back to him. - You make believe that you care for me to feel better about yourself. How kind I am to her, you think with cruel self-regard. Naked, unshod, Francis/Thomas runs along the narrow winding path to the dune's edge. A complex network of mist melds the ocean to the sky. The beach is deserted except for a ten-year-old boy flying a kite. Francis scrambles down the dune to the beach, falling once, twice. Before going into the surf-he has no knowledge beyond intuition that Emily has walked into the water- he asks the boy ifhe's seen a small woman with long blond hair tied in a rope down her back. The boy looks around him with vacant surprise. Something is wrong with him-perhaps a failure of education. My kite come down, he says, then she went away. Which way? He shakes his head. His mouth droops. How long ago was. it? It was when the kite fell, he says. When kite was falling. When did that happen? The boy seems transfixed by the swath of his kite. He makes a noise with his mouth like the wind. Later, when alone, Francis will blame himself for the time wasted in questioning the boy. The search for Emily, which goes on for long hours without reward, becomes his punishment. He regrets the expense of his passion for Charlotte. Again and again he dives into the waves, blaming himself for losing Emily. Waterlogged, defeated, he drags himself back to the cabin, imagining that Emily is safely returned and waiting. The cabin is empty and remains empty except for his own unacknowledged presence. Charlotte will return, he thinks, in a day or two; she is
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never gone for more than a week. How will he explain himself? He gives way to exhaustion. A week, more or less, proceeds in its time. There is no succor for his disappointment. Exhaustion leads to hallucination or dream state. In this condition he hears Emily calling to him from beyond the waves, asking for his help. Which of you is it? he asks. The other one, she says. He tries to reach her, but she keeps swimming out, extending the distance between them. When Charlotte died, the doctor says, puffing smugly on his pipe, Emily went bananas and out of guilt and loneliness incorporated her personality to keep her alive. Is it possible that he's never actually seen the two sisters at the same time? It is Charlotte's grinning corpse, dressed in Emily's clothes, that washes up like jetsam on the shore. Francis falls to his knees on the sand, a bare speck in the UnIverse.
3 Nora, who has a conspiratorial sense of history, precluding accidents and motiveless malignity, had trouble believing that her late husband Francis was unequivocally dead. No one, my dear, she would say to someone or other proposing marriage-proposals came and went like packages sent to the wrong address-has ever really drowned on a summer vacation at Cape Cod. Francis merely decided to take off and used drowning or the illusion thereof as a means of disappearing without messy recriminations. More than she had the in-the-flesh Francis, who had a number of unlovely habits, Nora loved the memory of her disappeared husband. If he appeared one day at her door, bearded, disheveled, eyes bloodlocked like some monster risen from the deep, she would yield a sigh of speechless joy and embrace his ankles. She would clean out her closet of her once and present lovers and restore him to his rightful place. And yet, she knew (she was no one's fool), it would inconvenience her life to have him back. Anticipation of his return was sufficient in itself. Francis was almost positive that he had at least once or twice seen the two sisters together in the same room. Francis's death, or the memory of his life, had opened the sluice gates of eros in Nora. The month she came out of mourning, continuing however to wear black, Nora had so many lovers she had each sign his name and sketch a picture of himself in her guest book. Her larger project was still the Memoir for which she had accepted a modest five figure advance from a young editor who had been an admirer of her husband. Whenever she
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remembered something about Francis or if she had a dream in which he made one of his periodic metaphoric appearances, she would dictate the event into a tape recorder. She kept the recorder, which was an expensive miniature, in her purse and took it everywhere. One of her discarded lovers claimed that he happened to know that Nora's machine was always on. Adoration, she told Genevieve one day over coffee at the Cookery, has its wearying aspects. Too much attention of the wrong sort makes one feel in a cage or on exhibit. She was only after all flesh and ... whatever. It was not a problem to which Genevieve, who felt unadored at all times, could relate. No one has ever adored me for long, said Genevieve. Darling, we all adore you, said Nora. Genevieve and Josh had "taken her up" Nora liked to say. In a world of people that courted the widow's favor, they were her only genuine friends. When she was with people who had a strong sense of self, Genevieve discovered, she tended to pick up gestures of theirs, habits of speech, obsessive diction, the defining coloration of their lives. Nora opened her purse and took out a packet of cigarettes. As soon as she propped the filtered low-tar-and-nicotine cancer stick on her lip, a figure moved out of the shadows, an ambitious young writer with the manuscript of a novel in his drawer, to light it for her. She accepted this spectacular service with a barely perceptible nod of her head. The young writer thanked her excessively for this attention and spent the remainder of the meal curled up at her feet, catching an occasional dropped crumb with his protruding lower lip. Genevieve, made uneasy by the intruder who wore a desperately ingratiating sulk, suggested to Nora that they move to another table. Nora affected to misunderstand the occasion of her friend's request. -You can borrow my
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coat, she said, if you feel a draft. Not to worry, Gen. Francis used to say that homage has its place in art as it does in life. To deny the obvious is to live in a world impenetrably obscure. Genevieve wondered, as she might, whether Francis had ever said any of the things Nora attributed to him. In his life, Francis had never shown much flair for aphorism. Apparent death had changed his character. The puppy at Nora's feet crunched on a radish and whispered compliments of a crude though not uningratiating sort. . He has a novel he wants to show me, Nora whispered across the table to her friend. It's called Amerikana Afterbirth, he says, and is the last word on the Sixties. It trashes our most sacred institutions and, without missing a beat, revitalizes the form of the novel. He's a bit of a wag, isn't he? Let's get out of here, Genevieve said. When the two women left the Village coffee shop, the young novelist traveled in the same direction, a discreet step-and-a-halfbehind them. He walked sideways, one eye behind him, seemed to be coming and going, a circumstantial figure in their lives. I really don't see how I can fit him into my calendar, said N ora with a small sigh of regret, tossing a kleenex ball over her shoulder, a token her admirer picked off the sidewalk on a short hop and pressed to his lips. Nora couldn't help but abhor and admire such outrageous behavior and if she had an opening, even a small one, she felt inclined to add him to her circle of intimate acquaintance. He had, she thought, picking up his reflection in the window of a posh boutique, a pestilent and hungry look. He reminded her just a little of the saturnine Francis of her memOIrs. Don't make yourself so available, she warned him, which was also her advice to herself. Genevieve and Joshua were planning a whirlwind trip through Europe and invited Nora to join them in Geneva.
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Her life had become so boringly complicated, Nora said, she was installing a revolving door to her bedroom. I wonder if there's a message there for me, her admirer ruminated when the elevator in Nora's building mysteriously plummeted fifteen flights with him inside as its only passenger. He was repellingly honest. When he found an earring of Nora's he pursued her through the great cities of Europe endeavoring to return it. You can run from me, he said to her in Berlin, but you can't hide. Why not? she wondered. Even when you're gone you make one desire your absence, she said to him in Rome through her interpreter, an impoverished Italian count. Someday you'll regret your treatment of me, he said. I continue to regret it, she replied. If you're ever in any kind of danger, he said earnestly, walking off in midsentence. For the next two days her ubiquitous admirer troubled her not with the surprise of his by now anticipated appearances. She took his continued absence as a token of her diminishing powers and felt herself in serious danger. Her friends, Josh and Genevieve, who had taken her up, took her to Paris to the Cinemateque to see Johnny Guitar which, as it turned out, was not scheduled for another week. Disappointment followed disappointment. No one in Paris followed the widow admiringly, importuning her with desperate compliments. The movie they got to see was an Edgar G. Ulmer classic called "Daughter of Dr. Jeckyll" which, though mostly untrue to life, seemed nevertheless a metaphoric comment on her divided nature. And then if that wasn't enough, Josh insulted her under the transparent disguise of praising her intelligence. You're a shit, she said to Josh. Isn't he a shit? Genevieve concurred (or didn't) by turning remote, a
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woman of staring silences. In a foul mood, Josh was infuriatingly kind. The weather in Paris reminded Nora of New York in August. Everyone spoke either English or German it seemed, usually at the same time. Why don't we all get laid, she said as a joke over dinner. It was the kind of thing Francis, the Francis of her memoir, would have said. Who did you have in mind? asked Genevieve, waking from her life. We could pick up a couple of frogs, said Nora, and see if what they say about them in song and story holds water. Too too boring, said Genevieve in half-conscious imitation of her friend. Everyone in Paris seems to be American or German anyway. The conversation, which was conducted in an odd mixture of English and broken French (and taped on the machine Nora kept in her purse) attracted a small audience. Let me be so kind as to traduce myself, said a small frogchested man with a monocle in meticulous broken English. I am Romanian by birth, French by breeding and acculturation, and served meritoriously with the Desert Fox in se tank corps in Norse Africa. Prinz Scott-Keysinger is se name by which I am best known. He bowed and clicked his heels, his monocle slipping loose and falling like a poisoned wafer into Nora's glass of wine. Nora lit a Gauloise and closed her eyes to the smoke.-It happens we ordered frog legs, she said to no one in particular. The rest of this frog ought to be returned to the kitchen. She thought she saw the young wag (her eyes of course were closed) behind the face of the musical comedy prince, but it was a case of misplaced identity. May I enjoin you? said Prinz Scott-Keysinger, pulling up a chair between Nora and Genevieve. My complete person is at your disposal. I'd like to dispose of as much of it as possible, said Nora.
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We were just leaving as a matter of fact, said Joshua who saw it as his office to protect Nora from unwanted attentions. My whole life until ten minutes ago, Genevieve said to Scott-Keysinger after her husband had paid the check and left the cafe, has been a small lie exquisitely embroidered. Call me Prinz, said the stranger to Genevieve. For how long haf you this illusion sat your life is a lie? Ignored, Nora felt like crying, touched by the dehumanizing fate of someone much like herself. Worried about Josh who had been going through some bad emotional weather, Genevieve followed her husband's footsteps, leaving Nora to the blandishments of the frog pnnce. Why is everyone leaving me? asked Nora. Scott-Keysinger snapped his fingers and a trio of waiters came over and serenaded them with a smarmy rendition of Deutschland Uber Alles. The French had a peculiar way of expressing their natural character, thought Nora. Call me Prinz, he said. Josh and Genevieve were having a wordless fight on the Champs Elysees, walking slightly apart as though their proximity was merely incidental. What are we going to do about Nora? Genevieve thought to ask, but forgot the question momentarily. Josh was manifestly aggrieved that Genevieve had accepted an invitation to a party without consulting him though whatever the occasion of their dispute it was the same fight they had been having in different guises and arenas for almost a year. She came over and took his arm. -Let's not fight, she said. There was something Nora felt she ought to know before any further intimacy might be allowed to develop. Was Prince a title or merely a name with aristocratic implication? My name in point of fact is Prinz, he said, winking under
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his evil monocle. I am an international figger of royal blood and unaccountable charm. So you're not actually a prince? He extended himself across the table to kiss her hand, his monocle slipping surreptitiously into her demi-tasse. - The story is long and to the sympathetic heart dangerously sad. Let me put it in se proper perspective. I am Prinz and I am not prince. Someday when the barriers between us have collapsed, I will tell you my story. You will laugh and sorrow and clap your hands to hear of it. Nora clapped her hands for the little of the story she had heard and two waiters like wind-up toys appeared, offering unwanted attentions. These are my private waiters, explained Prinz. When he snapped his fingers they stood stiffly behind Nora's chair like palace guards. -The service is poor to indifferent here. I take sem with me whenever I dine out. Prinz sent the one on the right for his car while the other poured brandy in the coffees. None for me, said Nora, though the waiter did not allow refusal. What a strange man you are, she said. I am one of a kind, he said, blushing slightly, trying to disguise his pleasure in her remark. He was the most self-assured man she had ever met, she thought, if not the most childish. Of her own free will, though, as she was later to say, with only the illusion of choice, Nora went with Prinz ScottKeysinger on a long night's journey in his Mercedes limousine. Are you really a figger of unaccountable charm? she asked him. I am everything I seem and more, he allowed. Sometime later when she realized that her hotel was miles away in the other direction she asked her mysterious host just where he thought he was taking her. That is for you to guess and me to know, said her abductor, removing his monocle to breathe on it. -Consider it surprise.
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I have no patience with surprises, she said, laughing gayly. I would be indebted to your kindness if you would return me to my hotel. My friends will worry, perhaps do themselves injury out of despair. Her requests to be returned, spaced discreetly over ten minute intervals, went unanswered. She felt herself in serious danger. Like no one quite before, Scott-Keysinger tapped the secret hysteria of her nature. Under the continued assault of her demands, Prinz laughed his pained mirthless laugh. His English, Nora would note in her Memoir, which showed an apparent range of expression in the restaurant, tended in the car to be made up solely of phrases memorized from a conversation book or from a Hollywood film of the forties. Love is how they say just around se corner, he announced at one point. She ought to have known better than to believe that a man with a German accent could be a French prince. That lesson assimilated, she wished she were in a better position to profit from it. One of the waiters, the one not driving, said something that appeared to anger Scott-Keysinger. As near as Nora could make out-the language spoken not one of hers-the man was asking for a raise. The limousine, as if at journey's end, slid over to the side of the road, then continued on for a mile or so at diminished speed. Nora thought they might be looking for a quiet place to dispose of her, though she couldn't imagine why. Finally, for no apparent reason-no reason for anything-the car came to a full stop. The two waiters, who had been in the front-the one called Fox had been driving-went off together into the woods. It was a dark night, though the moon was almost full, swollen like a bruised eye. She could hear the howl of some wild animal, a wolf perhaps, echoing just outside the
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sanctuary of the car. Her companion removed his monocle, said that the delay would be temporary. His breath seemed to fog the back windows. If you think you're going to make love to me, Prinz, she said, bringing to bear the full authority of her distinguished widowhood, you are a figure of tragic self-deception. My dear madam, said her mysterious host, I am sadly and devotedly incapable. It was the war injury of old. During the day, all is hunky dory, as you Americans say. At night it is different or not the same. He seemed, although seated, to click his heels-perhaps only a trick of the lips. Her pinched heart went out to him in his incapacity. You have a gentle nature, she said in her gentlest voice. Moonlight bathed him in a pinkish glow. His gloved hand rested discreetly an inch above her knee, moved imperceptibly upward like an infection under the skin. If you had been the man I thought you were, things might have been different, she said. You have reason to say it, he said. She heard a gun shot-perhaps he heard it too though he gave no indication of it-and a few minutes later one of the waiters returned to the limousine. He exchanged a short glance with his employer-no words passed-before driving away in a dust-raising hurry. One of your waiters is missing, she said. Her host acknowledged the fact, or merely her representation of it, with a weary smile.-I take them with me everywhere, he said. The service in France is not so absolute as during the Occupation. Yes, she said, but one of them has not returned. (What occupation did he mean?) She held up one finger to make her point. -There were two, but now there is only one. Of course, he said, returning monocle to eye, you have reason to say it. What happened then to number two? Scott-Keysinger said in the iciest of voices, You got me,
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Baby. Twenty-three skiddoo. The weather this evening is something else, he added. Prinz, she said, we don't talk the same language, do we? You will teach me, he said. I am student of the inexplicable, which I study in my youth at your Harvard, the happiest days of my life. They drove at great speed another ten minutes, by Nora's account, then turned abruptly into the driveway of what seemed like the ruins (partially restored) of a medieval castle. You are all my guests, said her host to no one in particular. Nothing is too good for you. The driver, the surviving waiter, went ahead to open the castle doors and turn on the lights. It's very opulent, Nora said. She looked at her wrist not so much to see the time (not at all in fact)-she kept her watch in her purse with her tape recorder-but to demonstrate her concern for the lateness of the hour. I can only stay a few minutes, she said. Scott-Keysinger took her arm in a way that Germany, it might be said, took Poland. Used to be, he said, bringing to bear the full girth of his unaccountable charm, lights burned in my little castle at all hours. It was a happy place, always laughter and the dancing and the tinkling of glasses. That was before tragedy arrived. How sad, said Nora. It was unspeakably sad, said her host. How so? Unspeakable, he whispered, offering his myterious smile, moving wordlessly ahead of her from room to room, a man quicker on his feet than she might have guessed. It unnerved her that the walls of each room were painted a different color. It was as if the castle itself were in disguise. Some of the rooms were avoided, she noticed, gone by without explanation. Where did the servants stay? she wondered. There had been few signs of other human activity in the castle.
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I was too intrigued to recognize how frightened I really was, Nora said later into her tape recorder in a selfinterview. Who else lives here? Nora asked, made lonely by the empty rooms. Do I look like the repository of all knowledge? said her host, flipping his monocle from his eye in a manner meant to charm. In the Green Room, Prinz allowed that his castle, striking as it was, might be improved by the touch of an intelligent woman with some experience of the world. Are you thinking of hiring me as a housekeeper? she asked. Prinz Scott-Keysinger appeared to study his thoughts. You make joke, yes? he asked. A scream of pain came from what seemed like under their feet, Nora putting her hand over her heart in shock. My maman is going through a crisis of identity, said her host. I must look to her arrangements. If you leave, Nora said, I doubt that I'll ever see you agam. My capacity for the return trip is legion, said Prinz. He bowed politely, clicked his heels and left the widow to her unguarded ruminations in the Green Room. Nora liked a man with a few secrets, some locked rooms in his castle, an unspeakable past, an aged mother he tortured on the wheel, but thought that Scott-Keysinger carried his eccentricity to disconcerting excess. The secrets of Scott-Keysinger's castle are not the obvious secrets of a sinister castle. After wary investigation of several of the rooms denied her on the guided tour, Nora returns to the Green Room. Her host is pacing the floor in uncharacteristic antsiness. I missed you, he said. You were missing. I was looking for the powder room, she said. Powder? Gunpowder? It's an idiom, she explained. I thought you said you went
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to school in the States. Didn't any of the girls you dated ever go to the Powder Room? The question seemed to tap a memory. -Did I say I went to school in your country? Nora nodded, though in fact she couldn't remember if he had. Is true, he said. I studied for a brief period at your College of Hard Knocks. It was there I met a blond bombshell wis gorgeous gams. Though we were too young, we talked of making beautiful singing together. One day she announced she was going to the Powder Room. I remember waiting for her in my pad, lighting se cigarette, one after the other, but she never returned. I don't know what to believe, said Nora. Scott-Keysinger paced the room, working himself into an unspeakable state. We've had our fun, Nora said, stifling a yawn. Now I must insist that you take me to my hotel. I tell you something for your own good, he said. You widows make too much of your losses. Always dressed in black which is so attractive to death-obsessed men like myself. Give up the memory of your husband, dear lady. Embrace the present. If only I could, she said. Let me help you forget, he whispered. N ora took his odd remark for a proposal of marriage which she felt honored reluctantly to refuse. What are your final terms? he asked. You force me to reject you, she said, don't you see, by urging this unnecessary proposal. Give up proposing and I will give up refusing you. If you cared for me, as you say, you would not keep me here against my will. Scott-Keysinger was not a man to countenance soft turnings away, though a figure of otherwise unresolvable contradictions. His celebrated war wound had left him with a predilection for testiness. - I will be back in an hour for your final decision, he said, storming from the room.
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Another time he said, this master of paradox, You are free to go, locking her in her room. N ora had always wanted a man who was unequivocal in important matters. There was something to be said for someone who took whatever he wanted without qualm of conSCIence. Whatever it was to be said, give the ogre his due, she had worked too long and too hard at her widowhood to give it up for the first man that locked her in a room in his castle. And she had of course-it was only natural-mixed feelings about impotence in a husband. A note appeared under the door. "Your beauty is a torture to me-Prinz," it read. The present history, with all its contradictions and certitudes, pauses here to reflect on Nora's dilemma. She cannot marry Prinz Scott-Keysinger, tempted as she is by the opportunity to share his wealth and power, nor can she, held prisoner in his castle, not marry him without putting herself in danger. The danger may be more or less than she knows. What would Francis do? she asked herself. Her lost husband had been a master of squirming out of tight spots. One possibility was to jump from her window which was about a fifteen-foot drop to the courtyard. Another was to pretend to agree to Scott-Keysinger's terms. Calculated pretense, a longstanding technique of Nora's for dealing with the untenable, presented a different set of problems. When in fact Nora had agreed sixteen years before to marry Francis S, an up-and-coming trade pook editor, she had had it in mind only to pretend to agree. It had been a means of keeping him off balance. When they got married in an informal ceremony at the Plaza she had the fleeting awareness that she was only pretending to marry him. Nora unlatched the window with surprisingly little difficulty, the action described on tape as she performed it. It seemed too easy, which worried her. They (she assumed
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Scott-Keysinger was not in this alone) might encourage her to escape as a pretext for having her erased. She must know something, she thought, among her storehouse of knowledge, that was dangerous to them. Unknown knowledge was the subject of her speculations. What were the implications of what she didn't know she knew for the man who had refused to have his oblique offer of marriage denied? When she looked out the window she noticed a wolflike creature prowling the courtyard. The monstrousness of his grief, she suspected, had excited a corresponding reality. The creature howled piteously, an awful music which terrified and excited her. She lifted her dress at the window, just a bit to cool her thighs. It was the least she could do, she thought, in answer to his serenade. She had nowhere to go-it was the literal truth-but down.
4 There are no characters in my novel, Genevieve was saying. That's not the kind of fiction I write. I see, her host said, nodding as ifhe had been listening to her when in fact he had been rehearsing what he wanted to say himself. Maury Chevalier offered her, with a magnanimous gesture, anyone in the room as a character but three that absolutely belonged to him. It's only those three that interest me, she teased, noticing over Maury's shoulder an oriental woman coming toward them with a bomb on a silver tray, the fuse lit. Maury, for God's sake, look out, Genevieve said. Why, he was saying, if you can have any of the extraordinary people in this room, some of whom are more accomplished than my characters, do you insist on running off with mine? He was smiling in his angry way, jealous of her prerogatives, when the bomb went off just behind his ear. The room spilled like matchsticks. Genevieve threw herself toward the rug, wrenching her faith in human nature. I can't understand it, Mamie Chevalier said in a confidential manner to her guests. We always treated her like a member of the family. She's even a moderately sympathetic character in one of Maury's books. The worst of it to my mind is the base ingratitude. Maury Chevalier had always hungered for recognition, someone said in an authoritative voice-it was the cultural editor of The International Herald Tribune-was the first of his crowd to misperceive any given fashion. It was a function of his integrity, don't you know, to miss the point. Mamie Chevalier had no choice under the circumstances
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but to reemploy the maid (good help in Paris hard to find that fall) to sweep up the remains of her late husband. I appreciate this, Doris, Mamie said. I don't know what we'd all do without you. Genevieve was in a state of minor trauma from the explosion of her host in mid-sentence. What remained unsaid left her feeling that her life was incomplete. Nothingin our agreement says I have to clean up brains, said Doris. What a mess of brains on the rug. It was his dream to leave his brain to science, Mamie announced to the company. Bobby Mitchum, a passing acquaintance, offered to accompany the distraught Genevieve to her hotel. I shouldn't, she said. You might not want to, he said, but should or shouldn't should not be the issue. Maybe you find me unlikeable. Said as if that seemed out of the question. Oh no, she said. My husband Joshua doesn't like me to take rides from other men and so if I accepted your offer I would have to not tell him, which would lead inevitably to further deceptions. You have a compassionate nature, said Mitchum, and seem to be tied into a robot-like system of self-denying imperatives. She agreed that there was something in what he said. Mitchum took her to a hotel room which, prior to their arrival in it, had no claims on either of them. Neutral ground, he called it, Out of M's ashes, Genevieve would write (to put the episode in novelistic perspective), I sought wholeness with one of the characters he would deny me use of in my characterless novel. I wanted husbanding and healing and the sweet son of a bitch spent the evening telling me the story of his life. He was the half-Jewish motherly doctor all my high school Jewish girl friends' mothers wanted them to bring home for dinner. Mitchum told her his story which up until his telling had been hearsay. He was a practicing alienist happily married
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to a well-preserved wealthy invalid ten years his senior, a lady of extraordinary courage and good cheer. You're a good man, Genevieve said, turning away so as not to let him see how moved she was. H that was her opinion, he would respect it (he said), though he tended to think of himself as a man removed from such uptight distinctions. Most of the time, he said, we say good or bad when we are talking about pleasure and pam. She repeated to herself what he had said in case she might want to use him as a character in her novel. A tormented man, she put him down, his affability a disguise. My marriage is collapsing of its own weightlessness, she confided, though she privately thought her own marriage superior to his. She envied him his larger sadness, bags under his eyes and chest. I don't want to talk about my husband, she said. I've been married to Joshua for a little over eight years. He has blue eyes and a red beard. Maybe the trouble is that your wife and my husband, I mean it the other way around of course, are crowding us out of this bed. She said, I won't make love to you again if you insult me. I've never been so happy, said her lover, blowing a smokescreen of Marlboro between them, as I have with you here. My wife, though a wonderful woman, has been deaf in her right ear since the accident. The Prussians had invaded Alsace-Lorraine and were on the way, according to the underground radio, to Paris. It's not our fight, said Mitchum, lighting two cigarettes in his mouth. They stood at the window and watched the fighting that was not theirs (though whose was it if not?) in the streets below. You could count the injured on one hand. The room was smoky from the cigarettes. She opened to window and sang in a high clear voice the first stanza of the Marseillaise. Je suis Parisienne, she said.
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Some, those who knew the words, sang the Marseillaise. Others hummed along. Nevertheless the bloodshed had stopped at least for the moment. Those people love to fight, said Mitchum, who was an expert on the local customs. Genevieve scribbled a hasty note to her husband and sent it to his hotel by messenger. We can cross the channel by nightfall, said Mitchum, and be in Dover before sunrise. Have you ever seen a sunrise from the white cliffs of Dover? It was one of the many things she had missed in her marriage to Joshua, she said. He went on about the sunrise at such length she could almost visualize it. She didn't like to know how things turned out in advance, she told him. To anticipate something is to set oneself up for disappointment. Yes, he said. Once they were safely in Dover, not so much on the cliffs as in the neighborhood of them, she thought if she had to do it over again she would do it differently. Escaping across the channel in a rowboat was really too much to do in a single night, too tiring really, too declasse. There was hardly time for serious conversation. Too much ducking of heads under tarpaulins and holding of breaths. It was not her idea, though she liked the excitement, of an evening's good time. Perhaps it was something she had to get through in order to get to someplace else. Mitchum took up with another woman in Dover, a hardas-nails cabaret entertainer, whom he described as having an extremely fragile psyche. Genevieve talked of suicide. She was reading Anna Karenina and missed her children. Mitchum said when she talked of jumping from a window or throwing herself under a train that he wanted more than anything in the world to make her his wife. Only ...
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Only what? Mitchum goes to see his wife Meg on their plantation in Brazil to ask her for a divorce. He has made the same trip with the same intention five or six times before with the same failed result. When he sees her brave trusting little face tilted toward him he is unable to tell her that another great love has entered his life. What usually happens is he kisses her on the top of the head which gives her great pleasure and they talk about irrigation and gardening and the problems with the natives. The natives have been extremely restless, Meg says in her charming accent, happy to discuss the problem with him. He can see that his visit, although all too brief, has brought a little sunshine into a life of unremitting convalescence and he feels free to return to his work. His life's work-he has done a number of famous monographs on the subject-is to find a cure for female emotional disorders with particular attention to traumatic schizophrenia. This work brings him into intimate contact with fascinating troubled women in all parts of the world. In the course of bringing these women through his (as of then) unorthodox ministrations into the painful light of reality, the doctor has occasionally fallen in love with one or another of them-he is human after all-and has considered divorcing his invalid wife Meg only to give up on the idea at the last minute. At the instant he opens his mouth to say I am in love with someone else, he finds himself mute. It is clear to the professional eye of the alienist that she needs him too much, relies for her sustenance on his periodic visits. All of this is made known to Genevieve on Mitchum's return from the jungles of Brazil. Genevieve says she could empathize with poor Meg, that she would never do anything to add to that brave woman's pam.
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She decides never to see Mitchum again and leaves him a goodbye note when he is out of their hotel room buying a packet of fags or on some obsessive errand of mercy. When he finds this note (and the room empty of Genevieve) he perceives that his whole life has been a misperception of reality and he rushes down seven flights of stairs into the blistery Dover streets. Mitchum wanders the streets of the foggy coastal town crying out Genevieve's name in a variety of pronunciations, pursuing empty spaces. He drinks heavily and loses his sense of dignity. If only she will consent to meet Meg, Mitchum thinks. The two women can't help but admire one another, each having the qualities the other lacks. When they learn to know each other Genevieve will understand why I can't possibly leave Meg and Meg will understand why I have to have my freedom. The nature of my work requires sacrifices. The doctor catches a chill and stops off at a pub called The Queen's Cross for a bit of cheer. The bar lady, whose name is Katie Cornell, falls in love at sight with the brooding, sad-faced middle-aged mind doctor. You have super eyes, duck, she says, refilling his glass of bitters. I hope you don't mind me saying it. I mean no 'arm. Mitchum could tell from her manner, which hid more than it revealed, that the girl had severe emotional problems, and he asked her to join him at his table for a drink and a consultation. It's agin rules, duck, she whispered, winking. I'm off duty in 'alf a now but me old man's a bit of a tartar. Mitchum studied his pocket watch for almost a minute before shaking his head slowly in incomprehensible gesture. You're frightened of something, he said. He was particularly good at picking up on errant fright. Katie shuddered, said G'wan, and returned to her place behind the bar. A few minutes later a heavyset man in an apron came over to Mitchum's table and sat himself down.
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Mitchum said hi, though he could tell from the man's manner that he was angry as a bull and looking for trouble. The man held out a beefy hand as if it were a sample of something he hoped to sell when the market for such things improved. Now we're both grown gents, said the intruder, you and me sir, ain't we? We've seen a bit of the world to be sure and we're still around to say boo if that's the noise that wants saying. Ain't we, friend? He put his heavy hand across Mitchum's back and breathed his beer and garlic breath into the wings of Mitchum's classic nose. Was that lovely little girl that served me bitters your daughter, Innkeeper? Mitchum asked. Used to be, said the proprietor of The Queen's Cross, Wild Irish Cornell. Since January the ninth the little bird's been me wife. The last announcement sends waves of shock through the pub and even Mitchum, who has seen plenty in his day, is rendered temporarily speechless. The innkeeper explains that the bird had been his stepdaughter-the daughter of his first wife-not his natural daughter, before he made her his second wife. Hiding his heartbreak behind a professional smile, Mitchum indicates that his interest in the innkeeper's wife/ daughter had been primarily that of a doctor's toward a patient with a baffling illness, that something about her had whetted his scientific curiosity. My wife's not me only daughter, says Wild Cornell. I have another who's bedridden poor thing. She hasn't left her bed in seven years and I'd be much obliged if you took a peep at her, Doctor, much obliged. Up until the time she stopped walking, she had been me favorite. Mitchum sees no graceful way of refusing his host's request and follows the Colonel (an honorary title) to the bedside of his invalid daughter, Sonia, in a small apartment two stories above the pub. The girl is very pale and wizened, a patina of perspiration covering her diminutive
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face. She raises her head but is too weak to make herself heard. She has not spoken a word in seven years, her mother/ sister reports. The Colonel gets maudlin at the sight of his stricken daughter and throws himself at the foot of her bed, letting out a long, heart-rending sigh. Mitchum has no patience with grandstanding and tells the weeping Colonel to stop competing with his bedridden daughter for sympathy. Mitchum's insight produces a mild shock of recognition. -How could I be such a bloody blind fool? Wild Cornell rages, tears streaming. I'd give me life if the darlin' would walk again. I'm the most worthless dog that ever drew breath. If I'm going to pull this girl through, I'm going to need your help, says Mitchum. Can I count on your support, Colonel? (The Colonel grunts in the affirmative, falls shamelessly to the floor in an abject posture.) What I'm going to need you to do, says the doctor in his clinical voice, is to go to the kitchen and boil some water. In the meantime I'd like to talk to the patient without interference. When the room is cleared, Mitchum sits down on the bed's edge, concentrating his entire attention on the speechless girl. His smile radiates confidence. The girl smiles back though it is unfelt, merely a gesture of the mouth. You're a beautiful child, says the alienist. Surprise lights the small pinched face. She shakes her head very slowly, all her energy centered in denial. Mitchum repeats his compliment, insists on it. I ... she starts to say, pronoun at her tongue's length. She mouths the words: I'm awful. Dh yes, you are awful, he whispers, as if it were a secret they alone shared. I've known that from the first moment I saw you. I said to myself that beautiful child is awful. She's awful and at the same time remarkable. She's special, that
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child, and I'm going to do something for her. Muck off, she says clearly and distinctly, her voice like the hiss of a kettle. Mitchum laughs his boisterous roar of a laugh. You can talk, can't you, little darling. And I'll bet you can walk, too. You've had them all fooled, haven't you? Well, good. Hooray for you. But I'm not like the other doctors and your father and your stepmother or anyone else you've ever met. 1 don't believe you're incurable and I won't leave your bedside-I promise you-until you give up all this nonsense about being sick. What do you say to that? Her answer is to pull the covers over her face. After a few minutes, suffocating, she tears them away. - I couldn't breathe, she mouths. Why didn't you take them off? If you don't want to breathe, little darling, he says, that's your business. The cover over your face didn't bother me. You're cruel, her mouth says quivering. I won't get better for you. You've lost your chance. Good, says Mitchum in the same false hearty manner. I'm glad we're agreed on that. A gleam of stubbornness registers on her stricken face. No matter what you do, the gleam says, I will hold tenaciously to my right to be incurable. 1 don't care, little darling, he says. I love you just the way you are. She raises her wizened head to stare at him. I'm no way, she mouths. Leave me be. He leans over-his bulk casting a huge shadow across the bed-and kisses her between the eyes. I can't leave you alone because I love you, he says. You can't love me, she whispers, the voice ghostly. I'm the most awful thing. Tell me why you're so awful, little darling. The question returns her to her former muteness. She shakes her head and tears leap from her eyes like flying fish. She writhes, screams silently, bites her lip. Blood t10wers at the bud of her mouth. After awhile, all gestures
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of anguish exhausted, she makes the following report. They always hated me because I tried to be good, she says in a death rattle of a voice. (He has to put his ear to her lips to hear her.) I overheard them one day planning to get rid of me. It was my mother's idea. She said to my father: Little Sonia breathes too much air. The child is greedy for oxygen. If we don't get rid of her, there will be nothing left for the rest of the family. Their plan was to take me to the country one day, pretending it was a picnic, and leave me behind in the woods. I made my own plans. The day came. After lunch my mother and I went for a walk in the woods. I pointed to a mushroom, asking her what it was. When she bent down to look at it, I hit her with a rock on the back of the head. We looked a lot alike and I changed clothes with her in the woods, pretending it was me that was left. It worked for a couple of weeks but then they found out and made me suffer, which was only right. Another bad thing I did was spy on them. I would pretend to be asleep. They would say a lot of strange things when they thought I wasn't listening and I would write them down in a secret notebook. It was the only way I had to protect myself from their meanness. If they did something mean to me, I would give away some secret of theirs. That was awful, wasn't it? Mitchum nods. I've never heard of anything more awful, he says, which elicits a smile. . I'm not even telling you the worst things I done, she says. One time I stole a pint of milk from the front of an old lady's house. In its place I left a mixture of soapy water and cat's urine. She hasn't quite finished her recitation when her father comes in, carrying a lobster pot of boiling water. Hope I'm not intruding on nothing, he says. Make him leave, she whispers. The Colonel slaps his head in astonishment. Them's the first words the little doll has spoken in two years. You're a miracle man, Doctor.
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He rushes to his daughter's bedside and embraces her feet. Leggo, she screams. I won't have him doing that. She's right, the Colonel says. I'm not good enough to kiss her feet. Though good enough I suppose to pay for famous doctors to look after her. Somehow Sonia (in the confusion) has gotten her hands on the pot of boiling water, which she holds by its sides as if her fingers were nerveless. Mitchum is too far away, too caught up in his analysis of the situation to stop Sonia from tilting the pot (who could have believed she had enough strength for that?) so that the scalding liquid drenches the head of the figure embracing her feet. There is nothing anyone can do, everyone moving in slow motion as in a dream. Mitchum does his best-physical medicine after all not his specialty-to save Colonel Cornell's life. If he survives, the innkeeper will have to wear a mask to conduct public business for the rest of his days. The stricken daughter rises from the sickbed that held her captive and embraces her dying father. Papa, she says, don't leave me. Where the ministrations of science have failed, love and hate effect their own remedies. The old face is gone, she says gently. The new face will be better. If Colonel Wild Cornell's tear ducts had not been burnt away by the boiling water, he might have shed some tears at his youngest daughter's words. He stumbles to his feet and surges blindly across the room. His daughter trails him, begging for his forgiveness. Look Papa I can walk, Sonia says. She takes two steps and falls down. The Colonel squints his one sighted eye, helps her to her feet and they embrace for. a second and third time. You won't be neglected ever again, says Colonel Cornell.
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I give you me word in front of the doctor .... Where is that big fellow? His job completed, Mitchum has slipped out of the apartment unnoticed and down the stairs and out into the foggy Dover streets. He puts up the collar of his trenchcoat against the cold and lights a cigarette-two at once-in the shadow of The Queen's Cross. It has been a long emotionally draining day and night for the itinerant alienist. He has loved and lost three times. Three women have entered and departed his life, leaving him with a sense of void. Who is that bloke? someone in the pub asks someone else as Mitchum shuffles by on the way out. I never did get his name, says the other, but that big fellow is the goddamndest mind doctor you ever want to meet. Mitchum climbs into his rented Vauxhall and drives off past the cliffs of Dover into the muted English sunrise, another chapter of his life behind him.
5 Francis has been in a stupor of grief, has not eaten or washed or changed his clothes since Emily took her fateful walk into the ocean eight days ago. He expects to see neither of the sisters again, is resigned to that regret when Charlotte appears laden with packages. She seems very much the way she was the first time they met, her manner denying even the barest intimacy between them. -Could you give me a hand with the groceries? she says in her peremptory way. Her matter-of-factness gets him moving again, gets him up and moving on legs that had forgotten earliest teachings, gets him out to the car to receive a cardboard box of groceries and then back into the cottage. You've been gone a long time, he says. U mmm, she says, neither acknowledgement nor denial. The car is cleared. The groceries put away in cupboards, the sink cleared of a handful of dishes. No mention is made of Emily, or the time passed, or the sallow broken look of her guest. Well, she says when everything is done. I have something to tell you, he says portentously. Do you? she says, moving into another room, pulling her shadow along reluctantly behind her. Francis sits down at the kitchen table to wait for her return, withholding the moment of confession, revising his information. He has held his news too long to give it up like small talk. The trip tired me, she murmurs. I need to lie down. Don't you feel that way after a long trip, that you need to just lie down and close your eyes. Rather than confront her in her room-how difficult it
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is to unburden himself-he goes for a walk in the forest, darker outside the cabin than in, the fog like webbing connecting the trees. He loses the path-he can't remember a time it was so hard to follow-finds it again or another like it, loses the second, stumbles through brush to the water's edge. He sits on the cliff of a dune, staring into the fog, rehearsing what he plans to say to Charlotte. He dozes or doesn't, daydreams, hears a man and a woman talking in low voices. It is a daydream after all. No man and woman are on the beach below him whispering so that their voices might be mistaken for waves lapping against the shore. He gets up, yawns, stretches, treks down the dune, thinking perhaps of going into the water for a swim. It is a deceptive day-everything the milky color of fog. He sees or senses two figures at the far end of the beach, their backs to him. Who could be on this private cove? he wonders. It is not accessible from any of the public beaches so that to reach it you would have to come from the house or, as he had originally, from the ocean itself. He would like to overhear their conversation, to find out what they are about, before approaching them. He is not mistaken or rather not wholly mistaken. There is someone on the beach-one person, a womanstanding or posing at the water's edge in a long lime-green gown, holding a parasol over her head. Where has the man gone or has he imagined the man? The woman has her back to him. He walks slowly toward her, wanting to be sure of her identity before giving himself away. Perhaps he is still on the cliff, dozing, playing himself in a dream. He could almost swear from the back, the slight bend in her shoulders, that the woman is Emily. Emily? When she turns he can see that he has made a mistake. Although the women are almost identical and the long
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gown is something Emily might have worn, he senses that he is witnessing a performance. Hello, Charlotte, he says. She stares at him without recognition. - Is there a Charlotte who looks like me? It's embarrassing to reportplease don't laugh-but I can't quite remember who I am. She is, as always, extremely convincing and Francis wonders if she has actually lost her memory or is merely enacting a role. Where have you been? he asks. I can't remember that, she says. Tell me something about the person you think I am. She takes his arm in a formal way and they walk along the beach in the fog. The game is making him uneasy. -What are we playing? he asks. Who am I supposed to be? You are who you are, she says, wide-eyed, frightened. The thing about Charlotte, he tells her, was that she tended to make theater our of her day-to-day encounters. She was always playing one part or another, was rarely herself. It gave her a charge, unless that was also an act, to make love in the persona of another. The woman with real or pretended amnesia laughs decorously as if she is withholding greater amusement or affecting the little she indicates. -You're making this up, aren't you? she says. No more than you're making yourself up, he says. It's cruel of you not to believe me. Francis assumes a role. He is a skeptic by predisposition, unable to accept the unverifiable on faith. It is hard for him to sustain his act, distracted by the mystery of the real Charlotte. He looks over his shoulder for the man he imagines he saw with her. When he asks her about her sister she says she has none. How can you be so sure if you don't remember who you are? Her eyes drop. She turns away as if afraid the secrets in
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her face had become too available. Did I have a sister? she asks rhetorically. Is it possible? The emotional content of the nothing I remember is empty of otherness. There is a damp chill in the air, a prescience of rain. His nameless companion, who had been staring over his shoulder, lets out a sudden scream. She is shivering as though her bones are rattling in her flesh. Did you see something? Is there someone there? No one. Why did you scream? Did I scream? I don't remember. She puts her head on his chest. You're being maddening, he says. She tells a different story, invents a new past. She is a woman sexually impaired, the consequence of having been raped by a near relation when she was thirteen. Tears fill her eyes. I thought you couldn't remember, he says, holding on to the tail of her story. You must be confusing me with someone else, she says in an ice-tipped voice. They walk a little farther down the beach, her arm locked in his. -Charlotte, let's stop the game, he says. I'm not Charlotte, she says, her face turned away. Don't you know that? You're not? (He catches her staring over his shoulder and he turns around to see who's there.) Did you think I was? I wanted you to think that. Francis might have been walking alone on the beach for all the presence his elusive companion commanded. -Why did you want me to think that? he asks. She is coquettish with him now, all shy smiles and turns. -Really, don't you know who I am? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He stammers an assertion, his words coming apart at the seams. -Gimme a clue, sweetheart. She smiles at his confusion. -Am I so changed that you
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no longer recognize me? Her identity slides away from his glance. It is as if the disease of her disorientation were infectious. He is in danger, he feels, of losing himself. You used to tell me stories about yourself, don't you remember? Almost every morning a new chapter in the life of the pseudonymous Tom. You almost had me believing they were true. You're not Emily, he says. When you're a twin you learn how to avoid people you don't want to see by pretending to be the other. Which one of you is trying to avoid me? She puts her hand on his cheek and kisses him lightly. -Now do you know? He is reluctant to commit himself, wary of the irretrievability of mistaken choices. Instead, he offers to tell her a story about his marriage. You never told me you were married, she says. This is a new story, .Francis says. He exaggerates pointless details to give the real the patina of invention . . . . We slept together about once a month and rarely in our own apartment and never in the king-size bed we shared at night. She was a woman of moons and moods, few of which corresponded to mine. She needed special occasions to interest her in sex. One time at a dinner party I went to the closet to get our coats-we were generally the first to leave-and she followed me in, insisting that we make love then and there, with the door slightly ajar to increase the chance of discovery . . . . The threat of humilation aroused her. In our own bed she was always too bored or tired unless of course I had come home with the smell of some other woman on me. And then, though nothing would be said, we would inevitably wind up on some rug or in the bathtub-any place but the bed. She said my aggressiveness inhibited her, opened up childhood fears of violation. It was easier, less harrowing, to go our separate ways. We separated twice-once my idea,
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once hers-and reconciled twice, chained to each other by who knows what. The truth is, we were miserable together, soured by each other's company. She invariably disapproved of my public performance, her mouth at parties sucking on its own displeasure. To tell you the truth, I loved her. The first time we split up, I suffered her absence, unable to sleep at nights, crying like a child that had lost its mother. I felt as if I was dying of loneliness or dying of shortage of air. One day gone and I was ready to return, flowers in hand. I had girls up to my room-I had six months' ration of sex in a week-but it only temporarily relieved my feelings of loneliness. I took my children for the day on Sunday and we were decent to each other for about an hour, then belligerent for the rest of the time. I bought them whatever they asked for-stuffed animals, Crackerjacks, an American flag, posters, souvenir pennants, ice cream, comic books-but nothing satisfied long. The more I bought them, the worse (it seemed) their opinion of me. I must have done something terrible, they seemed to be thinking, if I had to bribe them with gifts to gain their good opinion. When I brought them back, my wife invited me to stay for supper. I had a date that night. My daughter pleaded with me to have supper with them, the first indication she had given all day that she even liked me. I said, studying my watch, that I would sit with them while they ate. "Are you having dinner with someone else?" Nora asked. I said I was. She gave me an ultimatum: either I have dinner with my family or I leave immediately. I got up to go. My son, who was four, began to chant: "Daddy stay, Daddy stay." Nora went into her room and shut the door. We could hear her sobbing in her room. I had a drink, knocked a chair over, made my daughter a hamburger, ended up eating most of it myself. When I left everyone was even more unhappy than before. That night, after having been two hours late for my appointment, I had a few more drinks than I needed and I fell asleep on this woman's couch. I don't remember if she threw me out or not-I believe she did-but I remember pacing a train station at 4 A.M., then getting on the wrong
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train. Two or three weeks later, defeated on all fronts, I moved back in with my wife and children. That's only the beginning of the story. About seven months later, Nora announced that she wanted me to move out, that it was her turn to call the tune. It came as a surprise since 'I thought we had been getting along relatively well. We had a brief reconciliation, had sex of a rather bizarre nature under the kitchen table, and I moved back to my pied-aterre. She needed, I remember her saying with a mixture of apology and anger, to see what she was capable of on her own. This time we avoided the mistakes we made during the first separation. We remained friendly; we went to the same parties; we had dinner together twice a week; we talked with the illusion of openness about our private lives apart. Extorting gifts on both sides, the children seemed only mildly upset by the arrangement. It all seemed so amicable and civilized until one time at a dinner party when I asked Nora to leave with me. She told me to "get lost," or "go to hell." She had been talking to a mutual friend, Max, all evening, and was hanging possessively to his arm. I made the mistake of telling her that she had had too much to drink. She called me a string of obscenities in a hysterical voice, announcing that she was going home with Max, who was looking at the ceiling, I remember, as if he wished himself invisible. I made the further mistake of taking Nora's arm. She slapped my face and told me, told the room in fact, that she never wanted to see me again. I left, but instead of going to my apartment, I waited in the street for her to come out. After awhile she appeared with Max, clinging desperately to his arm. Two cabs came along. They got into the first, and I got into the one behind, instructing the driver (as if I were a detective following fugitives) to follow them. I followed their cab to Max's hotel and watched them go in together. After that I took the cab to our apartment-the apartment I was estranged from-dismissed the babysitter and awaited her return. The longer I waited, the harder it was for me to sustain an intention. When she finally came in-it must have been three in the morning-I
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was dozing on a couch. She let out a scream when she saw me. I woke in a daze and hit her in the face with the back of my hand, hit her harder than I might have had I been fully awake. I carried her into the bedroom, washed the blood off her mouth, undressed her and put her to bed. She was pretending to be unconscious but I let it pass. I had already had the only communication I wanted to have with her. I hope that doesn't sound as brutal to you as I think it does. Instead of going back to my place, I spent what remained of the night on the couch. In the morning, Nora-I still don't understand why (perhaps it was the influence of the children)-invited me to stay. She listens with a child's enigmatic smile on her face, the story stretching across the blank landscape of absolute belief. Are you lonely here with us? she asks. I missed you when you were gone, he says. The news seems at once to please and trouble her. -Sometimes, you know, I have to get away, she says. He thinks to ask where she goes, though lets the question bed down with his other mystifications, his relationship with the sisters dependent on keeping everything but the present out of sight. Later, when she tells him she has to do something at the cabin, he is reluctant to separate. - I'll go with you, he says. You have to trust me to go alone, she says. If I don't come back to you, then I'm not worth your trouble. She walks ahead, looking over her shoulder from time to time, though not always in his direction. The memory of loss is too close to the surface. He will not let her out of his sight. She goes on, then comes back to him to plead against his pursuit, repeating the gesture a number of times with the same selfabandoned desperation. Finally, she makes a bargain with him. Give her fifteen minutes and then come along. Ten minutes, he says, kissing the hem of her gown, grovelling on the dune.
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How can anyone love you when you're like that? she says. She goes up the dune at its highest point, clearing the pinnacle and then receding, disappearing from vision. This time he lets her go. He closes his eyes-the mist sealing them -and sleeps for what seems to him on waking a night and a day. The sun is down and he shivers from the cold. Getting to his feet, he has difficulty remembering what he wants to do. He doesn't remember walking the winding path to the cabin, though remembers arriving in the near dark. His idyl has come apart. The two women fill his life like an anonymous crowd. Loving them is like loving images on a screen. At least the cabin isn't empty. There is a light on and the sound of someone moving around, the clang of dishes in a sink, the opening and closing of a door. He doesn't know what name to call her, her back to him when he enters the cabin. Are both of you here? he asks. Just me, she says. I've been waiting for you to come back. He mentions that he has been asleep on the dunes for what seems to him a long time and that his neck is stiff. T ell me about my mother, she says. You never talk about her any more. Your mother? Do I look like her? I have to know these things. My memory of her is so faint, so hard to hold on to. Please tell me. He stares at her without words, mumbles a collection of broken sounds, fragments of responses unsorted on a tray. You have a way of putting it, she says without apparent irony, that makes it come wonderfully to life. It must mean that you have a very strong sense of her. I read somewhere, in some book I think, that certain people have the capacity to keep loved ones alive inside long after they are dead to the rest of us. I didn't know that you read books, he says.
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I only read books that tell the truth .... Tell me again how you met her. How I met her? Yes. How you met her. I want all the details. She claps her hands with excitement. I don't remember all the details, he says. She had very fine light brown hair which she wore up in a bun that she kept hidden under a variety of striking, highly individualized hats. The first time you met her was at a party in Charlottesville, Virginia. And you didn't like her at all that time. You thought if you never saw her again it would be just fine. Is that the way it was? You remember it better than I do, he says. She laughs nervously. - I think about her all the time. Will you tell me about her in your own words. He elaborates on her story, inventing what seem to him probable and improbable details, limited by ignorance and failed flights of the imagination. She interrupts just when it feels to him that he is getting it right. That's not the way it was, she says. Why are you lying to me? Memories change, he says. You're hiding something, she says. Is there something you did to my mother than you don't want me to know about? That can't be. You've already told me the real story. Or was that also a lie? Everything tends to be a lie, he says. (She shakes her head vehemently.) Your mother used to expose herself to strangers on the subway. She puts her hands over her ears, says, screams, that she won't listen to him. Francis goes on as if something compels him. - I knew what she was capable of when I married her, but I thought she would change. The need to expose herself in public places got increasingly intense. No, she says. It's not my mother you're talking about. It was a sickness, a form of madness really, but I couldn't
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help taking it as an act directly against me. One time on a flight to Paris she slipped up front to the pilot's cabin and exposed herself to the pilot under the notion that it would make the plane go faster. Her hands leave her ears briefly and then return to their vigil. -I'm not listening, she whispers. Months would pass without a single incident and I let myself think that this particular madness no longer gripped her. Then I would find her sitting at the front window, naked under her skirt, her legs apart. The postman and several teenage boys looking up at her as if she were on exhibition. She can't help but lift her hands from her ears to hear what he is saying. Her body is bent slightly forward. -She had other qualities that made you love her. Why don't you talk about those? I don't remember them with any clarity. I'll say this. I was mad about her and the exhibitionistic episodes which often horrified me didn't diminish that. She went to one psychiatrist after another, went through them like napkins, exposing herself in turn to each in some oblique and unexpected way. She lay on one of the doctor's couches in fact-the second or third-with her hand inside her pants. This doctor had encouraged her to wear underwear so that she couldn't readily expose herself. Most of what she did was unconscious. In her own light, she was an extremely modest person. It's true, she says. Oh God. I've known the truth all along as if my mother lived inside me. Is that right? We're so much alike, she says. It's uncanny how alike we are, mother and I. I didn't want to know but now that it's out in the open it frees me to go on to something else. It's not true, he whispers. I've been making it up. Finally, she screams it out, turning to him, her face distorted to an almost grotesque degree. - You're not my father.
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She stares at him, verifying her accusation. No, I'm not. You're not my father, she says again. He shakes his head very slowly, a regretful acknowledgement, asks her name. - You're not my father. She puts her leg on a chair and slowly, looking at him with her dark eyes, never not looking at him, raises her skirt. I recognize you now, he says. Pardon me. She says this with icy formality, seemingly unaware that she is exposing herself to him. You are Charlotte, aren't you? And you're Thomas. It's funny. For a moment or two, I thought you were my father. She lets her skirt fall, removes her leg from the chair. He follows her, uninvited, into her bedroom. -Are we to screw again? she asks. Is that what it always comes to? He shakes her violently by the shoulders, her head looping like a rag doll's. - Who are you pretending to be? You're not the man I married, she says. He buries his face in her skirt. She looks at him with surprise, almost fright, her hands flickering delicately above his head. - I don't know who you are, she stagewhispers. He recalls to her the occasion of their first meeting, his voice muffled by her skirt. -You must think I'm just terrible, she says. She is lying on top of him across the bed. They are both fully dressed, their feet hanging over the side. She pulls her face away when he tries to kiss her. - I f sex is what you have in mind, forget it. What do you have in mind, Charlotte? Don't call me, Charlotte. He tries to unbutton her skirt and it tears. She turns her face away from him and cries silently into the bed cover. -It was my mother's skirt, she says. He lies next to her on the bed. Her back is to him. She is
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crying or seems to be, her back going up and down in irregular complaint. At some point, she announces the following: One night 1 was having some kind of attack and thought 1 was dying. There was a flash of lightning, although no other indication of a storm. 1 took it as a portent. 1 am not what one thinks of as a religious person, but at that moment 1 made a pact with God. Spare my life, 1 prayed, and I'll never give myself to another man. 1 woke up the next morning in my own bed, the illness gone. She turns around to kiss him, her eyes wet. A tongue slips like an arrow out of the corner of her mouth. -Do you mind? They are kissing, ,her hands against his chest. She suggests they lie on the floor next to the bed, a suggestion he resists. She is sitting up in bed in her slip, smoking a cigarette. He is lying next to her, his eyes closed. - Do you know what 1 like best, honey? she asks between puffs, her voice high and constricted. He makes no sound, though his lips appear to move. - I like it best when you put your head between my legs. Her knees swing apart then come together, then pull apart again. - What do you like the best? He murmurs something unintelligible, lifts his head. - You don't take a hint, do you? Reluctantly-it is not quite what he wants-he slips his head like an untenable secret between her legs. A voice interrupts him. -I'm terribly afraid, it says. He raises his eyes and is surprised at the changes in her face. It is Emily he sees, the other sister, not Charlotte, not remotely Charlotte, and he gasps in astonishment. - Why did you let me think you had drowned? - Who are you? she asks. What are you doing here. She pulls the sheet up to her neck, a parody of modesty. -You know who 1 am, he says. He recapitulates the story of his arrival, brings her up to
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date as best he can on the ambiguous events of their relations hi p. - That's how it seemed to you. I remember it differently. - What's your sense of it? he asks. She covers her face with her hands, peeks out at him through two fingers. -I've told the police that you're here, she says in a childish voice. You have about ten minutes to get away. I hope you won't hate me too much. -One doesn't hate just a little, he says. What did you do it for? - I wanted to see if I could. Francis goes to his own room and collapses, spreadeagled on the bed, his feet dangling over the side. A few minutes later there is a knock on the door. -I'm sleeping, he says, not bothering to open his eyes. -Police, a voice calls. He wonders what they think he has done, what feverish crime, and he gets up slowly, or he imagines himself getting up, to declare his innocence. - You have five seconds, the voice says, to throw down your gun and open the door. The seconds tick away. He is unable to move fast enough or perhaps he moves too quickly for his own good. As he gets to the door, a blast of gunfire greets him, driving him backwards across the room. In a moment or two the woman is at his side, holding his hand. The room spins crazily. I had to find out if I loved you, she says. She kisses him on the lips and tastes his blood, a good wine gone bad. The lights go out. As the fall winds crash against the walls of the cabin, he bids the future hasta la vista.
6 Conflicting vanations proliferate in the Nora/Scott· Keysinger affair. In the version credited to Scott-Keysinger's first wife, Henrietta, Nora is viewed as a manipulative young woman who leads the good-willed and over-sexed Scott-Keysinger on by pretending to reject him. You vill be sorry, he says between his teeth after her third rejection of him. An hour later he returns with a small bouquet of long stem white roses and an abject, perhaps ironically abject apology. It would be a mere formality, he whispers, like a death in the family. Nothing is required of you but your consent. In another version, Scott-Keysinger plans to marry Nora against her will and poison her slowly-one of his companies makes an inordinately slow poison-for refusing him. The master of the castle is above all practicaL There would be no point in having acid thrown in Nora's face unless she were made aware that it was an act performed in extension of his hand. The man is not incapable as is rumored, Nora wrote to her friend Genevieve. His avowed incapacity is another of his myriad disguises, a means of deflecting that ultimate facing of himself. An investigative reporter for the Washington Post named Grant Wooden, an admirer of Nora's, discovers that ScottKeysinger is an agent of a foreign power. He persuades the widow out of loyalty to her country to accept her tenacious suitor's third and last proposaL When she accepts Scott-Keysinger, his estimation of her character falls to nothing. She is not the woman he wanted (the woman he wanted is the woman he cannot have),
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although he will stand by his commitment. His entire reputation (so large, all of it has never been seen in the same room) is dependent on the impeccability of his word. Nora photographs her husband's secret papers under the guise of looking for something interesting to read and turns the film over to Grant Wooden who has the misfortune to have fallen in love with her. The investigative reporter, jealous of Scott-Keysinger's husbandly prerogatives, finds it increasingly difficult to perform his job in a professional manner. One night he shows up uninvited at a party at the ScottKeysinger' and drinks himself into a state of disgrace. He meets his hostess as if accidentally on the secondstory battlement, which has been converted into a glassenclosed terrace. I don't think we've been introduced, he says, slurring his words as if he were only pretending to be drunk, a complicated deception. I'm your hostess, she says, holding out her hand. Reports of your beauty were not exaggerated, he says with boorish gallantry. You're making a fool of yourself, she says under her breath. You're one to talk, he says. I don't understand what you're doing, she says. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to see to my guests. I'm one of your guests. He has her arm, has her by the arm for just a moment which is the very moment one of her husband's confederates spies on them through the louvered glass doors. I can't stand not knowing what's happening to you from moment to moment, Grant says. I've never said this to another woman. Nora knows, has a second sense about such things, that she is being observed. It is a policy of Scott-Keysinger's to leave no one he pretends to trust unwatched. She makes light of the reporter's love protestations as if
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she thought he were joking with her. -Sir, she says in charming fluster, you must be joking or mad. I want you to leave here with me, he says, in a voice louder than he intends. Nora warns him with a glance, moves from the terrace, notices a small man wiping his monocle on the red velvet drapes. If you don't stop bothering me, she says to the figure on the terrace, I'll call my husband. To mention Scott-Keysinger, even in the name of husband, was to conjure his authoritarian presence. Such was the power of that presence that in moments the investigative reporter was gone and no witness could say under oath how, whether under his own power or not, he had departed. He had come headlong to the wrong party, said ScottKeysinger in explanation, and had therefore mistaken my wife for the wife of someone else. For a seemingly crude man, Scott-Keysinger could be unutterably subtle. Nothing further on the subject of he uninvited reporter was said either in public or private. What had his confederate reported to him? Nora wondered. The next day when she tried to leave the castle there was a black Doberman on guard outside the door, snarling and baring its fangs. She thought not to mention it to her husband-two could play at the game of being subtle-but after a week being unable to leave her own castle became a sore point. By the way, S.K., she said, sipping morning coffee-she didn't seem to have much energy, made tired by the slightest exertion-I wonder if you noticed that there's a vicious dog outside our door. Scott-Keysinger cleared his Germanic throat of disingenuous gutterals. -A dog at our door? Ach. Wait a second. Ach. Ach. Ach. A Doberman of ebony caste, correct me if I'm wrong. Answers to the name of Gestapo (a
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little joke), yes-so He is yours, my dear Nora, a gift from a devoted admirer. The beast, if it is the one 1 ordered for you-nothing as you know is reliable in our time-is loyal to a fault. 1 appreciate the gift, dear. Yet 1 must say the thing bares his fangs at me in the most brazen manner. Perhaps that's the fault attached to his loyalty. All of this, although said in the mildest, matter-of-fact voice, seemed to gall and rage Scott-Keysinger. -Do 1 throw your presents in your face? he said. If you don't like him, you are perfectly free to exchange him for something else. He is merely, like everything in zis house, the best of his kind. His tantrums frightened her. He sometimes banged his head against the table, catapulting expensive china in all directions, until whoever had resisted him acceded to his wishes. - I really loved the gift, she said, though how was 1 to know it was mine. Really. There was no note, nothing to indicate that he wasn't a hostile presence. If you loved me, he said, you would not doubt. If you loved me, she said gently, you would be more sensitive to my needs. 1 am sensitive, he growled. There is no one more sensitive. She begged him to stop banging his head" but her pleas seemed to fall on insensible ears. It pleased her nevertheless to have something real to complain of. Nora felt easier about leaving the house the next day, knowing that the vicious dog that threatened her life was her own. Yet something was wrong, something unfathomable. A subtle incapacity troubled her as if old age had arrived before its time. Her contact was abrupt and business-like, accused her when she had no further evidence to turn over of being secretly in the employ of her husband, a woman whose only
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scruple was the price of her betrayal. This will be our last meeting, he said. I have enough material now to write my story or enough to determine that there's no story to write. I'm glad it's over, she said, his back to her. This whole thing has been draining me, Grant. I can't remember when I felt so ... so .... Weakness made her inarticulate, blunted her rapier-like tongue. The struggle to find the right word exhausted her further. She leaned her head against his back to keep from falling, a hard unfeeling back that received her like a bed of stones. He revived her by shaking her in an abrupt manner. -Something wrong with you? he was saying. What the hell is it? Have you been drinking? It was only after she'd left him, after he had put her in a taxi to take her back to the castle that he regretted his stiffnecked behavior. She hadn't been drinking, he knew that now, distance enhancing perspective, but was suffering from an illness. Poor brave kid! Why hadn't they had a doctor look after her? He didn't think about it again until that evening when the subject came up in a surprising way. When he returned to his hotel room from dinner there was a dying woman in his room, a former un attributed source. There was something she wanted to say, though could barely make herself heard. - Who did this? he asked. Your friend is in grave danger, she whispered, coughing blood. They are .... They are ... poisoning her. Who's behind it? he asked. Is it Scott-Keysinger? I've said all I can, she said under her breath, eyes dilated. I'll count to ten, Grant said. If you don't interrupt me before I reach ten, I'll assume you verified my suspicion. One ... Two ... Three ... Four .... Five .... Her silence extended itself beyond recall.
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There was a full moon that night. Not an ideal time for the investigative reporter to penetrate the defenses of ScottKeysinger's sanctuary. Dressed in a black dinner suit he used for going after inside stories, Grant burrowed underneath the electrified fence. A moving floodlight affixed to the roof illuminated the ground by degrees. The trick was to follow in the light's wake, moving diagonally to the wall of the castle, before the searchlight turned the other way. His mountain-climbing experience served him in good stead. He went up the dark side of the castle wall, stone by stone, hand over hand, the furthest he had ever gone for a story. Nora, he knew, was on the third floor and he walked slowly, daringly, along the parapet of that floor, straining to hear conversations on the other side of the wall. Grant kept a stethoscope inside his jacket for just that purpose, one of the lesser-known tricks of the investigative trade. Something in his shoe, a stone or cobbler's nail, was cutting into his heel. Balancing himself on his right foot, not daring to look down (as a child he had suffered from vertigo), he removed his left boot to inspect its interior, a delicate operation for a man on a narrow ledge forty feet in the air. A noise distracted him-the opening of a window or a cry for help-and the boot separated from his grasp and fell, bounding noisily off the side of the castle into the courtyard. My God, what was that? he heard from inside. I heard nothing, said another. You would be advised to hear nothing. I hope I am making myself understood. Is it the beast of the castle? said the first. I know of no such thing, said the other. Grant pressed himself against the wall to avoid discovery. The full moon, which passed between clouds, illuminated his face for a brief moment. A lonely monstrous figure, sometimes upright, sometimes on all fours, paced the courtyard below. When the creature was out of sight the reporter edged his way along the papapet to the next window. It was Nora's
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room or a room in which Nora was temporarily housed. He listened to her sigh in her sleep through the stethoscope. The window, which he fiddled with, posed some difficulties, was latched from the inside or perhaps designed not to be opened. There was someone in the room with her. He could taste something-fear or jealousy-rising in his throat to coat his tongue with displeasure. Whoever it was was standing at the foot of the bed, its back to the window. The figure turned. The reporter slipped back into the shadows, felt a piece of the ledge give out under his foot. One foot, his left, bootless, dropped through the crevice. The other curled in its boot, toes clenching. Fragments of old brick clanged in the yard, causing the creature to let out a long ear-piercing howl. Grant held on by his fingers until his arms grew weak, then he forced himself forward, the bootless foot finding its way back through the hole, removing some more of the ancient stone. The reporter found himself framed in he window by moonlight, a silhouette in black. More and more of the parapet gave way. When out of desperation he crashed through the window the figure in bed rustled as if a wind had passed over the blanket. Fortunately they were alone. It was not a time, he thought, for company. He heard a noise in the hall, footsteps away or toward, and he threw himself to the floor, coughing, holding his breath, a dying man in his dream. Five minutes passed and no one came in. It seemed extraordinary that he had escaped notice. He called Nora's name. She raised her head tentatively from the pillow, her face ghostly as if blood had been drawn from it. You're in danger here, she whispered. He'll never let you leave. He can't bear to part with anyone who visits him. The torrent of words appeared to tire her and her head fell
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back on the pillow. Perhaps she wasn't talking to him at all, hadn't recognized him, her words spoken in her fever. When he heard someone coming Grant hid himself behind the door. A small woman with gray hair entered. I sought I heard my son, she said. Have you seen ze dear boy? Nora moaned in her sleep, said no one has been here. Leaning over her bed, the old woman let out a snarl that was hardly human. You are not worth his little finger, she hissed. A howl from the courtyard brought Scott-Keysinger's mother to the window. Who is responsible for this? she asked rhetorically. Someone will pay ze piper. When the old woman was gone, the reporter lifted Nora to her feet. I'll get you out, he said. You'll have to carry me, said Nora. I seem to have forgotten how to walk .... Oh, it's hopeless. He'll never let us leave the castle. The reporter took a rubber mask out of his back pocket and adjusted it over his head. It was the face of ScottKeysinger and so like the original it caused Nora, in her weakened condition, to cry out with surprise. It was as if everyone in the world were her changeling husband. The reporter, a student of exits, lifted her with a flourish and carried her out the door past one guard and down the hall past another to a large stairway. Limping conspicuously, consequence of the missing boot (and a turned left ankle), he was careful not to say anything that might compromise his disguise. Harumph, he said when he passed someone, an authoritative deep-throated grumble he had heard his absent host use, or imagined he had, on a similar occasion. A dark mustachioed figure, hair pomaded and parted in the center, was coming up the long baronial stairs as Grant and Nora were coming down. Careful, Nora whispered. That's his step-son, Andre. They seemed to meet exactly half-way so that an overhead
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shot of the stairs, allowing for camera distortion, would show as many steps below as above. Discarding her, sir? the stepson asked with mock politeness. I would have thought that there was still some use left in that one. Zo, said the impersonator, nodding with a distracted air. He speaks to me, said Andre. It is the first time in years that he has afforded me his notice. Nora's weight-no small burden at her trimmestannounced itselfto the reporter's knees as he hurried away from Scott-Keysinger's scapegrace stepson. Nora would report in her memoirs that Andre ScottKeysinger winked at her over his shoulder, though there is no evidence for it beyond her assertion. As Grant reached the bottom of the second flight of stairs, a man who appeared to be a servant (butler or perhaps doorman) spoke to the reporter with an air of ironic deference. Can I offer you a hand, sir? the servant asked, his face in close-up inexpressibly sinister. You look to be a bit under the gun. The false master of the castle refused to comment, grunted an unintelligible negative. In the study to the right of the main hall, there seemed to be a meeting going on, door slightly ajar, insidious murmurs in a variety of tongues swelling the air. Your mother said that under no circumstances was the woman to leave, said the servant. It is difficult to know what to do when one authority countermands the order of another. A hush came over the meeting. A small man in a monocle came to the door. Joining us, Keysinger? he said wittily as if it were the punch line of a joke they shared. His remark was followed by a few raucous laughs from his colleagues. Nicht, the reporter said and continued his journey to the door, bowed by Nora's weight, his back aching. Vas nicht, mein freund? Ze bride is not feeling how you
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say it up to snuff. The speaker had removed his monocle and was studying the reporter with narrowed eyes. - Your color is bad, he said. They exchanged a few more monosyllables of pidgin German, the false Scott-Keysinger edging authoritatively, burden in hand, toward the massive front door. In a moment, the moment extending itself endlessly as subjective experience, he stepped into the night. He wondered how he had gotten so far without discovery. Perhaps they didn't care or were letting him play himself out. The servant in his characteristically insinuating manner offered to get the master of the castle his limousine. We will go for a short drive in the woods, yes? he said. The reporter permitted himself a nod of ambiguous consent. A cry reached them from the near side of the castle, an almost human sound. The servant, who had just started on his errand, froze. What was that? asked the reporter. He got no answer other than a sharp look from the servant who let himself into the castle in a hurry and locked the door. The howl repeated, closer this time, though still out of sight, the occasion for it hidden behind one of the jutting walls. The beast stood on hind legs, was dressed in a gray double-breasted pin-striped suit, and wore tortoise-shell glasses, a fearsome apparition. His fierce howls, as he bounded toward them in the courtyard, caused the windows of the castle to rattle. Grant tried to run carrying Nora over his shoulder but felt his legs give out. Can you walk? he asked her. I have lost the use of my legs, she said. The reporter switched his burden from his right shoulder to his left, decided to ignore the beast, to walk by him as if he imposed no threat or didn't exist. Ignored, the monster whined, seemed less than himself.
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Arrrrr, he grumbled, beating his chest. A great swatch of light rose at the northern end of the castle. The night was dying, the full moon a thin reflection of itself. The beast had an arm over his face, shielding his eyes from the light. Another howl seemed less menacing, more poignant than its predecessor. The beast, stumbling toward them, collapsed in their path. Nora had tears in her eyes. You can put me down, she said. The creature sat glumly like a backward child in a piddle of feces and urine, snarling at flies. The investigative reporter cut off further requests from the burden in his arms with a kiss. Not in front of him, she whispered. It will tear the heart out of him. Indeed, the monster let out a howl of such pathos that the reporter, trained to emotional callousness, felt a pang of profound grief. He needs me, she said. Let me stay with him another week and then I'll come to you. The reporter hurried toward the rental car he had parked just outside the gates. If it wasn't one danger, it was another. The wolf howled like an inconsolable infant, swatting the air impotently with his paws. He's breaking my heart, she said. Although he was not without pity for the debased state of his adversary, Grant's main concern was getting out of the wolfs den alive. He thought that once Nora was out of range of the beast's piteous cry, she would settle down. Grant had gotten her into the car and was going around the other side to open his own door, when Nora threw herself out of her door and began dragging herself along the ground in the direction they had come. Then the beast, also on its belly, turned, groaning, to close the space between them. Grant climbed out of the car, exhausted and furious. Nora, he called after her, his voice rising. He was torn
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between deploring her stubborness and pleading for her forgiveness. Don't leave me, he heard himself say. The beast was moving in his slow, erotic, ineluctable way toward the woman. As the sun rose the beast underwent an extraordinary transformation, his wolf hair seeming to dissolve into yellowish smoke. Nora longed to take the beast's terrible head in her lap and didn't notice as she crawled interminably toward what he had been that he was no longer that. Disappointment waited for her. The transformed figure lifted himself awkwardly from the ground, shook off his evil dreams-his other self never real to him in the daylight-to discover his wife crawling headlong in his direction. It was cold in the early dawn and he shivered, slapping his arms across his chest to get the human blood flowing. A logical man, he reasoned that his wife, waking in distress, had climbed to the window and thrown herself out. The next thing he saw was a familiar figure coming toward them, calling Nora's name. The figure wore a face astonishingly like his own. Such impressions were difficult to reconcile so early in the morning. For the moment he wondered if the other face, the maskface, weren't his own and his were another. In no mood to concern himself with ambiguities, he knocked on the castle door demanding entry. Noone received him. Were they all asleep or drugged? Had there been an insurrection in the castle? Was he no longer what he had been? Scott-Keysinger' turned back to the scene in the courtyard he would have wished to avoid. Nora, being held up by his other self, was staring at him in dismay or disappointment. It may only have been vagueness or dim sight. Don't reproach me, he was thinking of saying. His idea of himself was as irreproachable. I'm leaving you Prinz, Nora said. Prinz said nothing-it was still as ifhe were in a dream-
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but when he saw Nora getting into a Peugeot Sedan with his false self he became insanely jealous. You can't leave me, he shouted after the car. No one leaves me. lt was true what he said. No one, since his father had died without warning, had ever left him. Like most great men he was agonizingly sensitive to slight. In a flash, he perceived his influence in the world collapsing like a row of dominos. A single failure suggested the possibility of more to come. He regretted that he hadn't followed his mother's advice which was to kill the woman Nora outright-slow poison seemed to take forever-and have her replaced by a double. Scott-Keysinger, a master of emotional disguise, let out a triumphant laugh, a few short peals rising to a crazy crescendo. Let them make of it what they would. In his secret heart, he mourned the decline of his greatness. The failure to kill someone you had been feeding poison was an unforgivable mistake. He had compromised himself, and compromised his associates, beyond the penance of regret. After a moment of reflection, he entered the castle by the back door, prepared to do the right thing. Before he strode into the board room, his arrogance in full flower-all eyes on him as he approached the open door-he slipped a bitter pill between his teeth. Gentlemen, he said to the glowering room, I am dead.
7 When Genevieve, after two days' absence, appears in their hotel room in Paris, Joshua is sitting in the bathtub smoking a cigar. He asks offhandedly where she has been. At first she says What? as if the question eludes comprehension, looking at her reflection in the mirror with more generosity than she ordinarily allows that intruder's image. I wasn't anywhere, she says to the delicately ruined face that resembles pictures she has seen of her father as a young man. Do you know what time it is? he asks. The question is asked to hold back the time, to return the day to its beginning. If you're coming out of the bathroom, I'd like to use it, she says. Come here and give us a kiss, huh? Dutifully, she presents her face, turning it away as his mouth approaches hers. We have to be at the airport in three hours, he says. He holds his cigar over his head while they barely miss connection. Does that make it all right? she says, brushing away cigar smoke as if it were spider webs. -Why do you have to smoke those foul cigars? You make the bathroom uninhabitable .... Actually, I don't mind the smell of cigars. Only .... You hate the smell. Only I hate the smell. She laughs without pleasure, lies down on the bed, cries, closes her eyes, smiles at the outsider's view of herself she imagines. She is traveling incognito, she thinks. She notices, though it is not untypical of him, that he is wearing a hat in the bathtub. I've lost my respect for you, Genevieve says. Isn't that
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terrible? I mean, isn't that a terrible thing to say? I mean, I feel that but isn't it terrible to say it? The water in his bath is not as warm as it was, is not as warm as he remembers it. His cigar has gone out, but he continues to suck on it, inhaling the memory of its smoke. The situation reminds her of a novel she is writing about a marriage in which a wife not unlike herself wishes she were not married or were married to someone else. One day she wakes up to discover herself a widow. There's something I have to tell you, she says, but I can't say it until you get out of the tub. Earlier in the day, pacing the room in order to keep going, Joshua happened to glance out the window and noticed Genevieve, or a woman who resembled her, getting out of a cab in a self-absorbed way. It was then he took off his clothes, went into the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. An hour passed and he developed a taste for being alone. Now that she was back he was not concerned, had never been, that she would not return. I've been seeing another man, she said. Seeing? He had never, a man with an eye for metaphor, doubted the power of sight. Is that what you wanted to tell me? he asked. Doesn't it matter? You seem to want it to matter, he said bitterly. They flew back from Paris to New York on the same plane, sitting next to each other as if it were the oddest of coincidences. At the time he had no idea that that's how it would end up. When she confided her infidelity, he imagined that they would go back on different planes or that Genevieve would drive off with her lover in his red Porsche and they would be listening to music, Mozart or Vivaldi, and going very fast and the driver, challenged by an oncoming truck, would lose control of the car on a winding mountain road and there would be an accident fatal to both passengers.
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Another man came into the room, presumably a bellhop, and embraced his wife. It had happened moments after her confession and moments before he had worked himself into a convincing display of outrage. The bellhop will say in his operatic English that he is in the room wrong. Wrong room, you mean. How stupide. Time gets ahead of us. Let's return to Joshua in the bathtub, smoking a Cuban cigar. His wife, who has been away a night and a day, returns breathless and mysterious, wearing her secrets like too much perfume. What can she confess to him that he hasn't already imagined. She has a lover. She is in love with someone else. She wants to leave him. They have no longer anything to say to each other. When I needed you, Genevieve says, you weren't there. You're never there when anyone needs you. When wasn't I there? When? The first time this man I've been seeing kissed me you weren't there, were you? He couldn't answer, ashamed of his absence when she needed him. When that bus driver whose name I forget-I was only nine years old-stuck his hand under my dress, where were you? Again he had no answer. When that creep with the stocking over his face broke into the house and forced me to do it with my hands tied behind me, where were you? No answer as usual, his hat over his face, a bald spot at the back of his head as big as her fist. When that black addict on the MT A pushed my head onto his lap and said suck it white mama, you weren't there. You were never there. His excuses, such as they might be, were choked back. I just mention the first things that come to mind. There were hundreds of other times in my life when you weren't
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there when I really needed you. If you weren't there then, it follows, isn't that so, that you won't be there the next time. He thought to ask for another chance. It's not that you always let me down, she says in a reflective moment. It's just that, how can I say it without making it sound worse than it is, I have disdain for you. Why don't you say something? Come over and give us another kiss, baby, he says, blowing a smokescreen from his relit cigar. Like hell I will. She comes over slyly, tenderly, and offers him the side of her face. Several more occasions of his failure in regard to her come to mind. -There was this dream I had a couple of weeks ago in which I was locked in a burning room and your face was in the window and I was calling to you and you wouldn't come. There must have been times when I let you down too. Do you want to tell me about them? I can't think of any, he says. He gets out of the tub with an enormous erection. In Paris, such was the word-call it an injunction if you will- you do as the Parisians. When she tells him of her assignation with the schizophrenia specialist, the air goes out of him. He shaves, the steam from the bath clouding the mirror, his face ghostly on the other side of the fog. I don't know what to do, she says in a voice louder than normal. I thought you were through with him, he says out of the side of his mouth. Isn't that what you told me? I don't know what to do, she repeats, the phrase acquiring an odd precision in iteration. He's one of the most decent men I ever met. He's really a very decent man. You'd like him if you got to know him. I'll never like him, he says. Try as I may he remains anathema to me. He wants to take care of me, she says. What's that supposed to mean? Does he plan to adopt you?
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It means that he's the kind of man who's there when you need him. Her lines seem to embarrass her and she throws away the script they've been rehearsing only to find herself speechless. The phone rings. She looks at him smugly, her queer smile saying: See. He is there. I have no intention of seeing you again, she says to the ticket agent at Pan Am who has called to verify their reservation. Have you ever noticed, she says when he has put on tie and jacket and combed his thinning silver hair, how matters work themselves out in metaphor?
An hour and twenty-seven minutes later they are boarding Flight 522 to New York, taking their seats like any other couple returning from vacation. Their jet, a Boeing 747, is beginning to taxi toward the runway, turning once and then again, when they notice a hulking figure running in their wake, waving his arms. It is, or seems to be, the itinerant alienist, Dr. Bob as he calls himself. The plane stops and Joshua fears for a moment that the doors are about to open and the alienist come aboard to take his place. Genevieve sits with her hands clasped in her lap, staring straight ahead, impervious to the interruption. It is Joshua's impression that the figure running alongside the plane has some news to deliver. There are words on his lips, sentences, abbreviated paragraphs. Perhaps his invalid wife in Brazil has agreed to a divorce. In a few minutes, three or four, they are in the air, leaving Paris and Genevieve's persistent lover to the past. Joshua has the uncanny feeling that he has read the word "Danger" on the lips of the figure below. Genevieve squeezes his arm, the gesture ambiguous. A swarthy man, Arab perhaps, sitting in the left aisle three rows ahead of Josh and Genevieve, is behaving in a suspicious manner. Genevieve calls Joshua'S attention to
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the man. What do you make of him? she stage whispers. The suspicious figure, forehead beaded with sweat, glances nervously about as if wanting to know where everyone is at every moment. He looks too suspicious, says Joshua. Only a man with the clearest of consciences could behave so badly. One of the stewardesses, her button says I'm Dixie, glides over to the apparent Arab to ask if anything might be done to ease his obviol.ls discomfort. Genevieve imagines the following dialogue. Is there anything the matter, sir? asks Dixie. Can I get you a pillow? The man has a blank look, perhaps understands no English, offers his interrogator an agitated smile. Air, he says after a moment or two of puzzlement. You have to turn the little knob, she says sweetly, adjusting it for him, a pin point of air stinging the flesh above the bridge of his nose. -Is that better? He points to an unmarked brown canvas bag balanced across his lap. - Please to tell pilot to take plane to _ _ __ (the destination is unimaginable). I do not intention to blow up plane but if pilot refuse me, it is something to be done. He hands the stewardess a folded piece of paper and asks her to deliver what is apparently a message to the pilot. Akim is a decent enough man-this will come out lateralthough a hopeless fanatic. An hour out of Paris the 747 subtly shifts its course. No offiCial acknowledgement is made of the change in flight plan. Josh accepts this deception with a cynical pleasure as he accepts all of the self-fulfilling deceptions in his life. This is what Genevieve is thinking. Genevieve is thinking that had her lover been on the plane he would have found a way to defuse the skyjacker. Genevieve leans her head on Joshua's shoulder. - I wish we had made out a will, she says. Who will take care of the children if we're killed? A, voice comes over the loudspeaker announcing that
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they are going through some minor turbulence not to worry. The sign FASTEN SEATBELTS flashes on. The kids will be all right with your mother, Josh says. She may not be ideal but they are fond of her. My mother's all right for short visits-I know she means well-but I don't want her bringing them up any more than I would want your parents bringing them up. Who then? That's just it. There isn't anyone I would trust with them. Is there anyone you would trust? I can't think of anyone. A small suitcase tumbles from an overhead compartment and smashes open. Someone on the plane was apparently a hijacker with a bomb, though the fanatic may not have been the person Joshua and Genevieve assumed. Under duress, even the shrewdest judges of character tend to fall victim to the obvious. The one neither the most suspicious nor the least suspicious was the most likely suspect. Was it the pomaded gigolo with the rubber codpiece who was passing himself off as a member of the French government? Was it the Chinese lingerie salesman with the pointed Shriner shoes and the glass eye? Was it the prosthetic devices salesman from Oshkosh with the thick-lensed glasses? Was it the Pepsi-Cola executive with the American flag pin in his lapel and a faint almost indiscernible Russian accent? Was it the former professional football player, a dignified massively built black down on his luck? Was it the fat Jewish matron from Shaker Heights who had spent the past two years, since the death of her husband, traveling first class through the principalities of Europe and Africa?
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Was it the balding elegant Sicilian don who is coming to America ostensibly as an olive oil importer? There is something on the face of each of these people that invites suspicion. Four hours and fifteen minutes after takeoff Pan Am Flight 522 lands without explanation in Nova Lisboa, Angola. Is that New York? asks the Russian scientist, inventor of the six-stage rocket. He wonders, staring out the window of the 747, if he's suffering from culture shock. Genevieve slides her hand into Joshua's like an untenable secret. A voice that does not sound like the voice of the man who had previously introduced himself as the pilot makes the following announcement. FOR REASONS OUTSIDE OUR CONTROL THERE WILL BE A SHORT INDEFINITE DELAY. PASSENGERS ARE TO REMAIN SEATED. THANK YOU FOR FLYING PAN AM. WE HOPE YOU HAVE ENJOYED THIS PORTION OF YOUR FLIGHT AND SINCERELY REGRET WHAT HAS FRANKLY BEEN OUT OF OUR CONTROL. WHEN WE TAKE OFF AGAIN, WHENEVER THAT MAY BE, THE STEWARDESSES WILL PASS OUT TWO FREE DRINK VOUCHERS TO ADULT PASSENGERS AS A GOODWILL GESTURE. THANK YOU AGAIN FOR FLYING PAN AM. THE TEMPERATURE ON THE GROUND AT NOVA LISBOA IS 109 DEGREES.
The balding Sicilian don says to the English sportsman next to him that it may be necessary to take matters into their own hands. I say, says the other. Jolly good. It is still not certain at whose behest this unscheduled stop of indefinite length has been made. Several passengers exhibit signs of panic running up and down the aisles like gerbils on a treadmill. Machine gun fire blasts the unnatural silence with its unarguable logic.
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The fat Jewish matron from Shaker Heights, singing and sweating to keep up her courage, converts in a wholly unexpected and touching moment to Christianity. A celebrated religious leader, traveling incognito, hears her life's confession. If we get killed, Genevieve whispers, obsessed on this one point, what will happen to the children? Who will take care of them? We've made no provisions. The more reason not to get killed, says Josh. Genevieve is out of patience with wise-ass cracks, is sick and tired of a husband who confronts disaster by making light of it. Had her father been on the plane he would have penetrated the identity of the skyjacker and through sheer bravery, perhaps even at the expense of his life, saved the plane. Which one of you is responsible for this outrage? Genevieve asks, standing on her seat to command attention. Enough is enough. Eight of the passengers-her eyes move like a camera from face to face-evidence guilt in a variety of ways: facial tics, averted eyes, fanatic stares, looks of distraction and madness. A man gets up to go to the can and is waylaid in the aisles. It is of course the suspicious-looking Arab with the canvas bag. A few minutes after his capture, as if a consequence of it, the plane takes off, dodging some misguided ground fire from the Angolan authorities. Genevieve is not a little surprised that the most suspicious-looking of the major suspects is the guilty party and anticipates some further revelation. There is great relief on the 747 which manifests itself in unconstrained weeping. Strangers embrace one another. A cameraderie, virtually unknown on commercial transportation, buoys the mood of the flight. Joshua, not himself, whispers something in Genevieve's ear. Are you crazy? she says, laughing at him.
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Just for a minute, she says slyly. He kisses the lobe of her nearest ear. -Just this one time and I'll never ask again. Absolutely not, she says, her face turning red. If you mention it one more time, I promise you I'll change my seat. The only empty seat on the plane is the one formerly occupied by the skyjacker who, according to rumor, continues to insist that he is an American agent on a secret mIssIon. I don't want to hear about it, says Genevieve, resting her head on his shoulder. Joshua gets up to go to the bathroom, his hard-on preceding him like a maitre d', is gone twenty minutes, finds his wife not in her seat on his belated return. The pilot or co-pilot-how is one to know the difference? -comes out from behind the curtain, weaving slightly as he comes down the aisle, his cap at a jaunty angle, his un praised hand making shadowy benedictions over his flock. How you? he asks one after another. How you? How you, sweetheart? Are you the pilot? Joshua asks. The pilot, if that in fact is who it is, admits to being himself, says with a mellow, slightly drunken insouciance that he is Captain R. H. Tufts. -Am I mistaken in supposing you're Joshua Quartz? I admit to nothing, inquire into the source of the pilot's surprising information. Well, Joshua, says the pilot, I make it my business to know the names of all my passengers. Joshua, God blessed me with a wonderful memory for names. He did, die He? I can't complain, says the pilot, stumbling at some subtle shift in the Hight pattern. -Some days nothing goes right. If you're here, Captain Tufts, who's flying this plane? The 747 lurches in a spasm of doubt, spilling several passengers out of their seats. Belatedly, a F ASTEN SEAT BELTS sign flashes on. Thass what happens, says the insouciant pilot, when
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there's a breakdown of trust in the social order. You got to trust your pilot. If he is not behind the controls of the plane, there's more than likely a reason for it. You'll have to excuse me, Joshua. The pilot pitches forward and collapses face down in the aisle. A doctor examines him and pronounces him unfit to fly. He has been talking all day about his number being up, says one of the stewardesses. This is a clear case of extrasensory perception. Who's flying this plane? I want to know. The question comes to obsess me and I ask it at every opportunity. I forget about Genevieve's mysterious disappearance, give up hope of recovery. There's always someone to take over, says the Wine Steward, an amiable old scut. -It's a tradition with this airline for someone unlikely to step in in an emergency. We've all had our moment or two behind the stick. Yes, but who is behind the stick at this moment? Have some faith, man, says the Steward, moving on. - When I have some hard information I'll get back to you. The man sitting directly in front of me, the dignified prosthetic devices salesman from Oshkosh, turns around to say that he heard that one of the engines is out but that he didn't think there was anything to worry about. - Principle of compensation. One engine, if it has to, can and will do the work of two. Do you know that for a certainty? The salesman laughs good-naturedly, says if I worried every time a flight I was on was in some kind of trouble, they would have planted me long ago. Planes like people are programmed to continue their mission no matter the meddling stupidity of outsiders. It takes a moment for the last part of the sentence-the odd shift in diction and tone-to sink in indelibly. Instinct precedes comprehension. There is a small bomb in the salesman's hand which, in a
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flash of anticipation-:-one never knows what one is capable of until the moment of trial-I wrestle loose. The explosive device falls, seems to float in the air. I reach for it. Two stewardesses come running down the aisle. The left lens of the salesman's thick-lensed glasses has a large crack. Once again disaster is narrowly averted. Everything ought to be all right from here on in, I tell myself, though your absence troubles me. An hour and twenty minutes out of New York, an unprecendented announcement comes over the loudspeaker, requesting passengers with religious backgrounds to pray for the safe landing of the plane. While others pray in a polyphony of tongues, I make a journal entry on the flight, wanting to have a record of that unsettling experience, working the confusion of events into some intelligible pattern, thinking that if I could return to the moment of your loss, I might find you again.
8 Nora, his presumptive widow, came to Francis in a dream and demanded his return. Francis was noncommittal, excoriated her mode of request, said it was a violation of privacy to walk into someone's dreams uninvited. Besides, how did she know he wasn't dead? I can't be in bed with another person, Nora whispered, a man or a woman, opening myself to new and indescribable sensations, without you being there to say no. He assured her that it was a case of mistaken identity, that he had no long distance objections to her erotic excess. Either come back for good or go away, she said. I'm dead to you, Nora, he said cruelly, but she was already gone. The next night (or day), whenever he closed his eyes to sleep, she was back with a new set of complaints.-When we got married, she said, I assumed it was a life sentence. Was that a wrong assumption to make? Think of me as dead, he said. She said in apparent reply that she tended to give everyone, living or dead, the benefit of the doubt. Tell me what I did that was so bad, she said. Francis was exasperated and if she were there in real life might have enumerated twenty-five to thirty grievances. As it was, he said, You made me miserable. Perhaps misery is your true condition, she said. You think you made me happy? I thought maybe you would be happier without me. That made her laugh as he knew it might. There were certain things (reactions to given stimuli) that he could predict about her with ninety-five percent accuracy. A grievance knocked at the door. -You never appreciated
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my jokes, he said with some fervor. How long can one fake amusement, she said, without it beginning to erode the quality of one's life. The first few years of our marriage, admit it, you couldn't clear your throat without it eliciting a laugh from me. It was always the same joke you told with slight variation and you put so much pressure on me to respond that to continue laughing was to risk serious injury to the spirit. Not that you cared. How could he sleep when she interrupted his dreams with false and malicious accusations? - I never put any pressure on you to laugh. To be frank, you were always too gloomy to be funny, she said. Who the hell is Frank, sweetheart, he asked in his Humphrey Bogart imitation. She brought out the worse in him, he thought, the worst jokes. She had to correct him in that misapprehension, she said, in sententious voice. It was he, bringing out the worst in her, that provoked her to bring out the worst in him. -Frank is more of a comedian than you ever were, she said. There's no injury to the spirit to laugh at Frank? he asked. He didn't believe there was an actual Frank, though was willing to go along with the metaphor. On the contrary, she said. His jokes inspirit me. Not true, he shouted, waking himself, suffering momentarily her absence. I'm here, she said on another occasion, because you want me here, the better to complain of the oppression I visit on you. I'll go away, and gladly, the moment you relinquish me. I relinquish you, he said. I relinquish you. I relinquish you. Etcetera etcetera etcetera. Then why wasn't she gone? -Because there is something missing from your life is why. It was true, that much. The pleasure in his new life had begun to recede like a hairline, his own. He missed just a
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little the banal regularity of every day. The old stirrings of ambition-undifferentiated, avaricious, incapable of fulfillment-returned to torment his soul with hopelessness. He had a lust to read The New York Times, to see his name in print, to feel the low grade paper between his fingers. The world, unchangeable while he lived in it, was going on at great speed, he suspected, without him. Something was happening to him, a wholesale change of condition as ifhe were deconvalescing. All the old maladies came to visit, restiveness the first,jealousy not the least nor the last. N ora talked to him of her lovers, seeking his approval of one or the other. He withheld judgments, disliking them all impartially. You see what pressure you put on me by your jealousy? she asked. Do you have any idea what it's like? He whacked himself across the side of the head to drive out her voice. Her most recent lover, she wanted him to know, was a Danish rock star, very big in Scandinavia, trying to make it in the cutthroat New York scene. -He has an expressive temperament, a facile talent and a penchant for being out of phase. He speaks perfect English, though understands only a few words of what he says. Which ones? He knows the word love, she said. And he won't be nineteen until his next birthday. Whichever comes first. What does that mean? Your remarks never make any sense. He turned over on his other side, thinking to leave her behind. When she was gone he slept dreamlessly or without recollection of his dreams. Even when she was silent she was there, watching and waiting, searching out his weaknesses.
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He thought of her as the spirit of restlessness and discord. She could never resist an opportunity to make trouble. You are jealous, she insisted. Jealous of my lovers,jealous of me. He had always had a horror of going too far, of saying the unforgivable, but in his dreams such constraints were pointless. Accusations poured from him in exaggerated profusion. His worst secret opinions of her, all he had never said, were given voice. When she dissolved into tears-he had not expected her to break so easily-he had for a moment, though only for a moment, a sense of terrifying exhilaration. Regret followed and he apologized, perhaps too glibly, for his excesses. I don't have time to listen to that, she muttered, face averted, sniffling, tensed with rage. She had a way of speaking a cliche in a context that reinvented its meaning. When he said something she didn't want to hear she would say, I don't understand what you're saymg. I said I no longer have any claim on you, he said. You're a free person. I don't understand what you're saying. Free in what way? They got into an extended argument on the etymological implications of the word "freedom." You don't know what the word means, she said. You won't even allow me the freedom of my own arguments. All I want is the freedom not to hear you make them. How can I hold you against your will? Tell me that. If you wanted to be free of me, though I don't rate it as a virtue, you would be. Have I ever tried to hold you against your will? He was reminded of something, another conversation or the same one. One night in bed, after refusing him sex, Nora had said,
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I think what we ought to do this summer is to take separate vacations. Separate but equal? he had said or so he remembered it. She said his joke, if that's how it was meant, was in the worst of taste, a bitter thing on the tongue. I'll go to England inJuly, she said, and you stay with the kid, and you go wherever you want to go in August and I'll stay with the kid. He agreed, though with no great pleasure in the idea, merely acquiescence and an unspoken resentment. Instead, a last mintue decision, an unacknowledged reconcilation, they went to the Cape with their friends, Joshua and Genevieve. And Francis, swimming one day in the ocean before a crowd of indifferent spectators, drifted out beyond his depth. The machinations of the tide saved him. He was washed ashore like driftwood on a private cove and taken in by two mysterious, spacey young women, named Charlotte and Emily. The newspapers had reported him drowned and Francis thought, why not? and had taken on a new name and the presumptions of a new life. And then, one night, his wife Nora came to him in a dream and demanded his return. He had refused and continued to refuse, denying her claim on him, although secretly, in some backwater of the brain, he had not altogether given up the idea of return. Francis had no irreversible commitments. He had grown tired of realism, as he saw it, and was in the way of giving the imagined world a fling. The voice of his wife, his real-world wife, visits his ear, exacting retribution. It is a terrible thing to be deserted, she says, even though I'm more at peace with myself in your absence. Widowhood, I've come to discover, is its own reward.
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Francis wishes her gone, but not too far. Affection and irritation seem to be opposing sleeves of the same coat. I'll be home shortly, he says. Leave a light on in the kitchen for me, will you? Who needs you darling? she says, or someone does.
9 Francis S, fourteen months after his presumed death, appears unannounced at the door to his former apartment and is about to ring the bell. He stops himself when he unexpectedly hears a man's voice from the inside. And then, momentarily, the voice of his daughter saying, Do I have to, Daddy? He doesn't listen for the man's answer or listens for it and doesn't hear it, hearing only the clamor of his profound shock. It is in this fashion that Francis learns that Nora has remarried, that his daughter, believing him dead, has given away the title to his paternity. The former bookeditor, aged by regret, turns around and leaves without making his presence known. He will not interfere, much as he might want to, with the normal flow of their lives. Unwilling to admit his disappointment, Francis has a brief fling at alcoholism, moving in dazed profusion from bar to bar on a short trip to oblivion. A young prostitute, new to the oldest calling, takes him to her flat, nurses him through a particularly bad session of delirium tremens, becomes his keeper. When Francis comes to himself he is unable to account for two weeks of time. The anonymous room he is in smells of bad sex, moth balls and lavender. There is blood under his fingernails and a strange buzzing in his ears. He wakes with an overwhelming thirst, lips parched, tongue like some plastic implement. There must be a bottle, he thinks, somewhere in this rat-hole. A one-armed cupie doll on the dresser top winks wickedly at him. He drinks cough medicine, hair conditioner, nail polish, cheap perfume, liquid cleaner. Nothing satisfies. What kind of
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place is it, he wonders, where a thirsty man can't find something satisfying to drink? From the window he can see the blinking neon of an allnight bar, flirting with him like a mirage. Locked in, the indignity of it, he considers throwing himself to freedom through the glass of the window. When Judith Garland returns from work in the morning she finds him pacing the room in a crazed state. Glad to see you're up and around, Judith said. A heartless wretch in his present state, Francis (known to her as Buck) levels her with a punch and goes out to get himself some liquid refreshment. Judith has taken the precaution of emptying his pockets, a theft in his own best interests though not at this point appreciated. This is just a brief interlude in Francis's life, a transient decline and fall. The thing is about transience, it offers the illusion of hanging on forever. To raise money for a drink, Francis takes a job on the Bowery, dusting car windows with an oily rag. It is a position without regulated salary, its earning power dependent on the gratuities of strangers. The job is insufficient to keep a man of Francis's tastes together. He quits after three days and goes back to Judith's one room apartment to make peace with the past. She is fucking ajohn when he comes in, and he sits on the commode, reading the obits in The Daily News waiting for her to finish. After awhile she comes storming into the small bathroom, all icy sex and fire. I told you not to bother me when I'm working, she says. How was I to know you were working at home? You could have called, Buck. There's a phone in this apartment, as you happen to know. Francis sits on the bed, a look of sly charm on his face, while Judith performs her ablutions, cursing over and under her breath.
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Are you still here? she asks, not bothering to look. Let it be on the record that you are asking for trouble. If you are not gone in five minutes, I'll make you sorry your mother ever gave you birth. The above is not Judith's exact dialogue, but a reasonable estimation of it. She is thought to be Spanish spoken. Francis has no intention of staying, has come back merely to say thank you for your trouble and goodbye. His apology alters the picture, begins a new season in their relationship. While looking after him, Judith writes a book about the experience of living with a muchacho bent on self-destruction. The book, written in broken eloquence, finds a publisher who falls in love with its commercial possibilities. There is one problem if not two. The book needs the hand of a strong editor. The particular publishing house that has accepted Judith's manuscript has retired, in a recent austerity move, its last two editors with a more than nodding acquaintance with the English language. The ideal editor for this book, says the firm's vice-president in charge of subsidiary sales, is the late Francis S, whom many of us reviled in his time. Judith comes home from the publisher's lunch and reports the vice-president's story to her lover, who is busy making out a reading list of great books for her. The irony is that she doesn't know, hasn't the first idea, that the man to whom she confides this information is the selfsame Francis S. Holding the list of great books in front of his face as a ruse, Francis sheds a few tears-how can he not?-for the loss of his former self. -What will happen if they don't find an editor? he asks as if making idle conversation. Judith shrugs, making light of her success, and its attendant problems, not wanting to make him feel inferior or outdone. If he feels overwhelmed by her achievement, she has been advised, he might go back on the sauce again. She works to build up his confidence, an arguably
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misguided benevolence, sings his praises at every turn. Her lover can't blow his nose without being admired for talents criminal to hide. Why don't you be my editor? she says, trying to keep his fragile self-image together. I'm sure that you could do as good a job as that other guy. I imagine that that guy you mentioned is really first-rate, he says. You'd be so much better than him, she says, hoping to get him out of his funk. If they knew how good you were, they'd go out of their minds. Francis gets bored with being humored so goes out when Judith is not watching to take the air. Drying out has changed him, has left him with only the threadbare vestiges of a once luxuriant irony. He has, if nothing else, misplaced himself. It is time to move on, thinks Francis-one can imagine him saying it to himself again and again-though he is unable, perhaps unwilling, to make the break. Before he can move on, he decides, he has to do something for Judith, something or other to even the score. To celebrate his decision to leave what has become an unproductive and dependency-conditioned relationship for him, he stops in a bar for a couple of quick ones. He puts the drinks away faster than he can count them. After three scotches, still dead sober, he tries to pick a fight, though he is unable to work his rhetoric into provocation sufficient to stir an adversary from his stool. Walking down the street, he is noticed by a former friend, who recognizes the derelict Francis in some dim unspecific way. Hey, the former friend calls after him, aren't you ... ? Francis continues without looking back, checking in the windows of passing shops for the reflection of his pursuer, only to discover how unrecognizably changed he himself has become. I am who you think I am, he wants to say.
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I don't know how to tell you this, Judith says when he comes in, but while you were gone I fell in love with someone else. These things happen. You don't have to clear out right away, Buck. I just want you to know the score. Who is it? asks Francis, looking around. I'll kill the son of a bitch. The story comes out that Judith's new lover is younger and better looking than Francis, though perhaps with not so fine a mind. Francis resists the disclosure, argues with Judith against the possibility. They have their first fight. Perhaps it is their second. Francis sleeps sitting up on a chair that night, estranged from the complicated pleasures of Judith's bed. He doesn't love Judith (that is, he does and he doesn't), but is drawn to the humiliating experience she has to offer him. Her book comes out, has a six-figure paperback sale, and is bought by the movies. Judith is an instantaneous celebrity, goes on talk shows, makes numerous public appearances. Francis sometimes accompanies her, sometimes stays at home. Judith likes to talk to friends about her problems with Francis. She calls confidantes up at all hours of the nightthose nights that she is not appearing on talk shows-to share her problem with them. He doesn't like my friends, she says to one. He feels they ignore him, which I suppose is true. But he makes himself so uninteresting at parties. He's much more interesting than that. Is he? asks the friend. I didn't know that. Oh he has a good mind, says Judith, when he has a mind to use it. In the meantime, Judith is having a doomed love affair with a one-legged seventeen-year-old heroin addict.
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He has need of me, she says in explanation. She is a woman, she confides, inordinately responsive to the needs of others. Francis can see that his days and nights as Judith's lover are numbered, though resists taking that fateful step out the door. You no longer have necessity of me, she says over breakfast. (Success has made her a trifle incoherent.) I'm proud, Buck, that you're on your very own two feet again. He stands up. -Used to be that I stood on the metatarsi of others. She laughs idiotically. - What a marvelous sense of humor you have, Buck, she says. Her judgments, once tentative, present themselves these days in the voice of unshakeable authority. Francis can feel the thrust of her conversation pushing him out the door. He changes the subject, talks of the weather, the economy, the crisis in Rhodesia, the implication of tannin in California cabernets, divorce in America, the new German cinema, the decline of officiating skills in professional basketball, the naval coefficient in Florida oranges, the function of story in the non-narrative novel. What a wealth of information you have, Buck, she says. I've learned so much from you in a comparatively short time. Compared to what? he asks. She has no answer to that, laughing gayly before returning to high seriousness, says she wants nothing more than total honesty between them. In total honesty, says Judith, I believe I have learned alII can from you and the time has come to go our separate ways. Francis says that Judith's total honesty requires nothing less in return. He has, difficult as it is to let out, gotten bored with her simpering pretension and unimaginative rutting, has stayed with her out of gratitude and occasional lust. He will leave her in a couple of days, no worry, as soon he can get himself together.
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Judith can see that it is his pride talking, though she has never been one to take insult lightly. - Fuck off, creep, she says with ladylike iciness. This is my dreamy pied-a-terre and I want your creepy ass out pronto. Her change of tone, the flaking off of her thin veneer, breaks Francis up. He can't stop laughing, rolls on the floor, his hilarity like a fit. Fantasies of murder and mutilation occupy an idle heart. Judith prowls the kitchen area in search of a suitable weapon, returns to him with a kick and a word or two of advice. "Pride goeth before a fall," she announces. You're too much, Judith, he says, too weak from laughing to get to his feet. You contemptible creature, she says, you albatross, you maric6n, you communist, you ratfink, you motherfucker. He kisses her shoe to ingratiate himself, but he can see that he has lost the power to charm. She taps her foot impatiently, no longer moved by his erotic devotion. Stop playing the dog, she says. Have a little dignity, craphead. His tongue moves up her leg like a snake or an infectious rash. Judith pretends boredom. -Ah, she allows. Francis leaves without looking back, without so much as a single heartrending glance behind. -Promise me you won't take your life, she calls after him. It goes with me, he says, though not so she can hear him. When Judith discovers that he is irrevocably gone she is not without misgivings. She puts her face to the wall and has a good cry-five or six minutes of unadulterated grief-before starting on her second book. Judith can do no wrong. Not only is her second book a smash, but as a sidelight it is discovered that· she has a marvelous public speaking voice, a voice that might speak profitably to large audiences on radio and television. Her odd, recondite information and winning personality make her the hit of the late-night talk show circuit. In a matter of months, she becomes, in certain parts of the country, a
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household word. There is even talk of an exclusive interview with the President, who is said to be an admirer of Judith's work. On thing you can say about Judith: her success is the product of hard work. On top of her television appearances and her book writing, she does a little late night hookering for old times' sake, a woman with a gettingthrough-the-dark-night-of-the-soul problem. It is a full life, though she misses Francis in her way, thinks about him whenever she has time to think. I wonder who Buck is kissing now, she often wonders. Can he manage without me? Does he dare? Although on the rise, her upward mobility something to marvel at, Judith does not forget her origins or her old friends. A hooker acquaintance comes by for some advice or to use her douche, she treats her as she would the Queen of England come on a similar errand. The only notable change in her life style, apart from moving to a high rent district, is that she has to get an unlisted number to protect her from obscene calls. Almost every night between 2 and 3 A.M. she gets a call from a breather. Judith sees it as the price of fame and tells the story on herself on talk shows, where live audiences tend to cheer her imitation of her awful admirer. In real life, however, it is no laughing matter. The calls tend to undermine an otherwise indomitable spirit. She hires a bodyguard to answer the phone, an insinuating, silent English type named Grahame ForsyteSage, a former secret service agent with a license to kill, selecting him from a neatly typed letter offering his services for a pittance. There is something indefinably creepy about Grahame, though he seems dedicated to his job. Grahame logs in the calls, marking their exact time and duration, and makes daily reports in a world-weary accent that cannot be learned overnight. His style, as Judith
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reports to her friends, is super-classy. She calls him 'Harry' not so much because he reminds her of a Harry, but out of one of those little whims that is characteristically Judith. Besides receiving obscene phone calls for her, Harry cooks her an occasional meal and keeps the apartment shipshape. He makes himself, this figure of servile demeanor and presumptive authority, an addictive necessity in her life. She tends to say at the least opportune occasion, I just don't know how I'd manage without Harry. One day she discovers that Harry has been stealing her jewels, one at a time, and selling them for considerably less than their value. It is hard to continue living with a man (in your employ) who systematically undervalues your jewels. Harry's seeming faithlessness disillusions her with the entire servant class. Judith reluctantly confronts Harry with the indisputable evidence and gives him two weeks notice. Harry presents himself as a wronged man, framed by circumstance and unseen enemies, seems in fact so outraged and innocent that Judith, who could swear she had the goods on him, begins to distrust her own sanity. He will not be bought off by unfelt apologies, insists on leaving on the instant, severing all ties between them. The least he can do before he goes, says Judith, is accept a letter of recommendation she has written for him, focusing on his good qualities, ignoring the bad. Harry will take nothing from her. So Harry, all shabby gentility and smarmy self-respect, goes his way. Judith's household falls into disarray. Obscene phone calls come at all hours of the night without regard to ordinary decencies of schedule. There is no one about to make her lunch or to tell her what talk show she is appearing on that day. Although not a religious woman, Judith wanders into a neighborhood church and prays for Harry's return. What
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she needs, she realizes, what she has perhaps always needed, is not a lover or a husband but a good and devoted servant. Her prayers are not answered, not right away. She wonders if what the problem is is that she's forgotten how to pray, has lost her relationship with the deity. She remembers reading somewhere that the rich and powerful sometimes miss the boat with the Lord. A few nights after Harry's departure, the breather speaks to Judith on the phone for the first time. YOUR LIFE ISN'T WORTH TWO CENTS, he whispers in an awful VOIce.
What's that supposed to mean? she asks, but he doesn't stay to answer. Now she is really scared. She calls the police and asks for protection. Well, they've all seen her on TV telling funny stories about her calls and are unable to take her cry for help as anything more than a thinly veiled publicity device. They advise her not to worry (ha ha) and to change her number. People who threaten on the phone, says the sergeant in charge of her case, almost never go any further than threat. If an assailant breaks in, however, she should not hesitate to call again. If I'm killed, she says, you'll be the first to hear. The police, like everyone else, appreciate a woman who is not afraid to speak her mind. Who could possibly want to kill her? She goes through the pages of her address book, looking in vain for a suspect she might hang her suspicion on. An internal logic presents itself: the one she would like to kill is the one who wants to kill her. She meets her principal suspect (the first of several significant coincidences) on a street corner in front of Bloomingdale's, disguised as a Santa Claus. It pains her to see him so out of character. Judith is laden with packages at the time, an ambitious holiday shopper, tending to buy more than she has occasion
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to give away. Can we go somewhere and talk? she asks him. Where do you want to go? The question, innocent in itself, engenders suspicion. When she confides in Francis (for that's who it is) her problem with anonymous callers and threats on her life, she studies his face for a telltale sign. His eyes shift, she notices, when you try to pin them down. Judith offers Francis a job as her bodyguard which Francis predictably refuses. And then she says straight out so that there can be no mistaking her intent, Was it you? Uudith has never been one to avoid the direct question.) The intractable necessities of character divide them. Francis answers her accusation with a semblance of his former irony, says perhaps it is Judith herself who is making the calls. Judith wants to trust that he is innocent, though it is not in her nature to trust him. She is a woman devoted to the messages of her intuition. - If it is you, she says, I want you to know I understand and forgive. He jingles his bell and says, Merry Christmas. When Judith returns home there is someone waiting for her in her new luxury apartment. It is Grahame-the man she calls Harry. - You've come back to me, she says, willing for the moment to overlook the unorthodox mode of his return. He says nothing, merely smiles as if posing for a photograph. It strikes her that if he employed that smile more often, he might have gone right to the top of his chosen profession. -How damn lovely to see you, she says (or wants to say) when Grahame clicks something on in his coat pocket and a familiar voice, trapped in there, whispers to her. YOU'VE GOT SOME SINS TO ANSWER FOR, WHORE, it says. What are you saying, Harry? (She laughs with disbelief.) The name is not Harry, says her visitor in his unrecorded
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voice, though I've always been free and easy with my identity. The other voice interrupts, whispering, YOU THINK YOU CAN ESCAPE ME, HARLOT. THERE IS NO ESCAPE. I KNOW EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE AT EVERY MOMENT OF THE DAY AND NIGHT. I'M GOING TO DO YOU, CUNT. Harry, he's here, she says, the caller. He's in the room with us. YOU'RE GOING TO ANSWER FOR YOUR SINS, SLUT, the voice in the pocket whispers, breathing hard. Grahame himself says nothing, puts on a pair of black vinyl gloves. Judith, beginning to comprehend the danger, offers Harry, or Grahame ifhe insists, anything of hers he wants. First I want you to sign this declaration of suicide, he says, holding out a neatly typed letter (on her private stationery), which she reluctantly accepts. When she unfolds the sheet she finds that she is unable to focus, the words written in smoke. -I'll have to get my reading glasses, she says. Just sign, he says. Reading it will not improve your mind. He gives her his thick orange fountain pen and points to the dotted line designated for her signature. I'd rather use my own, she says, if you don't mind. It turns out of course that he does mind and he refuses her access to her black satin purse. I've always wanted to get into that purse, he says, removing the delicate hand gun she keeps there for emergenCIes. Judith delays signing, insists the pen has no ink, then as if by accident, spurts the black fluid in his eyes. I was just kidding, she says when she sees how angry it makes him, slipping around him, looking for a way out. - If you had a better opinion of yourself, Harry-I mean, Grahame-you wouldn't need to threaten the lives of people who never did you no harm. Grahame has been chasing her around the room,
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knocking chairs and lamps and vanity tables from between them when Judith makes the preceding observation. Her perception seems to occasion a change of heart, something only perceptible to the eye of a trained observer. Her assailant becomes contemplative, achieves a moment of small dignity. Judith works him over with compliments (You could have been someone, she says. You could still be if you gave it a chance.) while fleeing his pursuit. When he catches her they embrace, Judith treating him as she would one of the johns of her former life. The doorbell rings, changing the weather in the room. Grahame panics, claps a vinyl-gloved hand over Judith's mouth, warning her that if she makes a sound she can kiss her life goodbye. After the sixth or seventh ring, there is silence. Judith, struggling for breath, inadvertantly bumps her assailant's pocket, activating the tape recorder. YOU'RE ITCHING FOR IT, HARLOT, the eerie voice whispers. He clicks off the voice, then live, as it were, does a perfect imitation of the voice on the tape, her mysterious caller. -Judgment day is at hand, hooker. There is no longer the slightest shred of doubt as to the identity of her obscene caller. This time when she tries to talk her way out of it, he ties her hands behind her and stuff's a dish towel in her mouth. Do you want to know why I did it? he says before strangling her with the orange sash of her new chintz drapes. She grunts her assent, time the only friend at hand. Grahame tells her his pathetic story. Since earliest memory, he has been fatally attracted to violence as some are to cars and others to money. It is the kind of predilection that can earn a man a decent living in government service if he follows orders and disposes only of the people they want no more of. That isn't the whole story about him. He is also an idealist, committed to righting the wrongs of the world, particularly when those wrongs have no other
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spokesman. I think of myself as a modern day Robin Hood, he says. His limited understanding of himself brings tears to Judith's eyes. You need help, she wants to tell him. He stalks the room, spilling out his story, working himself into a condition from which there is no turning back. She nods with false sympathy, but he is beyond appeal. Abruptly, he is on top of her, the sash (a knot at its center) around her neck. He is grinning madly like a death's head. She is moments from death when Francis, a local policeman in tow, climbs through the skylight to save her. The saving of Judith's life redeems Francis, despite his unconscious identification with the other. How did you know he was here? Judith asks later, after the policeman and Grahame are gone. I had once read something in manuscript with a similar plot, he says. It was a spy novel written by a Grahame F orsyte-Sage. When you told me your story the coincidence struck me. I followed you here and when I heard your cries for help I got the policeman and we broke in. That's odd, says Judith. I never had the opportunity to cry for help. You must have heard the screams of someone else, Buck. He is about to leave when Judith calls him back for one last go at love, something to remember her by. When he inclines toward her-he is already in his own heart inclined toward reconciliation with his former lifeJudith screams. Screams. It is what he remembers of his time with her.
10 I vowed to myself that if I survived this flight, I would never get into an airplane again. It was not so much the prospect of disaster that terrified me, but more particularly that no one on the plane was in charge. The drunken pilot stumbling up and down the aisles, blessing passengers as though he were some kind of priest. The announcement over the loudspeaker asking us to pray for a safe landing. Those seemed calamitous omens. And then there is the mystery of Genevieve's disappearance. I had gone to the bathroom and come back to find her missing. It was the way she was that year. Whenever the word sex came up she tended to be out of the country. I ask a passing stewardess if she has seen my wife, describing Genevieve as memory allows. The stewardess, whose name tag reads Dixie, says he is under the impression that I am flying alone, has no recollection of a woman in the seat next to me. Your absence takes on the aspect of a conspiracy. The stewardess seats herself without invitation in what had been Genevieve's seat. I ask Dixie if fraternizing with a passenger isn't against the rules. I never fraternize, she says. And my name isn't really Dixie. The badges got mixed up this morning and Dixie was the only one left. Someone took my name on another flight. My real name is Dorothy, but I've been called a lot of things in my day. I think my story would interest you. Her excessive attention makes me uneasy. -Don't you have other passengers to look after? I ask. It is as if she were protecting me from bad news. This airline gives you super-total freedom in the
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performance of your job, she says. I'm a service-oriented person. You need me at the moment, that's why I'm with you. When I ask if she would help me find Genevieve, she cheerfully agrees though continues to do nothing. Where would you look for a missing woman on this plane? I ask. She had been an actress in adult films, Dorothy tells me, patting my hand sympathetically. (I look up and down the aisle for traces of you.) Her name was Dody then. Dody Lovemoor. And she played ingenues in adult flies, the sweet young thing who was initiated into vice by the older couple. They would tie me to the bed, she says, that kind of thing and then, you know, do their worst. At the end I would act like I was really getting off on it. That was before I went to Stewardess school. They appreciate, you know, some theatrical training in their girls. She smiles theatrically. I can see where acting training would come in handy for a stewardess, I say. Look mister, she says, it so happens that I am absolutely sincere. A sincere smile is offered in evidence of her claim. -Never in my heart did I speak falsely. It's possible, isn't it, that Genevieve fainted in one of those bathroom cubicles, I say. If I've learned one thing in this business, says my personal stewardess, it's not to overlook the obvious. I suggest that we search the plane, each starting at opposite ends. Didn't I say I would, she says. You have no faith, mister, in what anyone tells you. She continues to sit, hands clasped in her lap. Is there something I ought to know? I ask. My companion looks at me with narrowed eyes. - That's a thorny question, she says. I'd have to know you a lot better than I do to answer it. I get to my feet, hoping she'll follow my example. - Why
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don't we check the bathrooms first, I say. Don't expect too much, she says, waving as I walk down the aisle. Four of the six bathrooms in the coach section are occupied. I check out the other two and can find nothing out of the ordinary, though in one a sanitary napkin has clogged the disposal unit. I wait for the other toilets to empty. There is a turnover in two of them within five minutes of my vigil, an old man coming out of one and a girl of nine from the other. That leaves two booths unaccounted for. After about ten minutes, the pilot comes out of one, his head tilted at a jaunty angle. It's all yours, Joshua, he says. Have to get up front and show them how to bring this big bird to terra firma. That kind of remark, even in jest, doesn't calm one's fears. And the plane appears to be flying at a slight though conspicuous tilt to the right. Everyone, seated or standing, is listing at a thirty degree angle. An announcement on the loudspeaker indicates a run of rough weather. Passengers are requested to return to their seats. I whisper Genevieve's name into the transom of the still occupied toilet. An unintelligible sound comes back through the door like an echo. The door unlatches, folds open. The plane makes an abrupt turn before I can see who it is, throwing me into the booth. A woman catches me, though perhaps she has no real choice. The tilt of the plane locking us together. I think at first that it is you. The woman reaches over my shoulder to lock the door. There is hardly room for the two of us to stand without some part of us touching. I apologize for the space my body occupIes. There is something familiar about her that I am at a loss to place. Our enforced proximity makes normal perspective difficult. I need more distance than the cubicle allows to see
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her clearly. The plane swerves unexpectedly, a frightening jolt, and I catch her or she me. Our mouths brush and recoil, neither taking responsibility. She is a stowaway, I gather. -Have you been here the whole trip? I ask. There is no place for words to go. They sold me Standing Room, she says. The flight had been oversubscribed. She is a tallish woman, almost my height, big-hipped with prematurely gray hair. Such is the impression she gives either inadvertently or by intention. After a point, to avoid spilling into each other each time the plane lurches, we stand with our arms around the other, hugging without insistence. It's not the truth, she says. I'm a friend of the pilot, a former friend fallen from his regard for reasons best known to himself. I have the feeling I know you from some place, I say, our circumstantial intimacy persuasive in its own right. She leans away from the embrace, frees herself by untying my arms from behind her back. Yes, she says, nodding to herself, this is the way I expected you to be. The oddness of her remark one understands as a consequence of long hours of emotional deprivation. I had no expectations, I say, thrown against her by the next convulsion of the plane. I used to wear glasses, she says, so that when I took them off men would be surprised at my beauty. Those days are gone. Terror has always had its erotic edges for me. My erection keeps her at its own arm's length. My companion is discreet, declines comment on the obvious. You get used to being alone, she says. When she moves away, turning as if to go (though where can she go?), I miss her presence, feel the severity of its loss. An unwieldy intimacy has grown between us, though I don't know her name or, if I do, keep away from that
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knowledge. I have a blurred recollection of her taking down her hair and removing her glasses. Let me cite familiarities. Her nose, for one. Fleshy in the wings. Delicate in the point. Falling slightly on the left side. Rising imperceptibly on the right, a surprising, deceptively immodest nose. The thin red line of her mouth. Her small perfect teeth. The sullen charm of her personality. Roughly, she has half a dozen familiar aspects. An announcement comes over the loudspeaker. We will circle Kennedy in a controlled pattern, says the pilot, until the traffic controller's strike is settled or 1 get my hands back on the controls. My girl friend insists on flying this bird and she's a hard woman to refuse. That man will say anything, says my companion. We are pressed together, conforming to the space of the cubicle. While trying to remove my jacket, I feel my elbow spike her cheek. My apology is insufficient. She blames herself for getting in the way. She presses her wet face against my cheek as the plane circles the airport in random pattern. Something in our going around in aimless circles recalls her identity to me. In the old days I could never get to first base with you, I say. No one could, she says, or almost no one. I was a closed door when you knew me. I was waiting for my prince to come. And when he came you didn't recognize him. She shakes her head. -He never came. Not until now? He never came. He was not interested in women. As often happens between strangers, we are talking about parallel realities. We might not survive, I say. Let's not stand on ceremony. A hard prick tends to bring out the worst in me, sentimentality and cliche.
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She counsels patience. The plane loses altitude abruptly, lifting us off the ground to embrace like demons in air. I am obsessive about making contact, want to become an immutable figure in the mythology of her life. The shifting of the jet, as it makes its approach to the airport, hurls us from one end of the small cubicle to the other, back and forth. You're so persistent, she says as I fall against her for the third or fourth time. Nothing discourages you, does it? I have to warn you: my heart may not be in it. I don't want her to do anything at which her heart demurs, I say. Then we're in accord, she says. But what have we agreed on? The jet is sinking fast or such is the impression it gives. If the opportunity is lost, it will never be recaptured. What are you waiting for? my companion whispers. My ears are stopped so I can't be sure that I haven't imagined her dialogue. -What did you say? I ask. It doesn't matter, she shouts. Deprived of language, we revert to gesture, compound failed comprehension. Sex is perfunctory although exotic, enlived by a sense of impending crash. I arrive as the wheels touch. The scream of the plane in my ears. Are you satisfied now? my companion asks, averting her eyes. At least it gives us something real to despair of. Some flight attendant (it isn't the pilot this time) announces the temperature in downtown New York, asks us to stay in our seats until all motion is spent, invites us to fly again with Pan Am on some other occasion. Genevieve is in her seat reading a magazine called GROUND AND FLIGHT when I make my uneventful return. Oh, it's you, she says without looking up. You missed all the excitement.
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I've been looking for you, I say. Where have you been? An odd thing happened, she says. I got to talking to the pilot who was in a state of emotional collapse and he asked me if I would help him fly the plane. It was an emergency, so I said I would if he would show me how it was done. He was extremely patient and accommodating. I was frightened at first but after awhile when I mastered the technique it was a fantastic experience. What about you? I make my confession, recount the episode in the bathroom with only minor changes, offering neither extenuating circumstances in my behalf nor apology. Genevieve yawns, looks up over her magazine. -That's interesting, she says. I am glad that we are reunited, though am unable to say so. Our exchange of information has no weight in each other's life.
11 GENEVIEVE WRITES IN HER JOURNAL: I have trouble in the morning distinguishing what is in the novel-the one I have almost no time to write-and what is happening in the real world. The confusion has something to do with the relative intensities (or densities or immensities) of imagination vs. reality. Or perhaps there is no confusion. What is really happening? What is really happening is the novel I am writing or the fact that I am writing down something (connections of words) that purports to be a novel. What is not written down is without certification. It may be that what I am writing is an imaginary novel. Joshua, grayer than in real life, takes out his penis at the window and waves it around like a flag. (Whose story is this anyway?) I call to him to get away from the window. That's private, I remind him. You should not make a public display at the window. He ignores me, goes on waving his penis as though he were twirling a baton. Gnome-like women peer through windows from across the way, lecherous smiles pasted on the glass. I am so disgusted with Josh I say ifhe doesn't get away from the window I will get a scissors and cut off his beard. That the central character of my novel is a widow disturbs Joshua. He jokes about it at every opportunity. He says nothing happens in my novel except for the death of a husband which has already happened. Still he claims to admire the little I've let him see with a certain (perhaps I'm being unfair) self-satisfying generosity. His claims for its are excessive, yet insufficient.
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I leave things around for him to discover, uncharacteristic material, dreams and jottings, which will satisfy his curiosity with false revelations. How far wrong he goes is dependent on how much faith he puts in false information. My heroine, the way I see it, wants to be in full control. Fool control. Fool cunt-roll. Paradoxically (perhaps it is only carelessness) she has let her driver's license lapse. She has a daughter who looks almost exactly like her and who almost never talks. You can talk to me, she says to the daughter. I was somewhat like you as a child. The daughter nods. The story so far. Heroine, whom I'll call N, recently widowed, is tormented by unpleasantly graphic sexual fantasies, at war with the unbidden imagination. She has several lovers, of which one or two are perhaps real. The first on the scene is a sympathetic older man who runs a newspaper kiosk. He is not, as no one is, what he seems, though he is not enough else to satisfy for long. He is gentle and sad and fatherly (also motherly) and is a sweet man with a wisecrack, a stand-up comic of the old school. His children are grown; he has been a widower for ten years. The newsstand is his only means of making a living, though he has some savings in the bank (considerably more than one might expect) and plays the horses occasionally with some success. He is also a collector of rare books. On the way to the city, N picks up a Village Voice and has nothing smaller than a twenty to give the attendant. I'm not General Motors, he says. This ain't Detroit, sweetheart. It's the smallest bill I have, she says, giving him her helpless hapless look. They won't cash it on the subway, will they? Who hired you to put me out of business? he asks. Second lover is a former therapist, her former therapist, a specialist in traumatic schizophrenia. Third lover is as different from first two as night from day. He is a light-skinned black man, bisexual-more
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interested, one guesses, in men than women-who works as a dealer in an art gallery. The occasion of their first meeting (at the opening of a one-woman show by some friend) has faded from recollection. Fourth is a cab driver, obscure part Cree, who preceives himself-he is 23, 24 years old-as a latter-day Indian warrior. You're lucky, white woman, I don't scalp you when I'm through, he says as ajoke. Two or three of these lovers are imaginary, though the heroine is not sure which two or three or why she should take on such unappealing imaginary lovers. Is the imagination's choice larger or smaller than reality's? The character's confusion of imaginary and real is not symptomatic of illness, but is a metaphor of condition. When she wakes each morning she asks herself: Where have I been? Have I been lost all this time? Such lucky escape from the black hole of absence burdens the day. On Tuesdays and Fridays I call my parents. I do it so we can keep track of each other. So that my existence will reflect in someone else's eyes. I ask Livvy her eight times table at breakfast. She cries when an answer eludes her. It may be that I have no child and have this entire apartment to myself. The apartment is not as big as I like to think it is. I will not let any of my lovers, no matter my affection for him, no matter his persistence, spend the night here. Too long I've waited to be by myself. The phone wakes me-it is about midnight-and I let it ring, trying to figure out who it might be. Emergency, I tell myself and pick up the phone, say-Yes? Is it you? a male voice asks. Who is this please? You are too suspicious, says the deep, vaguely foreign voice. If you do not know me does not mean,that you will
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not be pleased at my acquaintance. I am predisposed to hang up, though hold on out of inertia and small curiosity. -Who gave you my number and what do you want? He mentions the name of a woman I know slightly, a friend of a friend, active in political circles. We had at one time shared confidences. She says, he says with no apparent irony, that we were meant for each other. That's an odd thing for her to say, I say, close to slamming the phone down, thinking perhaps it's a dream after all. - What do you think she means by it? If I told you over the phone, he says, you would not be prepared to believe. I suggest we arrange a meeting. I don't think so, I say. I don't even know who you are. You will see what I am when we meet, he says. Why put the end of the story ahead of the beginning? I agree to meet him for a drink, though can't imagine why (my life is fully furnished) once he is off the phone. The man she meets the following night is descended from an arcane race of Eastern Europeans that partake of human blood. He is disarmingly frank about his nature. I am vampire, he says. Not your movie monster with his vile blood lusts. Just a man about town with highly refined tastes. He must be kidding, N thinks, and even so, it does not amuse her. She thinks him effete and humorless. He escorts her home, kissing her hand at the door, biting gently into the thumb as a remembrance before fading like some bat into the night. Her hand tingles. She feels faint and longs, forgetting her antipathy and better judgment, for his return. It is the most delicate lovemaking she has had in years. Interest in her other lovers falls off, as does her appetite for food and pleasure, the ordinary needs of human condition. She becomes easily distracted and sucks her thumb
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when her newsdealer friend comes to visit. What tastes so good about your thumb that you need to suck it? he asks. Lethargy embraces her. She yawns politely. Tired of listening to stories of his Jewish childhood in Coney Island, she closes her eyes, dozes. Is there a message there for me? he asks. Or is this the part where you came in? Something like that, she says. His departure (what could she have seen in such an elderly man?) leaves no open space or illusion of one. When the old man is gone she is unable to remember a single evocative detail concerning him. One disemburdening engenders another. She drops her therapist, offering him what she assumes is an untenable ultimatum: herself or his wife, one or the other. He will call back, he says, when he is free. A week passes. N sits by the princess phone, waiting for it to ring, emptied of herself. Why does he take so long to call her? He is a dilettante, she thinks, and it is an honor to be singled out by him. Her group warns against such a man. A bloodsucker is a bloodsucker, they tell her. He'll ruin your life. It is beyond ruin, she says, sighing. I want some fun for once. Is there anything wrong with wanting to please myself? When she no longer expects him to call he does. (Is he some kind of Zen master? she wonders.) Do you want to see me again? he asks. No introduction or explanation. Merely the question bluntly put. I don't know, she says. Where have you been the past two weeks? Why haven't you called before? He laughs unpleasantly. - I have been employed elsewhere. She is frozen in her stance of outrage. - You may have lost your chance, she whispers. The conversation is all wrong. He refuses to apologize
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for his neglect or even to offer acceptable excuses. She will not see him right away, she decides. Her pride has its terms. I am most afraid of the creatures of my imagination, she writes in a notebook. His manner is languorous and faintly ironic, his guile worn on his sleeve. N tries to keep the spilled secret of her disadvantage to herself, feigns indifference. N is waiting with silky self-possession when he arrives to meet her (in front of the World Trade Center? at the fountain at Lincoln Center? at the entrance to the Russian Tea Room?). Although a warm night, he is wearing a heavy black cape with red silk lining. A magician's cape, she thinks. His manners are impeccable, though slightly out of phase, like a 45 disk played at 33. They have a drink at a cafe (he orders a Bloody Mary?), then they go to a Swiss movie called "The Invitation." She anticipates his advance, full of strategy for deflecting it. One time he leans over to whisper in her ear and she can feel his breath on her neck. His overweaning patience unstrings her false calm. After the movie, she invites him to her apartment to show him her collection of 19th century English fiction. She wonders if he sleeps in a coffin during the day or if that's some kind of old wives' tale. Why don't I open a bottle of white wine, she says at one point, made nervous by his staring silences. She cuts her finger, trying to remove the plastic binding around the cork with a steak knife. (How uncharacteristic this awkwardness.) The sight of her blood, or is it human concern, bring him to her side. He takes the wounded hand in his hand, his wolf eyes unnaturally bright. It is only a finger, she thinks, feeling faint. She remembers (could it be a dream?) him holding her wounded finger to his lips. She is not as weak the next morning as she might expect, her skin full of heightened color. Her energy level is
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unnaturally high. She cleans the apartment, searching as she does for some token from him, some veiled message. He comes and goes in her life like smoke, leaving only profound and indelible traces. I've learned to separate sex and love, to demystify their traditional connection, N writes in her journal. Why shouldn't a woman be able to take her pleasure the way men do? Three days pass before N sees him again. Where have they gone? One night, two minutes before midnight, he knocks at her door without prior announcement. May I come in? It's late, she says with token conviction. He holds his cape around her when they kiss. An incisor gently nicks her lip. The phone interrupts them. It is Arthur, her young cabdriver. He wants to come over in ten minutes to share one of the most important discoveries of his life. It will have to wait until tomorrow, she says. I'm really out on my feet. Don't fuck me over, Norma, he says. I need to talk now, babe. C'mon, I won't stay long. Someone's here. Who? Get rid of who it is, huh? She laughs at his characteristic self-regard. -What I'm doing, Arthur, is getting rid of you. She can feel him sulk on the other end, momentarily charmed by him. Look, babe, he says, this is the voice of desperation calling. You got to have faith in that I'm in some kind of need. What is it, Arthur? I need to talk person-to-person, love. You can't come over, Arthur, and that's final. When he hangs up on her she sighs with relief, unable to remember the times (the year past permanently revised) when she ached to see him. She returns to her visitor and shrugs her complicated regrets.
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His world-weariness disheartens her. He has only the patina of small talk, a rehearsed deadening charm. Would he were worse. He takes his dram of blood-tonight from her neck for the first time-and hastens away into the waning night, the shadows of retribution in pursuit. You don't have to feel guilty about it, she says to him. I'm a consenting partner. It's as much my choice what we do as yours. He laughs his feral laugh, a trapped uncomprehending look on his knowing face. - I am not like everyone else, he says, fleeing some invisible pursuer, his ancient smile like something etched in metal. The next time they're together (he likes, he says, the old world ambience of her apartment) she asks him ifthere are any other forms of lovemaking that please him. Ah, he says, raising the lid of one of his burning eyes. What may 1 ask do you have in mind? N is a little irritated with the question, which she finds not so much indelicate as a trifle stupid. She is embarrassed to say what comes to mind, afraid of his disapproval-there is something prudish in his decadent aspect-or there is nothing to say, her desires without specification. He bows and kisses her hand in his courtly way. She offers him her neck to kiss, lifting her hair as he bends over in his languorous way to take his midnight cordial. He leaves her-she sees it as his insidious advantageitching with dissatisfaction. The next day when her young cabdriver friend drops over for lunch, N invites him to bed. Or makes it obvious that she is not unwilling? Arthur is wary, tends to devalue the unearned. -You really want to fuck, he asks her, or are you just testing my reflexes. Really want to fuck, she says. They never get past the entrance to her bedroom. - What
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are those odd marks on your neck? he wants to know. She feels them lovingly with the tips of her fingers, surprised to discover them. Bites, she says. Uh huh, he says, taking her by the shoulder for a closer look. -There's more here than meets the eye. You drugstore Indian, she says and pushes him away. Don't be a wisenheimer, he says. I'm looking for your own good. I used to read medical books when I was a kid. I thought you had come to tell me of some shattering self-discovery you had made. He can't keep his eyes off her marks, is obsessive about explaining them, stares at them through the lattice work of her hair. You got them on any other part of your body, he asks. I'll tell you why I ask. It could be a disease you have, something rare and infectious, or even an allergy. Maybe I'm allergic to you, Arthur. He laughs far more than this remark warrants, devoted to her flippancies. Look I've got a friend that did three years of medical school before moving into the counter culture. I'd like him to take a look at your neck. This is for your own good, Norma. Now, let's fuck. She has had enough of his authoritative ignorance for one morning, and with uncharacteristic decisiveness requests his absence. I don't know if I want to buzz off, he says. And frankly, I don't know if you want me to either. Arthur, she says, you're infuriating. Do you know that? When I say I want you to leave, it means I want you to leave. He chases her around the apartment, threatening mock violence, calling out to her in a variety of invented voices. His charm has never been so easy to resist, seems to unravel before her eyes like a sweater she once made for her husband. Before he leaves-for hours he hangs on like an occupying army-he warns her that she is making the
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mistake of her life. Later that day, more contrivance than coincidence, more intuition than contrivance, more happenstance than intuition, more coincidence than happenstance, she meets her black lover at the private opening (by invitation only) of a museum show. Why haven't you made II?-Y phone ring? he asks, taking her aside, holding her hand in both of his. -Where have you been hanging out, stranger? He smells of incense and some smokey men's cologne. Why must I be the one to call? she asks. The question seems to astonish him. -Why? Because, sweetheart, that's the way we do it. You know I never call anyone on the phone. I suppose I knew that, she says. Sweetheart, I've been all alone by the telephone just waiting for you to invade my silence, bring sweet succour to this native. -Is that right? The image of his waiting by the phone salvages her day, consoles her regret. That night the vampire appears to her in her dream in the guise of a burning bush. What's the point of this, Ernst? she asks. The bush approaches for an answer, but offers none. The flame has a liquid consistency like water paint or sparkling burgundy. It's you, isn't it? I didn't know you had the ability to take on other shapes. This is how I am, crackles the flame. I am how I seem. I've been embarrassed to ask you this before-it's easier to talk intimately when you're in another shape. What does blood do for you exactly? It's a habit, says the flame, forming the words in fire. There must have been some pleasure in it or you wouldn't have gotten started in the first place. His formerly luxuriant fire reduces itself to a few errant sparks. - The habit has been in the family for years. I try to make best of what is necessity, try to invest my night life
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with some dignity of purpose. Choices pervade, priorities of affection. It is not nothing that you are chosen. He metamorphoses into smoke. What is it about me that interested you? The smoke forms an exclamation point, followed by a picture of a rabbit, then a question mark, then ellipses, then a bottle of French wine dated 1941 from some obscure chateau. I was born in 1940, she protests. The rest of the novel is in the problematic stage. At some point the fourth lover goes the way of the other three. (Why are they so easily dissuaded? N wonders.) When all four are gone, the bloodsucker also disappears, leaving behind tokens of himself, like clues, in unlikely places. His name (for the time being) is Kundlich, Ernst. Perhaps the night figure runs off with the daughter, Olivia. Is is as if, in a sense certainly, her dead husband were calling to her. N wonders what the bizarre creature actually wants beyond what he seems to want, perceives his erratic behavior as a form of test. If he spends so much time disconcerting her, she reasons, he must care about her somewhat. One day she discovers her daughter (perhaps a neighbor's daughter) talking to him in front of their house. Who was that? she asks her daughter. He says I'm not supposed to tell, she says. Kundlich, Ernst is not really a vampire; it is the way N perceives him. If he seems to her evIl, it is that she has invested him with moral deformity. (Still, what does the creature want with her daughter? Something sinister going on there.) What she loves, what she can't do without is the illicit -the loathsome lover, the fouler of the blood. (Is he susceptible to transformation? Will an honest woman's kiss turn him
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into something else? What else might he be?) No pleasure for her in the dailiness of things. She feels herself growing older by the hour, the blood slowing in her veIns. The waltz is ending, is almost over, is interminable. He runs off with her daughter because she is the better part of herself. The figure of night arouses her from her sleep. She wakes to recognize-it is the price of waking-that the pain of her life is its most convincing proof, that if she has invented her loathsome lover, she has also invented herself. She is no more no less than what her imagination allows
12 At loose ends, Francis S takes a job as a hit man for an undercover government agency. His first assignment is the assassination of an old friend. When you have no money you'll do almost anything for a payday, he writes in his notebook, carefully omitting the particulars of his desperate commitment. The nice thing about the job is that it permits him a new identity and gives a justifying framework to his reclusive life. They, the Company, have recruited him for the assignment because Francis is a man without apparent attachments, a piece of information they make no attempt to hide. Their top agents are all anonymous loners, his supervisor tells him on the first day of what is a whirlwind two-week training program. Men uncorrupted by the disease of society. He comes out of the crash program with the code name Camera and with an imperceptible tic in his left eyelid. He graduates second in his class, which leaves him with a sense of failure and a desperate competitive edge. The next day he draws the name of an old friend out of a hat. He tells himself it's only a job, de personalizes the murder of a friend through concentration on detail. How to do it. Where to do it. When to do it. Six months into the job-he has followed his unlikely assignment from Spain to Italy to France to England to France and back again to England-he has begun to lose heart, has the sense that, despite meticulous preparation, he will not be able to pull the trigger. The more perfect his plans, the harder they are to carry out. Self-consciousness defeats him, the whining of
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moral compunction. He has spent most of his ten-thousand-dollar advance and so expects some difficulty from his employers when he writes them that he is giving up the ghost. A special agent of the Company, code name Now Voyager, comes to London to persuade him to reconsider. The agent, as it turns out, is a sister of his estranged wife Nora, though neither of them knows this at the time. A meeting is arranged at a bistro called The Great American Disaster. Each arrives in muted disguise-wig and false mustache in Francis's case. If either recognizes the other, the manifest content of such recognition is nowhere evident. You don't look like your picture, she says, impassive behind oversize dark glasses. Francis smiles nervously. She takes the picture of him they have given her from her purse and studies it in a businesslike way. Perhaps if you removed your glasses, he says. His joking cuts no ice with her. -The Company asked me to look you up, she says in the driest of voices, in relation to correspondence from a man named Camera. I am instructed to tell him that the answer to his request for relief of assignment is negative. I'm sorry for the trouble I've caused your people, he says. For reasons I don't want to get into, Camera can't go through with his assignment. He agrees to repay all moneys paid to him in advance and will do whatever else is necessary to make reparation. The waiter comes by and Camera orders imitation American hamburgers for the both of them and a liter of house wine. You'll have to eat them both, I'm afraid, she says, without the trace of a smile. I never eat meat when I'm on a job. He takes her remark as a rebuke. I admire your dedication, he whispers. She says nothing, occasionally taps a finger on the table, watching him (or perhaps not) from behind the impenetrable
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glasses. Her solemnity piques his amusement. We have a stalemate, he says, winking incongruously . You say you can't eat meat on a job and I say you can. She seems to smile slightly, though otherwise maintains the severity of her composure. When she opens her purse for a cigarette, sweat breaks out on his forehead. He takes a matchbook from the table and lights it for her. His hand is unsteady. I think we understand each other, she says. I've been instructed by our mutual employers to inform you that the unthinkable is out of the question. Take comfort in certainty. There is something a little loony about her insistence, he thinks, though he recognizes that it is her job to impress him with the irreversibility of commitment. What if, he says, eating without pleasure, finishing both hamburgers with no sense of having engaged the food, what if, Camera were to take an alternate assignment? Voyager treats this question with a mildly contemptuous turn of the head. The meeting is over. Another is arranged for the next evening at the same time. The time arrives before he is ready for it. She is the same, silent, imposing, perhaps even more severe in manner than the day before. He has a movie camera with him, a miniaturized super-8 in the pocket of his coat. How long have you been working for them? he asks at one point. The question seems to surprise her, elicits a gasp or a sigh. She breaks down and has a drink of wine with him. Afterward they go for a walk. Somewhere in the middle of the Waterloo Bridge, she stops to get a cigarette from her purse. His hand goes in after hers, pinning her wrist with thumb and forefinger. You're hurting me, she says coldly. Do you think if I meant to kill you I would go about it in such a clumsy way?
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Two men in business suits, carrying attache cases, come by. Hallo, one of them says as they pass. There is no weapon in her hand, only a pack of True. -It is not like in the films, she says. He takes out his miniature camera and films her trying unsuccessfully to light a cigarette in high wind. - I t is not only like a film, it is a film. On a bench along the embankment, he notices the two men who had passed them on the bridge. Do you know those two men? he asks. One of them looks familiar, she says. For no reason he can understand, perhaps it is only to light her cigarette, she goes with him to her hotel room. For the first hour it is all business between them, a continuation of their first meeting, then as an apparent gesture of good faith she lets her hair down. The blood-red color is not altogether to be believed. Will you take your glasses off? he asks. I can't, she says, shrugging her regret. He resists the temptation of inquiring why. She talks vaguely of the need for illusion in business transactions of an exceptional nature. He thinks briefly of taking off his mustache and wig, of making the first confiding gesture. If you refuse me, she says, someone else will come who will be harder to refuse. No one is harder to refuse than you, he says. She floats with the compliment, lights up another cigarette. He sits alongside of her, leaning back to avoid the thrust of her smoke. She tells him the story of a former lover of hers who refused an assignment for what he thought were good reasons and who, years later in another country, met with a memory-destroying accident. He tells her a version of the story of his life, using metaphor as disguise. It is not so much the story of his life as an altogether different story with significant resemblances. Voyager listens with sympathetic attention.
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Later he asks, Who wants him killed? What's the reason behind it? These are questions it is against the rules to ask. He expects no answer and gets none. Later she says, It may be the computer's idea. Sometimes people are selected for no humanly comprehensible reason. We use the same computers as the IRS. Sometimes the murder of one man is arranged for the sole purpose of warning or threatening another.... I'm afraid I'm talking out of school. She has a moment-this discovered from her diary-where she suspects that he, not she, is the one testing the other. Their roles toward each other remain equivocal. He invites her to bed and she refuses, though goes to pains not to foreclose hope. The next day, by the sheerest accident, Francis is run into and recognized by the man he has been assigned to kill. They have a perilous meeting. What comes of it is this. Francis learns that his estranged wife Nora has not remarried and that he has more reason than ever to give up the assassination business. Francis is eager to get the old friend out of London without involving him in the specific reasons behind the urgency. I happen to know, he says over dinner, that it is not safe for you in London. The friend is dubious, though agrees to go with Francis north into Scotland for the ostensible purpose of visiting ruins. Over coffee, the old friend confesses that he had once been in love with Francis's wife. They drive at night in a rented car- Francis afraid that his own vehicle might have been tampered with-in a manner determinedly unobtrusive. Francis has the uncontrollable suspicion that, despite his precautions, someone in a black car is following them. The drive at night, the unspoken urgency, engender a certain intimacy. Further confessions emerge. The old friend not only was in love with Francis's wife Nora, but had a brief love affair
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with her. How brief? Well, it went on for awhile, though there was not much opportunity. The news does not ingratiate itself with Francis. The car, eluding pursuers or merely the idea of pursuit, picks up speed. Francis tries to recall what he had been doing when Nora and his old friend were regretting their limited opportunity for betrayal. The car, a Morris Monarch, handles poorly or perhaps the driver has no feel for the way it handles, never having commanded one before. The steering, it seems to Francis, has only symbolic connection, a wistful tendency to the direction the automobile chooses to travel. The possibility strikes him that the car he is in has been tampered with, though the Company, as it calls itself, had no way of anticipating that he would go to the particular rental agency he had and be given this particular Morris Monarch. It may have been that the car was available on short notice because something was wrong with the steering mechanism. In that case of course, they shouldn't have given it out at all. He is still not out of the London suburbs, vaguely lost, although going in the general direction he intends. I don't think you ever properly appreciated her, the friend says in the course of his nostalgic monologue. At the next turn they come close to having an accident, wheels skidding. Francis slows the Monarch, determined on survival. The old friend yawns. I tend to fall asleep in moving cars, he says. Francis wonders what Voyager will think when she comes to his hotel room for the appointment he has set up with no intention of keeping and finds him gone. Camera (or is it Francis?) looks at his watch. Voyager will be knocking at the door of his room in exactly three minutes.
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He wonders if his unexplained absence will excite any personal disappointment. His old friend snores lightly, mumbles to himself in his sleep. Francis's head, 'unlike the night he drives through, is extremely, one might say deceptively, clear. It is odd then that the Motorway north (M2) toward which he has been heading, following erratic signs and portents, has not yet materialized. Without warning, there had been no news of it for at least ten miles, the Motorway appears around a turn. Francis sighs with relief. Did you say something? the old friend asks. Just breathing, says Francis. I thought I heard you say someone was following us. Francis looks in his rear view mirror and sees a powder blue Firebird coming up on him in the same lane at considerable speed. He pulls over to the middle lane, the Monarch stammering slightly. When you rent a car, he thinks, you have no responsibility for its idiosyncracies. His tendency, Francis observes (after the Pontiac has passed without incident) is to drive either too quickly or too slowly, one extreme compensating for the other, moving in idle desperation between equally unviable alternatives. He slows to a crawl, then catching himself (or reminded by the friend in the death seat), he accelerates to the speed limit and beyond. For no apparent reason, the car directly in front of him decelerates abruptly. You're driving very oddly, his old friend complains as he pulls the stammering Monarch into the left lane to avoid accident. Then something unexpected happens. They are hit from the side or from behind, or something in the mechanism breaks down, and they are caught in a centrifugal force that pulls them from the road. He wakes on the ground some time later, moved to
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consciousness by a sequence of aches with indeterminable reference. The first discovery, not without its attendant ambiguities, is that he is alive. A dark night, cloudy, a patina of rain in the air. He remains where he is, nauseated, listening for sounds, adjusting his eyes to the dark. He has the idea that his old friend has tricked him in some way, has been a party to this confusing accident. Some minutes later an ambulance arrives. He is carried by two attendants in gray coats into the back of the ambulance, an indignity he protests without voice, and taken to a local hospital. No one mentions the disposition of his car or of its other passenger. Voyager comes to visit him the next morning, shows up in his hospital room an hour before visiting hours with a bouquet of flowers. I heard you were in an accident, she says, handing him an envelope, the remainder of his fee inside in laundered one hundred dollar bills. What's this for? he asks, unamused by her uncharacteristic good humor. For services rendered, she says. Now that wasn't so hard, was it? He puts the envelope under his pillow and turns his face to the window. Then there is no more to be said, she says. His silence seems tacit agreement. When you can travel again, Camera, when your leg is functioning, the Company wants you back home for a debriefing. Will you remember or should I send you a note reminding you? He nods or seems to, though continues to avoid her glance. She sits on the edge of the bed, chatting him up, a devoted visitor. -I've never had any patience with weakness, she says at one point. He is indifferent to the causes of her impatience, closes his eyes. When he opens them again he notices that his
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visitor is holding a pistol in her gloved hand. It's not the way it looks, she says. As if anything is. The gun is a further disillusion and appears on the scene just when he is beginning to fall in love with the young lady. Have they ordered you to kill me, Voyager, oris this your own idea? In a crisis, all alternatives are to be investigated, she whispers. She lifts up the covers and, kicking off her shoes, slips into bed next to him, the cold steel of the gun between them. You'll never get away with this, he says. I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. Francis tends to expect the worst, a protective habit he is loath to relinquish. He imagines the nurse wandering in to discover his visitor in bed with him and shares, if only momentarily, that matronly figure'S open-mouthed astonishment. When he reaches between them for the pistol she says, You'll have to get your own gun, I'm afraid. And he is a man who likes to know how things turn out, an adept of fiction, so asks his companion what really happened to his old friend. I can only do one thing at a time, she says. They do that one thing, though it takes more time than usual to get it together, Francis's leg in a cast, his mind elsewhere. I like happy endings, she says. Real life is depressing enough in my opinion. He asks her to explain this extraordinary remark. She tells him of an emotionally deprived upper-middleclass childhood where all her demands, no matter how inordinate, were honored except the unspoken, essential ones. There is a moment of recognition. Where do I know you from? he asks. She denies any prior acquaintance, recovers her piece,
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puts on her shoes and leaves. Francis is kept another two weeks in the hospital, mainly (so he is told) for observation. In all that time he is not once visited by the law, although a particularly unsavory lawyer comes by on two occasions to offer his services. No explanations are asked of Francis. No information is given him. Yet his old friend, his wife's former lover-he has money in an envelope under his pillow to attest to it-has been killed under suspicious circumstances in an auto accident. Someone must be accountable. He thinks of pursuing an investigation on his own, even if to uncover himself at the last moment as the object of his quest. Voyager makes one more visit in which she is all business, taking down his social security number in a notebook, remarking before she leaves that it has been a pleasure to work with an operative who has a professional attitude toward his work. Will we see each other again? he asks. I doubt it, she says, looking older and tired, graylights in her reddish brown hair. They don't like to repeat the same chemistry. If we do, sometime in the future under widely varied circumstances, it is altogether possible-debriefing sometimes has that effect-that we will have no recollection of each other. Goodbye Camera. I'll know you when I see you, Francis calls after her, fixing her image firmly in his mind, holding onto it willfully for days. Gradually, it begins to blur, confusing itself with any number of other images he has resolved to keep, finally leaving him altogether, defying his powers of imaginative recall. He is reduced to inventing her in language, though she is never the same twice, her reality subject to the quixotic predilections of the imagination. We're releasing you today, Mr. Sensabaugh, the babyfaced nurse announces. It is an odd sensation being addressed by a wholly unfamiliar name. I'm afraid you have the wrong patient,
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says Francis. My name isn't Sensabaugh. The nurse frowns (she is dressed in a nun's habit unlike the nurses he is accustomed to), says, What a funny man you are, Mr. Sensabaugh. She enjoys an uncomfortable laugh. Lifting the bedclothes, Francis notices that his leg is no longer in a cast. When was the cast taken off my leg, Sister? he asks the nurse. Mr. Sensabaugh, she says with quiet desperation, you know there's nothing wrong with your leg. Something is wrong, something else. The room is different in certain ways from the one he went to sleep in, though he can't quite articulate the nature of the difference. When the nurse turns her back he reaches under his pillow for the envelope of money. He starts to complain of its absence, but finds it unusually difficult to get the words in order. Nothing is as it was. A doctor comes in, one he's never seen before and asks him how he's feeling. How are we feeling today, Mr. Sensabaugh? asks the young bespectacled doctor in the tone of someone amused by himself. Any head pain, is there? Who told you my name was Sensabaugh? Francis asks. The doctor, whose name is Andrews Sista, hums to himself as he removes a bandage Francis has no recollection of from the forehead of the ostensible Sensabaugh. With a scar like that, the doctor says, you could be in the moving pictures, Mr. Sensabaugh. You come back in a month and I'll burn off some of the scar tissue for you, okay? It'll be like new I tell you. Bellissimo. What about my leg? Francis asks. Your leg? The doctor looks at his clipboard, then over at the nurse who has her eyes averted. -Our patient doesn't have a leg to stand on, he says. Seriously though, is there something the matter with your leg? The cast, Francis says, is gone. It wasn't supposed to come off for another five days. Where the hell is Dr. Malone?
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Dr. Malone? The nurse calls the doctor aside and they exchange hisses, then they leave the room together which makes Francis feel, as if he needed further evidence, that he is the intended victim of a maddening conspiracy. Francis doesn't wait for their return. He gets out of bed, careful of the leg which seems as mobile as ever and looks in the closet for his clothes. He dresses himself in whatever he finds-camel's-hair pants, white cashmere turtle neck, Harris tweed jacket, soft leather riding boots-which, though not his, fit him as if he had been measured for them. He hears footsteps and gets under the covers with his clothes on, hiding his hospital pajamas under the pillow. An older doctor comes in, a solemn, slow-speaking man. -How are you today, Mr. Sensabaugh? he asks. Francis pretends to be asleep, snores convincingly for his inquisitor. If you need me, Mr. Sensabaugh, the older doctor says, you know where I can be found. My name is Dr. Malone. It is not the Dr. Malone he remembers. When he hears the door close he counts slowly to ten, then gets out of bed and leaves the room, whistling to himself as he goes down the hall-an old man in a wheel chair nods at him in a conspiratorial way-looking for the way out. The various hospital attendants that pass him in the hall pay him no notice, and it amuses him (in a grim way) to think himself invisible. Just as he reaches the main door, a woman comes in, dressed in furs and a purple cloche hat, and appears to recognize him. (He has a dim sense that he has seen this handsome woman before, though is almost sure they have never met.) She says: I'm sorry I'm late, darling. Do you call everyone 'darling,' he asks, or only people you don't know? Clifford, have I done something to make you artgry? she
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asks in a tight voice. If I have, I'm terribly sorry. I'm afraid you're confusing me with someone else, he says, embarrassed at the reaction he has provoked. My name isn't Clifford. She puts her fist in her mouth and turns away, seeming to tremble, though it's hard to tell what's going on beneath the furs. - With no one else, she whispers. Please don't be unkind, darling. We pause here for an explanation. The woman, who calls him darling, is Nicole Sensabaugh, wife of the man she knows as Clifford, although known to us and to himself by other names. Francis discovers, not an easy discovery to accept, that a year and five months that he is unable to account for have passed, that there have been two auto accidents seventeen months apart and that under the pseudonym Clifford Sensabaugh he has been married for eleven months to the splendid woman in the cloche hat who has come to call on him in the sanitarium. Nicole refuses to believe that Francis doesn't know her, assumes that his pretended amnesia is one of his characteristically unpleasant jokes. Francis, on the other hand, suspects Nicole of being in the employ (or control) of the Company, of having married him in order to spy on him at close quarters. It is no way to start a false marriage. Small bitternesses are exchanged at every occasion. Do I get to sleep in your bed? he asks. She says no, though not with unshakeable certitude. He questions her about their first meeting. Her eyes moist. Perhaps it is the fog rolling in. -You were the most charming man I ever met, she says. That of course was before you started drinking. So I drink, do I? Like a fish. He looks for ways to expose her treachery, though she is either always on her guard or not what he thinks.
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When she is out of the house he sneaks a look at her diary and gets a portrait of himself-vain, self-centered, brutalthat he finds difficult to live with. One day he gets a call from her lawyer requesting a divorce. Why, he asks her, did you have your lawyer call instead of telling me yourself? You never seem to listen to what I say. You're always so distracted, Clifford. I thought this would be the most efficient way to get through. It did make you notice me, didn't it? He has never, he thinks, not noticed her, and would say so if he didn't think she would misconstrue what he meant. The call from her lawyer, her willingness to dissolve the marriage (in circumstance only) somewhat allays his suspicion. It is at this point they come to an understanding. She is willing to concede that he may be, as his behavior insists, a victim of amnesia if he is willing to trust that she is not, appearance aside, in the pay of some sinister organization. They embrace somewhat awkwardly to commemorate this understanding. - What does Clifford Sensabaugh do? he asks. The woman who claims to be his wife has difficulty characterizing his ephemeral career. He's a playboy, she says. And does, you know, the kinds of things that playboys normally do. He drinks to excess, runs after women, rides to hounds, goes to all-night parties. It's hard to explain. Clifford Sensabaugh is the kind of man who wears his dissipation lightly. He does no work with his hands? None that meets the eye. He plays an occasional game of polo, and it is rumored that he writes a bit between drinksmostly letters, I suspect, dictated to his male secretary. Why do you put up with him? Nicole shakes her head, smiles wanly, lights a cigarette, has no answer but the obvious.
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You'll find, he says, that I'm not the Clifford Sensabaugh you knew. Francis studies the life of his alter ego in order to impersonate him convincingly. If it became clear to . whoever is assigned to watch him that he has regained his memory, his life is in danger. For an hour each day after breakfast Francis and Nicole rehearse the roles of their marriage, reminding each other from time to time that it is only a performance. Nicole suffers his essential disregard, cries to herself in her room when she is alone. They go to a party at the home of a man who is known to be Clifford's closest friend, a Dr. Matt Bohrman, MP, currently residing in the United States. They charter a plane to a private airport in Connecticut, with three other guests, a means of defraying costs. Even the very wealthy, Nicole informs him (she is an heiress in her own right), tend to pursue certain economies. Everyone on the plane, indeed everyone at the party, has an air of long-standing self-importance. Doctor Bohrman is an older man, white-haired, with easy and elegant manners, no one Francis, in his nonClifford identity, has ever seen before. How good of you to come! says his host. Fully recovered frpm your accident, are you? Good as new, says Francis, unable to resist ambiguity. I couldn't be more pleased, says the other, a man of practiced geniality. Your wife, if I may say so, my boy, has never looked more ... ravishing. Is that the right word? He has a predilection for twinkling. Nicole averts her eyes at the word 'ravishing', an uncharacteristic reticence. He doesn't like women, she whispers to Francis when they're alone. He takes every occasion to make light of them. At dinner, he is seated between the Countess Emilia Casamassima (recently separated from the Count) and an American stage actress named Charlotte Bron. Francis can't remember if he is supposed to know these wom~n or
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not, so courts ambiguity. Bohrman seems to glance at him from time to time as if checking him out, his smile querulous, a soupf;on sinister. Francis has an intuition-perhaps an unremembered memory-that his ostensible friend is the Company's No.1 man, code name General Motive. You're not up to usual form tonight, the Countess whispers in his right ear. How so? he asks. He doesn't hear her answer or mishears, the voice of his other neighbor in his other ear. You don't seem like your old self, whispers Charlotte Bron. What did they do to you in that nasty hospital? You've changed somewhat yourself, he says. How sweet of you to notice, she says. Do you like it? I can't say how much, he says. Are you making love to me, Mr. Sensabaugh? My hands are on the table, sweetheart. She laughs falsely, catching Bohrman's watchful eye. It is all seemingly ordinary, an elegant dinner party at the ancestral estate of a revered and kindly old man. The Countess chatters to him of her former husband the Count, insatiably forgiving. The word oil comes up and it stays in Francis's memory like a smear on the landscape. After dinner (and brandy and cigars), Bohrman invites his guests into the den for a new game, one he has been promising them, he says with understated implication, for some time. Each of the participants is dealt four playing cards-there are thirteen players in all-and is instructed not to show his cards to anyone else under penalty of exclusion. When the deck is dispersed, Bohrman calls off the names of twelve cards. When your card is called, Bohrman says in his dry genial voice, it becomes your identity for the game and you live or die, I speak metaphorically of course, by whatever implications you imagine for it. As your card is called please step
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out into the hall where one of my assistants or accomplices, if I may, will continue your briefing. A pattern emerges: everyone of the guests but Clifford Sensabaugh has one of his cards called, leaving Francis alone in the room with his host. Well, my boy, it looks like you're the winner of the first part of the game, says the doctor in name only. And what advantage does that give me? asks Francis. Ah, now the real fun starts, says Bohrman, clapping his hands with childlike delight. You have four cards, my friend, each of which corresponds to some place or point on the grounds of Bohrman Cottage. Each of the points represented by the cards or in the cards, as I like to say, is your particular sanctuary. If one of your pursuers attempts to apprehend you in your sanctuary, he or she is in violation and removed from the game. To win the game, which I need not add is the goal of all games, you have to move from the first of your sanctuaries to the fourth without being apprehended, as it were, off base. Your first point of sanctuary, the King of Clubs-notice the painting of the black batman on the wall-is this room. After you start off, Clifford, moving toward sanctuary 2, which is a place that corresponds to your second card, I will hold the others for fifteen minutes before setting them on your trail with an appropriate clue. Each will have a weapon corresponding to his card and must use that weapon and nothing else in apprehending you. There are a number of Observers in red jackets spaced along the field of play whose job it is to note violations. Each of your sanctuaries is inviolable for twenty minutes. When the twenty minutes is up, sanctuary reverts to field of play and you are vulnerable there, as elsewhere, to apprehension. You are allowed now ten minutes to ask questions. I must warn you to be careful and precise in your choice of questions. (He takes out his pocket watch and rests it on the table in front of him.)-Begin. Nicole Sensabaugh wanders into the room at the back and sits down. Bohrman nods to her. Has she betrayed
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him? Francis wonders. Is there a reward for winning? he asks. Dear me, I hadn't thought of one. What would you have? One had always supposed victory to be its own cup of tea. What happens if I'm apprehended? It all depends on what's in the cards, Bohrman says, twinkling characteristically. -Advice, my boy, is not to think negatively. Nicole winks at him when he looks her way, a communication Francis chooses to ignore. Will you answer anything I ask? That's one of the rules of the game, Clifford, and I am, as you know, a man who likes to play by the rules. Are you the head of the Company? What Company is that, my dear boy? His smile, which pretends to amusement, wilts like old lettuce. - That's not a proper question, is it? Your time, I must warn you, is running out. I'm disappointed in you, Clifford. You used to have a decent respect for sport. Whose side is my wife on? Your ten minutes are up, says Bohrman, and I must say I expected you to employ your time with considerably more tact than you have. I can see, says Francis, that you're not the head of the Company as I thought but merely one of its minor functionaries. Bohrman permits himself a sinister smile. - I'm not what I seem, my boy, is that it? Illusion is the nature of the game. Two servants in red jackets bully Francis out the door into a courtyard. In a few minutes it becomes clear that the nominal doctor has no intention of playing the game by the rules. Someone, not clear who in the dark, tries to strangle him from behind with a rope. Intuition saves him, the reflexes of a suspicious nature. There's something to be said for duress. Pursued by unseen adversaries, Francis becomes the man he has often
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imagined himself to be. His second card is the Queen of Hearts and so Francis, playing the game, climbs in the window of his host's mistress, the actress, Charlotte Bron. After he makes love to her, throwing himself on her mercy, she agrees to help him escape. I've been a mistress in name only, she says. In reality Matt Bohrman is my uncle. He keeps me as his concubine-that is, his apparent concubine-as a form of self-deception. He is a man with an absolute faith in appearances. His real mistress, however, is his work. And what work is that? Francis asks. She lies back on the bed in voluptuous disarray, pondering an answer to the question. Is Nicole in league with them? he asks. If I were you, she says, I'd trust no one. Charlotte goes out into the hall to see if the coast is clear and while she is gone Nicole comes into the room. She has a gun in her hand. What have you done with Charlotte Bron? he asks. Charlotte Bron is not really Charlotte Bron, she says, in a breathless voice. I've come to tell you that, though I don't expect you to believe me. It's a long story and there's no time for it now, but I've come to show you a way out that will escape the attention of the others. Outside the window, Francis notices that his adversaries, some if not all, are drinking brandy and arguing politics. What are they waiting for? he wonders. It is a tradition with them, Nicole explains. They won't attack until they've burned away the last vestiges of human feeling. Still, it doesn't give us much time. Us? Francis takes a gun from under Charlotte's pillow and they face each other, this unlikely couple, at gun point. There is a dispute going on outside among the others as to the most effective way to proceed. The argument gets heated. The word oil comes up again. Also the words fire and ice.
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Someone says, We are always getting sidetracked into unworkable subtleties. I for one believe that murder is the only final solution. I guess you'll have to trust me, Nicole says. Francis puts his gun in his coat pocket. Nicole hesitatesthere is a moment in which we think she may actually pull the trigger-then she drops her weapon into her purse. There is no time for even a cursory embrace. There is a quick knock on the door and Bohrman comes in, radiating charm. He has aged, Francis senses, since their last meeting, a crooked stick of a man, his white hair blown about like threads of silk. He asks, his manners always impeccable, for a private audience. Nicole comes over to Francis, puts her arm in his. Will you believe him if he talks against me? she asks. She stays, Francis says. Bohrman presents himself in a new light. Although he is the head of the Company, as Francis had guessed, he is by and large a figurehead, held in distrust by those behind the scene. It is a principle of the Company that no one in its service be precisely what he seems. Bohrman, Nicole, and the pseudonymous Clifford Sensabaugh go out a back entrance to the estate garage. They get into the brown Mercedes at Bohrman's suggestion and drive off into the darkening night, Francis at the wheel. They can see the lawn party through the back window continuing without them. What happens is this. Someone notices the car rushing toward the gates of the estate and points a finger. A group of four or five gets into another car and takes pursuit. Bohrman takes the occasion of their escape to explain himself further. It was he (he admits) who actually assigned Francis to murder his estranged friend, though the choice had been made with the aid and advice of the Company's most advanced computer. A client had brought the project of this eradication to the Company's board of directors. The Board voted with one
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dissenting vote-the dissenter, I need not add, no longer with us-to accept the assignment. It was my job as de facto head to appoint the right agent. The four most likely candidates were chosen from the files and their salient statistics fed into the computer. Your name, Clifford, the name under which you registered with us, came to the top. A false name with invented attributes. All of that of course was in the computer's report. Do you think the Company was ever innocent as to your real identity? Having no core identity, you were an ideal agent for us. We could dispose of you at any time without the slighest notice taken of your disappearance. We could hit you on the head, change your name, and start you over on a new career. Francis wonders at the turn the conversation has taken. He stops the car at the side of the road. - You get out here, he says to Bohrman. He holds Charlotte's gun in his hand. There's more to tell, says Bohrman. Your old friend was not killed in that so-called auto accident. Intrigue much too complicated to go into here behind the turn of events. Suffice to say he himself planned that epidsode on the Motorway, and he walked away from the overturned car virtually unharmed. I want you out of the car. Nicole, he says, are you going to let him do this to your father? Nicole circles her soft glance from one man to another, from Bohrman to Francis and back again to Bohrman, moves her lips silently as if rehearsing an answer. You're not my real father, she says to Bohrman. Not by blood perhaps but real enough, dear girl. You got what you wanted, didn't you, and when you wanted it, anything and everything? If Clifford wants you out of the car, father, she says, I'm afraid you'll have to go. Bohrman shrugs, opens the door on his side and enters the night. A black limousine passes, moving at great speed.
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It stops a hundred feet ahead. Three men get out, carrying rifles. It is dark, though one makes out the men and the rifles coming slowly in their direction. Bohrman knocks on the window, pleads to be taken back, doesn't wait for Francis to open the door but rushes off into the fields. Francis whips the Mercedes around and starts off in the opposite direction. The rifle fire is not directed at the car. Nicole lets out a cry from deep in her throat. Francis drives with one eye on the rear-view mirror. After awhile, nothing to be seen from behind, he gives full attention to the road ahead. The names of towns change. The night gets darker. The night gets darker. They stop at a motel called Wayside Stop, an out-of-the-way place, and have to wake the manager to get a room. This is not our busy season, he says. In the room. -There are a lot of things I still don't understand, Francis says, sitting down on the bed, feeling the scar on his forehead with two fingers. Maybe darling, you're not supposed to understand, she says. Maybe the message of this experience is incomprehensibility. He has seen her some place before, but where? Will you put your arms around me? she asks. He has no objection to that, merely a vague distrust or foreboding, a deep unamlounced suspicion that there is more to come. They fall asleep in each other's arms as they had during the first months of their marriage. In his dream, he says to her, The man you married never existed. Then he hears someone outside fiddling with their car and he realizes that an explosive device is being attached to the starting mechanism. He means to warn her not to try to start the car, or doesn't expect her to get into the car without him. When he hears a car door slam he rushes out to warn her of the bomb. The car erupts in a flash of light before he can get out the door. The explosion jars his memory.
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He wakes with an erection alone in bed. She is not in the room. He calls her name. The Mercedes is not in the parking lot outside. In its space there are smears of oil, a broken kewpie doll, two half-finished cigarettes, a puffball of metallic dust. Francis returns to the hotel room to see if she had left some message for him, a note, a keepsake, something to validate his memory of her. There is no word, nothing of hers left behind. Between the covers there is the faint odor of her perfume. He clings to it, embraces whatever the imagination allows. Their ghosts take a final turn. When he wakes in the early afternoon there is nothing left.
13 A new subject interrupts our silence. Nora calls to report that Henry has left Illana for another woman. This unlikely news creates a tremor of unrest in our house. In the next moment, Genevieve has Illana on the phone. She listens to her friend with the faithfulness of a recording device, occasionally exclaiming her shock at some apparent outrage, her sympathy unequivocal. When she hangs up she says in a pained voice, Illana's angrier with him than she's willing to admit. Why does she deny her feelings that way? After that, Genevieve and our son,jason, who has just returned from camp, go for a walk into town. My auditor shows her displeasure in the pucker of her forehead and in the downward twist of her mouth. - I wish you hadn't used our real names, joshua, she murmurs. I feel my privacy is being violated. -The names are a disguise in reverse, I say. You know you're not the Genevieve in the novel any more than I'm the joshua. -That's our secret, huh? She picks up the book she had been reading, opens to her place, glances at me over the top. -Do you want to hear more? I ask. I want to tell the story in every way there is to tell it. I take her prolonged silence for assent. We talk about Henry and Illana in the evening instead of retreating as usual into separate privacies. What bothers Genevieve most, she says, is that Henry has always presented himself as a moral man, the most moral person. His defection from Illana is an act of betrayal, she feels, to
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all of us who took him at his word. She will never forgive him. We haven't heard Henry's side of this, I say. Of course you're right, she says, taking my hand. But what can he possibly say? Henry was barely twenty-four when he married Illana. They had met at college, had started going together when Henty, who was a year or so older, was in his sophomore year, though they had known each other casually (or such is the information one pieces together) since childhood. There were times, says Illana, when each was the other's only real friend. Her remark is not surprising. Henry and Illana had always seemed, to those of us who thought we knew them well, exceptionally close. They had grown over the years of their marriage to seem like mirror images of one another. One breathed in, we supposed, and the other breathed out. They saw themselves, and we tended to confirm that view, as a perfect couple. It was Henry who announced one day, Illana sitting at the kitchen table shucking corn, that he had fallen in love with someone else. You have? Illana is imagined to have asked. What does that mean in terms of our marriage? I don't know, said Henry. It's too new to me. You don't know? The question asked with some manner of skepticism. - What do you want to do? What do you want me to do? Well, naturally, Illana said softly, I'd like you to break it off if you can. Out of the question, said Henry. I didn't realize that it had ... ,said Illana, a small crack of panic in her usually impassive face, swallowing her words as though ashamed of their inadequacy. It happened, said Henry. I didn't mean it to, but it happened. I'm terribly sorry.
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Genevieve wants to invite Illana to visit with us at the Cape for an indefinite stay. - You don't mind, Joshua, do you? she asks. I could use some companionship and the change of scene will be good for Illana. I promise we'll stay out of your way. That doesn't worry me, I say. Then what does? Something does. I can tell. I don't want to seem to take sides in this, I say. If Illana is welcome to stay with us, then so is Henry. Genevieve kisses me on the cheek. -We're not in disagreement, she says. Two days after Genevieve's invitation to Illana, Henry calls. -How are you? I ask. -I'm terrific, he says in a voice that suggests the opposite. Illana is fine too, not as tremulous as she was. I don't think there's any danger that she'll do herself injury. I mention that she and Mark (their ten year old son) will be staying with us. It is the reason he called, he says. He has the opportunity to rent a house three doors from ours and wants my opinion about it. It would be an occasion to see us and spend some time with his son. If Illana has no objection to the arrangement, would I be favorably disposed to it? It's all right with me, I say, though I can't speak for Genevieve. I appreciate that, he says. No mention is made of the disrepair of his marriage, nor of the woman for whom he has left Illana. I assume I will find out more when Henry arrives. In another version. Illana was the first one to broach the subject. She felt there was something wrong but couldn't be sure what it was. It was as if there was something in full view that was also out of sight. What did Henry think? - I think I know what you mean, he said. They had just come back
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from a party and still had their coats on. - Will you tell me what's going on? she asked. -Are you accusing me of something? he said. Illana denied that she was, though there was something in the denial that was also an accusation. - I think I'd like you to move out, she said. I think I'd like to try living alone for awhile. He had been taking his coat off, had one arm free. -I'll leave right away, he said, hurrying his arm into the vacant sleeve. Illana hung her coat in the closet in retarded motion, straightening the shoulders, checking to see if there was anything in the pockets she might need. - You can sleep on the couch, she said. -It's best to go now, he said. They shook hands at the door. He seemed reluctant to go, yet not unhappy at the pros pect. - Is there someone else? she asked. - Absolutely not, he said without hesitation. - I know there's something wrong, she said. One day a man swimming off the point returned to shore with much, if not most, of his left leg missing. All of us assumed the obvious except Genevieve, who put it down to providence. - There's something there that doesn't want us in the water, she would say, only partly (one half to one quarter) kidding. Time would vindicate her. She had a history of being vindicated by time. I pick up Illana at the Provincetown airport. Mark, to my surprise, isn't with her. He's coming with his father in a couple of days, she says. Illana confides in the car that she's always found it difficult to be around me, that there's something in my manner that makes her self-conscious. -Thank you for tolerating my visit, she says mysteriously as we arrive at the cottage. Genevieve and Illana embrace like sisters, then go into the kitchen to talk. The two women exchange confidences. All of our men are unreliable, says Genevieve's tone. I go into the back yard and have a catch with Jason.
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One night in bed Genevieve asked me if I found Illana sexy? Sexy may not have been the word she used. Attractive or beautiful is more likely. I don't remember what I answered. What's that about? I thought, though let it slide by at the time. About a week later, the space between us in the bed large enough for another body, I asked Genevieve what she had meant by her question. -Oh, she said, someone else was saying, I don't remember who, that Illana was the most beautiful woman of his acquaintance and I wondered if you thought the same thing. -You're the most beautiful woman of my acquaintance, I said. - You're a liar, she said, though came over and put her head on my chest, eavesdropping (I imagined) on the unspoken. On Saturday at 10 A.M., we started on our expedition. There were four of us, U go, myself, Henry Quixote, and a fat southern Irishman named Forster Hennessey. - With a crew like that, said Genevieve, who had been against my going, you don't have to look outside the boat for an enemy. It was a clear mild day but the ocean was inexplicably choppy, perhaps from some storm recently passed or some foreboding of one to come. The boat, especially at the trolling speed Ugo had set for it, tended to rock back and forth at the pleasure of the waves. We were all at this point a little queasy. I discover myself alone in the cottage when the phone rings and no one else answers. It is Henry. He has just arrived, has not begun to unpack, has called to announce his presence. Would he like me to come over? I ask. He says something off the phone, his hand over the mouthpiece. He is out of breath when his voice returns. -Everyone is very tired here, he says. We'll do it soon. All right? I really want you and Genevieve to meet Elena. Illana returns while I am on the phone, smiles wanly,
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hides herself in an uncomfortable chair in the corner of the living room. The conversation with Henry plays itself out, though extends pointlessly, neither of us able to break off. -It'll be good to see you again, I hearmyselfsaying.-Not everything you hear about what went on is to be believed, he says. I imagine Illana, who is just out of view, staring forlornly into space. I think I'll go to my room, she announces. -It's good to hear your voice, Henry says between pauses. -And yours, I say. Illana waits at the foot of the stairs for the call to end. Henry asked Illana if the three of them could live together on a trial basis. I don't think I could handle that, she said. What if I stayed alternate nights with each of you? As a form of transition. Is that what you want? she asked. I'm just trying to think of alternatives. Do you have any suggestions? She hugged herself against the cold. - I don't want anything for myself, she said. I have no suggestions. I think the best thing is to live your life as if I ceased to exist. That's not a reasonable solution, he said. I order you to see it, U go shouted. And then we did, though not before the boat seemed to lift in the air. It was as if U go's shout had roused the monster from its deep, had challenged it into self-declaration. I was not alone in holding him responsible for its presence. He turned to me and said, Joshua, I want you to take an oath that you'll get the Discontent II back to port and that you'll tell them, those that didn't make this voyage, what it was like. Can I have your promise here in front of the others? I was about to say that my chances of returning were no greater than his when the giant fish leapt from the water to take possession of Ugo's arm. The captain's cry was barely
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heard over the roar of the boat. The bar is extremely dark and it is hard to tell whether Henry looks well or ill, better than usual or worse. -Elena likes you and Genevieve, he says a few times, rephrasing the remark so as not to seem to repeat himself. She felt the two of you accepted her. -She seemed extremely nice, I say. Very ... The word eludes me. -In that way, she's the opposite of Illana, he says. -Do you think you'll stay with her? I ask. He becomes thoughtful, which is a form of reprimand with Henry, an indication that you've overstepped yourself. Then he says with a forgiving smile, We take every day as it comes. -Carpe diem, I say, but it seems to pass in the air unheard. After taking a sip from his third Margarita, Henry says, Illana and I still love each other. The situation hasn't changed that. Then you are thinking of going back to her? Impossible, he says. We're both happier this way. Both of you? My incredulousness seems to escape notice. Even in the sullen dark of the room his beatific smile makes itself felt. Is it sex? I ask, expecting no answer. N ever been so good, he says. U sing his remaining hand, which I clearly remember as the left, U go tore the harpoon from his foot. Stand back, he grunted, a fountain of blood rising miraculously from his shoe. He muttered something in Italian, reverting in crisis to the language of his childhood. I had never seen him quite so beside himself. It's not sex, says Genevieve. We are trying to understand our friend Henry. -Or sex is merely an excuse for something else. If Henry says their sex is good, why should you doubt him? Henry, says Genevieve, is trying something out. He
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wants to see how far he can go, how outrageous he can be, before Illana will draw the line. That leaves out the implication of Elena altogether, I say. Elena doesn't count. Don't you see that? If you ask Henry, Elena is the only one that counts. Our conflicting views of the reality abrade against one another, strain the limits of our friendship. Why are we fighting over Henry and Illana? I ask. The continuing argument becomes its own answer. Francis dove into a breaker, the water churning over him like rapids. We waited for him to emerge miraculously at the other end. Genevieve leaned her head against my cheek; her eyes were wet. Is it possible that we'll not see our friend again? I am floating in the bay when someone or something pulls on my leg. I go under, experience a brief flash of terror, swallow some water, rush headlong to the surface. Is it meant as a joke? Illana is standing behind me, her hand in her hair, faintly smiling. U go flung the harpoon, though the weapon never actually left his hand. I would never know whether it was Ugo's intention to follow his fling or whether he was unable to let the weapon go. He was a man from the outset, his wife would report, obsessed with holding on to what he had. I did then what I had to do, what Ugo, had he remained in command, would have done himself. I made my way into the cabin and took command of the Discontent II, turning the boat forty-five degrees around so that the nose of the cruiser was in the direct line of the two forms in the water. The giant fish was struggling to unseat U go who had attached himself to its tail, a look of delirious triumph on his face. When the moment seemed right I drove the craft at full speed at the distracted predator. The creature, though diminished by its wounds, was still a frightening
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adversary, its eye peering at me with vengeful recognition. At one point, she says, Joshua, do you think of me as a cold person? I reserve answer, kissing her again as if that urgent gesture (is it really as urgent as it seems?) were a response to her question. And yet what I think one moment ceases to be true the next. She is passionate yet remote as if her passion were a private wellspring separate from her day-to-day nature. It strikes me that we are remarkably alike. I had no way of knowing how many hours had passed when I came to consciousness again. I was lying in a bunk in the captain's cabin, the surroundings unfamiliar as if erased from memory, a compress on my forehead. Henry was there, sitting next to me, his eyeglasses reduced to one cracked lens, an uncanny effect. It's over, he said when he saw that I was awake. Is it? It's over and done. Elena, for unspecified reasons, has gone back to the city, where Henry is to join her in a week. Illana talks of leaving any day now. We avoid each other in a way that can't help but attract attention, one of us moving out of a room when the other comes in. Illana has never looked so windswept, Genevieve notes, the remark without implication, though one can see that she has tired of Illana's visit. Genevieve, who is an exceptional gardener, spends her mornings helping Henry landscape the grounds around his cottage. Do you mind my coming to your room? she asks, stepping in, locking the door behind her. There is no time for questions or explanations; there is barely even time to kiss. Coupling is impersonal and urgent like some natural disaster.
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1 am not eager to talk to Henry, would have avoided this meeting at his house if 1 hadn't felt obliged to face him. Henry is standing at the window looking out when he says, 1 don't know quite how to say this. (I have nothing to say in my behalf, would have changed the subject had there been one.) While you and Illana have spent time together, he continues, I've gotten to know Genevieve somewhat better than 1 had. 1 don't want you to misconstrue what 1 am going to say, though perhaps you already know. Do you in fact? (I admit to not knowing.)-Joshua, please don't take offense. 1 was amazed to discover how alike the two of us are in temperament and interests. - You're talking about Genevieve? 1 want to be aboveboard with you, he says. Nothing has happened. 1 want you to believe that. But something might if we continue the way we have. We've agreed not to see each other alone again. It had reached that point. -And Elena, what about her? - What's between Elena and me has nothing to do with this. 1 have the feeling that you're furious at me, Josh. I wish you'd tell me if you are. What can 1 tell him? 1 am about to offer my own confession, or not offer it, when 1 hear a car with a familiar cough pull up to the driveway. Genevieve and the two boys are inside. She has returned from taking Illana to the airport. - 1 hope we're still friends, Henry says as Genevieve comes through the door. -I've brought you your son back, she says to Henry. 1 drive home with Genevieve and Jason, the three of us pressed together in the front seat, Jason between us holding on on each side. What remained were the explanations to the authorities and some words of condolence to the relatives of the deceased. 1 worked out a story which had little relation to
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the real experience but was less susceptible to disbelief. I told the story not only to those to whom it had to be recounted but to anyone who would pretend to listen. It got better with each retelling, achieved surprises of form, though perhaps lost something of its original freshness. Henry had taken off from work to spend the day with Illana, an occasion they had planned in advance. They went in the afternoon to a movie. In the movie, the husband, a good-looking but ordinary sort, confesses to the wife that he's in love with another woman. The announcement leaves the heroine in a state of shock. For awhile after they separate she feels lonely and desperate, moves like a sleepwalker from one painful experience to another. At some point, she discovers that she can get by on her own, that her husband's desertion is also a form of liberation. She takes up with a man who is more attractive and substantial than the one she lost. Finally, her husband returns and asks to be taken back. She rejects him without malice, having outgrown him in the period of their separation. Illana didn't like the movie, she said, though after they had come home and made love, she told her husband she thought it would be best ifhe moved out. Though he didn't want to go, he left with only token resistance. My own life goes on much as before. I keep telling the story, revising it as the imagination wills, inventing new possibilities, always veering cautiously from the truth. And here I've told it again, trying with each false variation to make it true.
14 Nora's first sight of him left her with a feeling of mild exhaustion, as if she'd been in the sun too long. Who is it? a male voice called from behind. It's my dead husband Francis, she dreamed herself saying. Francis walked by her into the apartment without the amenities of an explanation. How have you been, Nora? he asked as if he hadn't vanished from her life twenty-three months ago and been presumed dead. I don't know that I ever want to see you again, Nora said with some passion, smiling to herself at the obviousness of her complaint. I think you're glad to see me back, he said. She admitted to nothing, though asked her present lover, a former Undersecretary of the Interior, to clear out for the present, sending him on an errand that might take him a lifetime to complete. He said goodbye to Francis before departing, shook the other's hand and wished him well, leaving the smoke of unexpressed dismay behind. When they appeared to be alone, Nora embraced and berated him, cried bitter tears, said she forgave him, although what he had done was unforgivable. Another lover came out of her closet, a momentary interruption, but she sent him away even further from hope of return than the first. The phone rang. It was Genevieve calling to ask Nora to join us for dinner. Do you know what, she said, Francis is here, do you believe it? Genevieve said she didn't. I was standing behind her, listening in on the conversation. He walks in, Nora said, as ifhe had left ten minutes ago to buy a paper. How's that for nerve?
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It sounds like nerve to me, Genevieve said. I'll call you and Josh back later and tell you what happens. She called back an hour later to say he was asleep in the next room and that she was deliriously happy, though felt she ought not to have taken him back without some larger gesture of contrition on his part. What did I think? I was given no chance to say. Nora anticipated objections that I had no intention of making. He's never been strictly reliable, she said. Isn't that what you think? My life without him has a certain freedom and amplitude I never had as his wife. And where has he been for two years without a word, letting us all think he was dead, letting me make an international fool of myself playing the widow. I've nearly remarried, as you know Josh, three times. It would have served him right if I had. How does he look? I said. He looks the same. At least I think he does. The truth is, I didn't really notice. Can you understand that?
She sat in the bedroom in a ladderback chair, blanket over her lap, watching him sleep, unable to believe his return. The suspicion occupied her that if she looked away or closed her eyes, even for an instant, he would evaporate like an apparition. She could imagine Josh and Genevieve talking about her as if she had lost her mind. He woke to see her watching him and wondered what she meant by it, interpreting it to his disadvantage. She helped him out of his clothes. They slept together without making love-she'd be damned if she'd initiate itFrancis on his back, Nora on her side facing toward him. She dreamed he was gone, had run off with a circus of jugglers, woke to find herself in bed alone. She looked for signs of him in the dark room, articles of clothing. His absence made her furious.
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She discovered him in the living room reading last week's N.Y. Times Book Review. Don't you ever do that to me again, she said. I couldn't sleep, he said in a reasonable voice. I didn't want to disturb you. She picked up a book and threw it at his head, intending to miss though finding him a hard target to avoid. His complaint seemed insufficient, unworthy of her provocation. She looked for something else to throw, not wanting to repeat herself, merely to elaborate on the justifiable. I thought you had gone again, she said. I'm not prepared to go through what I've gone through a second time. Francis offered her, as if a prestidigitator's trick, the evidence of his presence. Nora looked away, then looked back, closed her eyes and opened them, held her breath and let it go. The evidence, to her mind, was inconclusive. No woman in her right mind would take you back, she said, holding his hand to her mouth. You look like hell, you know. She bent back his small finger to see how far it would go, working on it by subtle degrees so as not to generate resistance in ad vance. When he begged for her mercy she let go. That he found certain levels of pain unacceptable temporarily restored her faith in him. Befogged by not enough sleep, she had difficulty deciding on some further test of his actuality. She thought of questioning him about information that only the two of them shared as a way of determining whether he was real or an imposter. Even if he were real, she thought, he was also an imposter. The only thing he could say, the only thing he could
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think to ask, was did she want him to go. She thought of emptying an ashtray on his head, of biting off his ear, of sticking her fingers in his eyes, of digging an elbow or knee into his squalid jewels, of breaking a bridge chair over his head, of burning him in the throat with a lit cigarette, of pulling off his fingernails with a tweezer. Instead she called the Undersecretary of the Interior, though it was four in the morning, and asked him if he had seen anything unusual when over at her apartment that afternoon. Anything wrong, Nora? he said. It's possible. I want to know who and what you saw and I want it in precise detail, Grant. He laughed. - I saw you, Nora, light of my life. What do you want me to say? What else did you see? I want you to tell me everything you saw. Everything? He proceeded to describe her apartment with a surveyor's blind accuracy. She was disappointed at his insensitivity, had always thought him perfect to a fault and was unprepared to revise her view of him on such short notice. Grant, describe the man who came to the door this afternoon. She held her breath or seemed to, waiting for him to answer. I'm not going to play this game with you in the middle of the night, he said and hung up. Francis, she called. Francis. His name echoed as if she were listening to someone else call him from some vantage exactly opposite to her own. There was no answer she could hear. I must be losing my mind, she heard herself think. Francis was asleep in the chair in the living room, newspaper balanced on one knee, mouth pursed. She felt his pulse, held it for a moment or two longer than her purposes warranted.
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Nora put some pillows on the floor near her husband's chair and went to sleep, her sleep rippled by a tidal wave of dreams. She is in a hotel room in Los Angeles, in bed with a man encountered at a Pioneer Supermarket two hours before. Another nameless man, a rejected suitor, is hiding in one of her closets. The second man, she recalls, is pathologically jealous and has said on more than one occasion that he would rather see her dead than with someone else. I'll see you dead first, he says. What the one in the closet doesn't know is that the one in bed with her is incapable. His testicles have never developed-one in fact has atrophied to the figure of a large raisin-and he has never in his life commanded an erection. You can do it, she says to him in a bored voice, says over and over again. Don't give up on yourself. Her meaningless encouragements, she knows, come out of the same misguided spirit that caused her to invite him to spend the night. (The invitation was made before she knew about the one in the closet, before she was aware that he had gotten into her hotel room without her knowledge.) She knows that someone is in her closet but she has no way of knowing which of her former lovers it is. As soon as the one in her bed is asleep (the only name she knows him by is Mr. La Morte), she plans to seek out the one in the closet and explain that her friendship with La Morte proceeds from pity, not love or need. Her incapable lover is snoring softly, a delicate childlike snore. Nora gets up on her elbows to look at him, then slips silently out of the bed. She doesn't get two steps when the one she assumed to be asleep calls her back. What's the matter? she asks. I think it's getting hard.
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She says to keep it on ice until she returns. There are three closets in the room and though she knows her insanely jealous former lover is in one of them, she has no precise idea which one. She opens the nearest closet first, opening it cautiously to avoid extreme surprise. The closet is filled with men's shoes-eight pair in a variety of sizes, not a live foot in any of them. What does the number signify? she wonders. Eight lovers? Not very original. And the number inadequate by half. There must be some other meaning to the eight pairs of shoes that keeps its distance. Nora closes the door on the shoes and goes to the second closet. She doesn't open it right away, but thinks: It's always the last place you look that what you're looking for turns up. It stands to reason then that the insanely jealous lover will not be in the second closet, but in the third and last. At the door to the third closet her hand begins to tremble. She walks away from the closet, then comes back to it. Who is it? she shouts at the door. There is a rattling sound as if someone had bumped into some hangers. The noise frightens her, the wordlessness of it. She kicks her slippered foot against the door. -You know I hate it when people don't answer. The answer she gets is a low growl, the sound hardly human. She backs up, looks around the room for a weapon of some sort, some small protection against the unknown. She picks up a shoe. When she opens the third closet it is empty. A magician's trick, she thinks. This time she discovers Francis was still sleeping when she awoke; he was cramped in the chair in front of the television, his legs dangling. She bent over him and kissed his forehead, left for the kitchen to make coffee, looking in on him from time to time, occupied with the novelty of his presence. Francis was awake, smoking a cigarette with uncharacter-
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istic suavity, like William Powell in The Thin Man. In the past ten months almost all of their friends' marriages had broken up, she announced, one after another like an epidemic. What did he think of that? Francis smiled appreciatively, said he was listening, which was as much as he would say, suffering some form of language deprivation. Every once in a while she would interrupt herself to ask him why he didn't say anything and he would say he didn't know why, perhaps nothing important came to mind. . When she asked him specific questions about his time away, curious to know how he survived without her, he would nod as though an understanding existed between them that required no words. Nora wondered if he had suffered some brain damage during their separation, had undergone perhaps a critical blow to the back of the head. You seem to have misplaced the power of speech, she said. Once in mind it was hard not to say. -You used to express yourself so well, Francis, and now you can barely get a word together. She didn't mean it as harshly as it sounded, her words spoken in the spirit of open and honest exchange between old friends. The stories she told on herself lowered her self-regard, changed her life as she told them. It makes me sound worse than I was, she would say, feeling her contempt for herself as if it were his. The past, she could see, was the only future they had. This odd young man pursued me, would you believe it, though five no six different countries. He was so oblique in his purposes, it was never clear to me whether he was professing love in order to get his novel published or throwing his manuscript at me as a form oflovemaking. He was very persuasive, but for· some reason-perhaps
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because he tried so hard-I kept putting him off. I just want to talk to you alone for a few minutes, he would say. Tell me how a few minutes is going to hurt. Your friends can wait in the hall or hide in the closet if you don't trust me. He was irresistible, cute as hell. Francis clears his throat of the debris of displeasure and irritation. It was in Brussels that I let the serpent into my hotel room for the first time. This was after six weeks of the most feckless and flattering pursuit. When we were at long last alone my admirer had nothing to say, paced the room in silence, glancing over his shoulder at me from time to time to make sure I was still there. Well, say your piece, I said. I can't, he said. I'm overwhelmed by your presence. Francis snorts derisively or so his noise is interpreted. I made the same remark myself, suggested a regimen of underwhelming, though I have to say that I never got that kind of feedback from you, Francis, and it is nice even when you don't quite believe it all. Francis allows that it is. Nora continues her narrative despite Francis's manifest irritation with the turn of events. He was in no hurry to get into my bed, this electrode of misplaced energy, instead pulled a manuscript out of his hat and started reading, stopping every once in a while to explain his all too obvious intention. It was hard to listen and I told him that I'd rather read the manuscript myself, that I had difficulty getting things aurally, but he seemed to have the same problem himself because he went on as if I hadn't said a thing. Francis smiles, his imagination elsewhere. Nora's story is a familiar one and not to his taste. He has always had trouble taking the whimsical seriously, a matter of temperament and philosophical bias. There is a difference in substance between irony and whimsy, he has committed himself to believe, one a serious mode, the other not. It is a
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defect in Nora's character, he thinks, to make light of material, to make whimsy of it, that is intrinsically painful. When I got hungry I had to interrupt him so I could call room service for something to eat. His manuscript was filling, occupied space, but couldn't take the place of real food. Was the book any good? he asks. I'm getting to that, she says. Let me tell you the story in my own way. He read and ate, my young man, chewing words and food with seemingly equal commitment, looking over at me to check out if I was getting the point. He was full of points, a pointed young man. His shoes as a matter of fact - Italian or east-European imitation-came to a point. It was past midnight and he was still going strong, picking up speed, a machine gun reader of his own prose. When I went to the bathroom he merely raised his voice rather than stop. I was getting some of it. He had a way with a blunt phrase, I thought. His prose was like an axe against the hardest tree you can imagine. And so-I think you understand what I mean-the relentlessness of it gave it a kind of power. It was also, this novel, full of the oddest kind of sex. He looked so young I wondered how he had time to pick up so much unless it was all made up. But so graphic. It overfilled the imagination. Francis takes his shoes off and closes his eyes. - Why are you telling me this? he asks. I'm not sure, she says. I was hoping the story would, in the course of telling it, reveal its purpose. She comes over behind him and puts her hands on his shoulders, pressing her cheek against his. - You need a shave, she says. When you first came back I didn't want to know where you had been or what you had done, the less I knew the better, but now I've moved a hundred and eighty degrees away from that position. I don't think I can go on living with you, Francis, unless I know exactly what you've been through.
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Since you haven't volunteered anything, have barely given me the time of day, I thought I would tell you something of my experience apart from you as a way of breaking the ice. -Who puts it back together once it's broken? Nora laughs, thinks how different he is (or similar) from the figure of her memoirs. It is as if one or the other, the one she has lovingly remembered or the one who had silently returned, were an imposter. -Do you remember, she starts to say. After a point he stationed himself on the bed, like some dog declaring its turf, as he read in his nonstep declamatory way. I realized at about three in the morning that he meant to read it all in one go, and that-there were two piles of manuscript, one on each side of him-he was at most halfway through. I told him that it was time for him to leave, that I was tired, and promised I would read the rest to myself in the morning and give him an opinion the next evening when he returned. The puppy seemed hurt that I was cutting him off, stared dumbfounded at me. I didn't realize I was boring you, he said. I said that I thought he was talented but that I couldn't listen to War and Peace read out loud for twelve hours either. -Let me stay the night, he said, okay? What a poor thing he was. I said he could stay, I had after all expected him to, ifhe cleared the manuscript off the bed and behaved himself. I was very stern with him; there was something about him that made one treat him as a child or a pet. A puppy, as I think of him. He removed the manuscript and sat sulkily in a chair with his hands clasped, waiting for me, I thought, to invite him to share the bed. I never got the chance. After we had a liqueur together-very civilized-he pounced. He had me pinned on my stomach and was mounting me from behind. You don't have to rape me, I said. I'm of age and willing. He apologized inordinately, said he didn't realize that what he was doing would be construed as rape (can you
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believe that?), that most women in his experience liked to be taken by force. (I recognized that as a line from his novel.) 1 prefer the back door to the front, he added, in case 1 hadn't gotten the picture. 1 like to be wooed, 1 told him. You're going about this in absolutely the wrong way. The puppy said that he was open to instruction and that he thought my derriere was among the most inviting he had ever seen. 1 told him he had misread the sign: no invitation offered, none meant. We agreed that 1 would call the tune. When the preliminaries were over-as you may remember, I've always been a stickler for preliminaries-my puppy couldn't perform. Not in the accepted way. He seemed chagrined and 1 would have felt sorry for him if 1 weren't so annoyed. The only time he got an erection was when he was reading from his own prose. And one other time, which I'm coming to. Don't go to sleep. The best part's commgup. You tell this, says Francis, not a little annoyed, as if you've told it not a few times before. This version is just for you, says Nora. When someone's been gone as long as you have, he can't expect everything about his abandoned wife to seem virgin, can he? -Canny? At some point during our three days and nights together, he started asking questions about you. What was he like? he wanted to know. Was he difficult to live with? 1 did my best to ignore the question, but it kept coming back. Your name kept slipping into the conversation and then it struck me that 1 was the one, not you, that wasn't there. He was pursuing you through me, can you imagine? 1 was the go-between in the affair. What he really wanted was to get into bed with you or at least imagine himself in your skin.
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- You were reading into it, says Francis, who appears to have been listening. 1 had thought 1 had finally achieved a certain independence of identity, only to find that men courted me because 1 was your widow. How disappointing to be perceived as someone's wife-even someone's widow-and not as oneself. Can you understand that? Francis shakes his head, smiles cryptically. When 1 told him about us, not so much about our sex life but how it was living with you-a little of each, 1 must admit-it was like some miraculous tonic to him. He rose like the tide. He became you, or some idea he had of you. It enabled him to carry off an inspired session. 1 couldn't help feeling there were three of us in the bed, which was one more than was wanted. You make it sound awful, says Francis. It wouldn't have been so awful if you weren't there between us. Her logic slides off his ear. He is at once the invisible occasion of her lovemaking and the invisible ruination of it. And yet it is as if she were flattering him, telling him that his potency is of account even in his absence. Well, he says, if 1 somehow improved his performance, 1 don't see any reason for complaint. No complaints, says Nora. What I'm saying is that because of you, or my connection to you, 1 was attracting the wrong flies. The metaphor disconcerts him. -Send the flies away if they're a nuisance or swat them with yesterday's Times. The hell with your flies. She laughs a little unpleasantly. - I can't resist homage, but 1 resent it afterward if it's not the right sort. You understand me, don't you? The question of whether he understands her or not is a question not to be answered on the moment and Francis wisely, or out of blank indifference or passionless necessity,
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lets it hang fire. He has been gone so long his return seems merely another aspect of his absence. There must be times when he wonders how he can work the event of his return into the scenario he has been writing in his head. At the start of the film he leaves his family and friends to act out certain obsessive fantasies. The ending of the film-if beginning, middle and end proceed in the usual relationship-ought to deal with his belated return and, if only briefly, what comes of it. And yet his return, no matter how treated, runs the risk of anti-climax, of flattening the imagination rather than flying with it. How can there be a reconciliation when the split itself is of no great issue in the narrative? The return home to his wife (and daughter), who have partially given him up, who have given up his memory and not the living man, ought to be a fantasy in itself, comparable in tonality to that of preceding events. The return of the lost, thought dead, husband is the concluding fantasy of the film, as Francis sees it. The concluding fantasy must bring everything together or carry the narrative back to where it began, complete the circle or erase it altogether. The final scene he has imagined is too realistic and schematic, is not quite the note on which he wants to end. Until it comes to him, if it ever does, he has only the fuzziest notion of how the scenario should conclude. One imagines him dredging up possibilities, and finding them insufficient. The entire narrative has taken place in Francis's imagination. When he returns to shore, to wife and daughter, pitting his strength against the exertions of the tide, barely two hours have elapsed. Their teen-aged daughter Nadia has been difficult for Nora to handle since Francis's disappearance, has been rebellious and sassy, and is away at boarding school where, unknown to either of her parents, she is unwholesomely
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involved with an art instructor thirty years her semor, whose name is also Francis. Nora telegrams their daughter, announcing a visit in which a surprise is to be anticipated. The daughter, suspicious of her mother, assumes that the surprise has to do with someone, with some rat having informed her mother of Nadia's inappropriate liaison. She goes to see the other Francis, a professor of art and brilliant miniaturistit is his nature to see things small-to warn him of the impending visit of mother plus surprise. This Francis is no stranger to the visits of irate mothers- he has lost not a few jobs on their account-and he instructs Nadia to leave the matter in his hands. Not to panic. He will do a portrait of her mother. We will tell her, he says, that reports of our connubiality are in excess of provocation. I don't understand when you talk that way, she says. You know how limited my vocabulary is. All I know, he says, is that you don't know the word "no." This Francis knows how to hurt a young girl, an aspect of an over formed character, a man who speaks what little there is of his mind freely. You don't love me, charges Nadia. Already there is a new face in miniature on Francis's diminutive easel. When have I told you that I loved you, he counters. She thinks back, ransacks her cluttered memory, but is unable to come up with a single instance. You said I had fiery eyes, she recalls. He admits with no little reluctance to the exceeding probability of her recollection. I took it for love, she says sadly. Why else, I thought, would he say such a thing. You're becoming boring, he says imperiously. I said it merely because it was true. Alas, the fire has turned to smoke. Nadia admires his capacity for uncompromised candor. Francis suggests a course of action to his student, something so obvious it's a wonder she hasn't thought of it her-
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self. She is to make it seem that she is involved with someone else. The choice of pigeon he will leave completely in her hands, though he advises someone unlikely, the headmistress perhaps or the caretaker. His plan offers her no solace. I can't pretend, she says. When you are fifteen you can say that kind of thing. When you are forty-two and a thorough cad there is nothing you can say that doesn't make matters worse. What's your mother like? he asks. Nadia has never thought of her mother as like anything at all. -Mother has always relied on the kindness of strangers, she says, reaching back for a perception. When she dresses up she looks much younger than her age. None of thisdescription prepares the miniaturist for his first view of Nora. He is looking out the window of his garret when a brown Mercedes drives up and a man and a woman (in black) step out. It is clear-he has seen that proprietary look before-that they are parents come on a desperate errand. And since he knows that Nadia's mother is arriving it stands to reason that the handsome woman in black is that very personage. It has been on his mind to make love to Nadia's mother as a way of diverting her suspicion (who is the man with her? he wonders) and when he sees her he notes that there might be more pleasure in that strategic chore than he had reasons to expect. This Francis is rich in deviousness, a master of obliquity, though he thinks of it as the artist's prerogative to manipulate whatever raw material comes his way. Francis S. doesn't like what he sees of Old Country School and says so in front of the school officials to Nora's embarrassment. What bad manners he has, she thinks. How did I live with him so long without noticing it before? The Headmistress, a hearty woman with a penchant for non-stop chat, takes them around, pointing out the vistas while presumably trying to locate their daughter for them. Don't you have a schedule of classes? asks Francis.
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We used to, says the irrepressible Mrs. Bess. Now we simply let the girls evolve their own curriculum on a day to day basis. Your daughter, I've been informed, has been specializing in fine art. So Francis and Nora are brought before the other Francis, Old Country School's notorious miniaturist, in the hope of turning up their errant daughter. The miniaturist reports that the Headmistress's news is out of date, that Nadia, if that was the girl's name, is no longer studying with him. This information is addressed to the mother of the former student. Do you lose all your students or only the more promising ones? asks Francis. Hush, says Nora. To the other Francis: Can you help us find our daughter? The miniaturist glances a bit ostentatiously at his watch. -It's hard to refuse such a charming request, he says. You can refuse it if you really try, says Francis. Give it a little effort. Nora is mortified to travel in the company of such a boorish man, apologizes to the Art Instructor by winking at him. The Art Instructor leads the distraught parents through a maze of curricula: Dance, Mathematics, Penmanship, The Body Politic, Literature, Winter Sports, The Natural Sciences, Philosophy, Astrology, Cosmetology, Health Education, Filmmaking, Dialectical Materialism, Comedy, Pathos, The Applied Arts, Sexism, Mime, Ancient History, The Tragic Muse, and Female Psychology. Hours of unrewarded search pass. They certainly have a rich curriculum, says Nora, looking for the right thing to say. A curriculum for the rich, says Francis. Their guide says nothing, gives a world-weary sigh. - I'm afraid I have to leave you now to do a class in Shadow Drawing. And after that? asks Nora.
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The Art Instructor merely smiles brilliantly and goes off to his Studio, leaving the parents to unspoken recriminations. Nora and Francis return to the Headmistress's Office, beset with anxiety, each blaming the other for the state of affairs. The Headmistress says she is more convinced than ever that they have nothing to worry about. -She is here, under our very noses, count on that and be patient. Sometimes when parents come up like this, their intentions scarifying or confusing, the girls make themselves scarce. Unscarce her, says Francis, who is by this time ready to take the school apart. Sir, says the Headmistress, if I believed you meant what you say, I should request you withdraw your daughter from this institution forthwith. If you produce her, madam, I'll withdraw her, says Francis. Nora apologizes for her husband's intemperate behavior, says she is sure the Headmistress is doing everything in her power to locate their little girl. Be assured, says the Headmistress, that everything that can be done will be done. I've even ordered the caretaker to drain the lake. Nora collapses against her husband in a near faint. The Headmistress, who has had years of experience in dealing with hysterical parents (four years back the Penmanship Instructor had turned out to be a sex maniac), advises the couple to return to their room at the Old Country Inn and have a drink, which she would offer them herself if she didn't profoundly disapprove of the practice. -The recovery of absent children is too serious a matter to be left to parents, she says sententiously. The parents have a fight at the Inn-one drink is all it takes-and Nora, wronged from beginning to end, storms out the door to request a separate room for herself. While she is making her wishes known at the main desk, she is spotted by the other Francis, who is having a drink at the
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bar with some other members of the faculty. The miniaturist comes over to pay his compliments to Nora-his meagre salary hardly allows for more-and to ask if she has recovered her daughter. Nora agrees to accompany the Art Instructor to his attic apartment (it is his idea, of course) ostensibly to discuss what else might be done to locate Nadia. The miniaturist runs through his tacky grab bag of flatteries in thirty minutes without the smallest intimation of encouragement or success. And what about Nadia? she asks. Not a pale shadow of the mother, says the daughter's lover. Pretty enough for a child, quite lovely really, though without the fire and distinction of her progenitor. It is not that she is taken in by his transparent and crass appeals, but that she is moved by his obviousness, touched that he is unable to make a better show at dissembling. After the miniaturist does her portrait, she goes reluctantly to bed with him, more acquiescence than desire. As soon as he enters her, the door opens to his apartment and Nadia comes in to discover mother and lover in unequivocal commitment. It was the only way I knew to conjure you, Nora would say later in explanation. After they go to bed, a routine and perfunctory conjunction, the miniaturist admits that he has also been the daughter's lover. Nora is slow to react to this odd confession. He's making it up, she thinks, or else it is a misunderstanding. Even if it were so, why wouldn't he have the decency to keep it to himself. Have I made you angry? he asks. He is sitting up on the bed, his hands clasped behind his head, looking selfsatisfied and ripe. I'm not sure I understood you, she says. What is the nature of your involvement with my daughter? Her voice
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affects a certain casualness as if whatever he might say would make no large difference in her life. The miniaturist purses his lips and whistles. If Francis were here, says Nora to herself, her habit since his disappearance to evoke her husband as moral imperative, he would teach this motherfucker a lesson he would not soon forget. What happens defies Nora's recollection of it happening, comes so quickly that moments after she is unable to recall the cause and effect of events. She remembers gripping a palette knife, but not how the knife found her hand. She remembers holding it with her back to him, a residue of paint (she thinks, pain) staining her palm. This other Francis calls her to his bedside, a peremptory request as if she were some form of lower order. It is the last time he will humiliate anyone, she recalls herself thinking. From the credits we discover that Charlotte has performed the parts of both wife and daughter while Francis has played the two Francises. The game has tired him. It's no fun any more, he says. Nadia catches sight of her father, or, as she sees it, a man who resembles the picture she keeps of him, coming out of the Old Country Inn. This man is considerably thinner, though no less attractive for being almost wasted. His soul, she thinks, is living on the outside of his skin. He looks lost and she asks him if he is looking for someone in particular. He has had too much to drink and answers her by asking the same question in return. What is clear from his behavior is that he doesn't recognize Nadia, or is unaware of recognizing her. No questions, he says, taking her arm. He takes her for a walk in the woods and then to his hotel room. When she asks him his name he refuses to give it to her, insisting on the necessity of them remaining strangers
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to one another. Francis has had one or two drinks too many and when he lies down on the bed, he falls asleep. What a drag, says Nadia. She takes off her shoes and blouse and lies down in bed next to him. Daddy, she says, wake up. Francis opens his eyes as Nora walks into the room with paint on her hands. Why do all these charades, he wonders, end in some kind of melodramatic revelation? When Francis knocks on the door no one is home and he lets himself in after awhile with his key. Their summer cottage has undergone some changes in his absence, additions and remodellings. The kitchen is a stranger to him. He goes into every room, looking for traces of himself and others, then sits down in what he has always thought of as the place's most comfortable chair, his chair, and closes his eyes. Someone is shaking him. Daddy, wake up, a voice is calling. He hears the sound of the bay, the lapping of water against the shore. He's dead to the world, another voice says. When he opens his eyes he sees his wife and daughter peering down at him, looks of astonishment on their faces. I'm home, he says.
Coda Genevieve is dozing on the couch when I come in. She looks up with a mixture of astonishment and irritation as if my entrance had been made merely to distract her from her dreams. Is something wrong? she asks. You knew, didn't you, that Francis was getting restless agam. I didn't know. Has he said something to you? He's behaved, I say, about as well as he can. He's said absolutely nothing. The signs of course were there. Were they? Come over here and tell me about them. When he enters the supermarket-it is not an unusual feeling for him-Francis knows he has made a mistake. It is not the long checkout lines, not that. Nor is it the dullness of the fare, the absence of nourishing choices. It is more an uneasiness, a slippery foreboding of some crisis not easy to define or name. He chooses his cart like a man buying a car, kicking the wheels with obligatory disregard, not so much fastidious as exhibitionistic, making melodrama out of the most humdrum of chores. Do you have something in a later model? he asks no one in particular. He is not looking at anyone, is avoiding all eye contact, when we meet circumstantially at the frozen foods locker. Stay close, says Francis. I think I saw one of the fish fingers move. My shopping needs take me up different aisles, and the rest of Francis's story is pieced together from a number of fragmentary eyewitness accounts. Francis tends to get paralyzed by choices and sometimes
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stands frog-eyed for hours in supermarkets, staring at the gleaming shelves. It is at such a time that the tall handsome woman in the red hat approaches. She carries no purse, which is odd, keeps her hands in the pockets of her maxilength tan polo coat. I have a gun in my hand, she says to Francis out of the side of her mouth. Abandon your cart and come with me to the parking lot. He leaves readily, precedes her out the door with his hands clamped behind his head like a prisoner of war. Come back again, sir, says the assistant manager as he passes. They move in single file to the green Peugeot wagon, a bumper guard missing in front, ding like a goblin's mouth in right rear fender. It had been in the lot when he drove in and he had recognized it, though had not for some reason assimilated that recognition. I can't go back, he says when she orders him into the car. That's all over. We'll talk about it later, she says. I have what they call an itchy trigger finger, so I suggest you get in behind the wheel and do as I tell you. There is a man in the back seat of the car, already dead, bullet wound behind the ear. Getting in, he says: I've missed you, Charlotte. I'll bet, she says. She changes her mind and has him slide over into the passenger seat. You can't keep the gun on me while you drive, he says. She smiles ominously. -This is a friendly ride, Tom. The gun was merely theater. A touch of old times. She leans over and kisses his ear. I'm being taken for a ride, he thinks, though sits back in relaxed posture, pleased to be in motion. How have you been? he asks. The same, she says. They turn right on an undesignated road and travel it about two miles, then go right again on a dirt road marked
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Private. It is no place he has ever been before, no place he remembers having been. At some point-they are still not out of the woods-the car comes to a stop. We'll get out here, she says, as if showing an old friend the sights, though in this case there is nothing but woods to see. Francis says, Wait a minute. Charlotte returns her right hand to the gun pocket of her polo coat. I don't expect to be treated this way when I'm packing heat, she says in a sulky voice. Are we friends or are we not? Francis precedes her from the car, willing and unwilling to believe that she means to kill him. You've aged, she says. He doesn't deny it. They follow an overgrown path until they come to what appears to be a discarded campsite. I have a surprise for you, Charlotte says. Francis imagines his life slipping through his fingers. Charlotte disrobes, opening her polo coat button by button, her face without expression, letting the coat slide sinuously from her shoulders to the earth. She is wearing nothing but a filmy rose-colored negligee underneath. Francis in sympathy experiences a sense of grief. At some point Charlotte goes through a brief tour of seductive gestures, cupping her wide dark-nip pled breasts, thrusting her pelvis back and forth in erotic improvisation. I can't go through with it, she announces. Francis nods his head, picks up her coat and holds it out to her. Although he is tempted to, for some reason he does not reach into her pocket and remove the gun. He is frightened of dying (what does she have the gun for? he thinks), though he will not do anything to improve his chances of survival. Perhaps he likes the idea of risk. I have a confession, she says. Her hand slips into her coat pocket-he is obligingly holding her coat for her-and
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returns to view with the weapon in firing position. -It is something that must have crossed your mind. When 1 brought you here 1 had planned to make you sorry you had been so bad to us. Now that 1 see you again 1 can't go through with it. Go through with what? It, she whispers. Charlotte sits on the ground with her hands covering her face. Her coat is open and folded under her legs. Francis holds out his hand to help her up, his head turned slightly away to avoid the spectacle of her nudity. She doesn't see his extended hand or chooses not to see it. It may be that she briefly reaches for his hand just at the moment he turns his head toward the crackling noise in the brush behind them. When she doesn't take his hand, when she continues to sit on the ground in apparent self-loathing and despair, Francis makes the mistake of going down to her on one knee. Perhaps it is a calculated mistake, perhaps a gesture of hopefulness or affection. After a brief close-mouthed kiss, she opens her coat to him. There is a cold fall wind blowing in, and when the sun dies as it does at this moment (I mention the circumstantiality of it), Francis takes his heat where he can find it. He moves inside her coat to escape the chill. Move you head to the left, she orders. Put your arms further down if you don't mind. 1 thought you knew what you were doing. She is as officious as a neglected fishwife, moves him around like a pawn on a chessboard, irritated with the least of his hesitations. Move your left hand down and to the right. Further. It's still not what 1 want. And you knee is in the wrong place. This is not like you, he would tell her, though since she is almost always playing a role it is as like her as not. 1 have some rights too, you know, she complains. Do you
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think I don't? Do you think I exist to serve you? His erection shrivels under the assualt of her polemic, awaiting better times. He feels in her coat pocket for her gun. What are you waiting for, lover? she whispers, clasping his hand in her pocket. We don't have forever. This doesn't work for me, he says. I don't give a fuck ifit does or not, cowboy. I'm thinking of myself for a change. Her harshness is mitigated by a wink. She is tipping her audience to the fact that it is a performance she is giving, though why the need (he wonders). Is there someone else looking on? Francis grudgingly goes along with her game, his inner eye on the almost-filled shopping cart he left behind. Charlotte's demands-the demands of the character she is offering him-are not so bizarre that he need refuse them. He has expected worse, has anticipated the unimaginable. Nothing of course is wholly unimaginable, the body a set of fixed possibilities, the erotic, as Charlotte knows as well as anyone, a game of the imagination. Would you be so kind as to go down on me, she says. Here? I knew you'd find some excuse. Don't tell me you have a headache too. I'm sick and tired of your excuses, I really am. Her role, by implication, defines his. He has, whoever he is, treated her carelessly, aware of her only in respect to his own needs. Correspondingly, she has reached the point where she will no longer put up with his neglect. At the same time-it is a classic paradox-the shrillness in which she presents her demands invites resistance to them. Does she really want to get what she says she wants or is she after, as before, the martyrdom of being denied what she deserves. Perhaps, in mistreating her, the character he is playing has been more genuinely responsive to her wishes than either of them knows.
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At the moment these ruminations are going through Francis's head, someone comes up behind him and plicks the point of a knife in his back. Get your hands behind your head, says a voice. With professional expedition, Francis is tied up, wrists to ankle, an unnatural connection. As soon as Charlotte gets to her feet, the intruder hooks his foot around hers and reintroduces her to the ground. She slides away from him, reaching behind her for something to use against him. All she can manage is a handful of dirt and small stones. I like a lady with spirit, he says, laughing in a way that does not inspire confidence in his sanity. Somehow Charlotte gets the knife away from him or perhaps it is her own knife she wields-a surprise in any event to see it in her hand. She slashes at him, tearing the sleeve of his rust-colored car coat. He backs up, seems amused by her vehemence, narrowly avoids her repeated thrusts by swaggering out of the way. She stalks him with the knife, jabbing and slashing. Francis wonders where the gun is and why Charlotte doesn't use it against her assailant. It seems a kind of dance, Charlotte slashing wildly with the knife, her antagonist slipping away from her blows like a fighter. Finally, he grabs her wrist and wrestles the knife loose. Damn you, she screams, sitting in the du~t like a rag doll, tears running down her face. She barely resists him when he lifts her negligee. Not in front of my husband, she whispers. He don't give a shit, says the intruder, pinning his mouth to hers. She pounds against his chest with her fists as he kisses her, makes a show of resistance before abruptly sliding her arms around his neck as if moved to passion by the insistence of his embrace. Francis can't help but watch, head turned away, eyes half-closed, filtering the image. Their sexual dance goes on awhile, extending itself like a novel with insufficient plot, filling out the spaces of inaction with contrived detail.
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The sunlight, burning through the trees, marks them in graphs of shadow, interstices oflight and shade imprisoning the flickering figures. It is as if the film had been improperly threaded in the projector, Francis notes, the form depersonalizing the subject. Afterward, the grim rapist is disappointingly sentimental, pleads with Charlotte to run away with him. She treats his maudlin plea with a staring silence, her contempt registered in the turn of her lip. And what about my husband, she says. While he lives I am still his wife. The rapist turns his attention to Francis, removes the gag from his mouth. I want to run off with your wife, he says. Do you have any objections? This isn't my wife, says Francis. The rapist jumps up and down in a parody of glee. -He don't got no more use for you than a worn-out pair of shoes. If it were me, I would of stuck by you. Charlotte picks up her knife and, while her assailant recommends himself to her, cuts Francis's ropes. Can you forgive me? she asks him. There isn't anything to forgive, he says, unable to look at her. Don't disappoint me, she pleads, slipping the knife into his hand like a love note. Then she moves back into the shadows, a sly look on her face, to retail some secret to the other. Whatever she says to him-one avoids thinking the worst-he gestures refusal. Charlotte is furious, calls him a coward and slaps his face. That she had the gall to strike him seems to astonish him and he looks up at the heavens in disbelief before whapping her with his forearm in retaliation. She meets the ground like a felled tree. I like some spirit in the gentle sex, the thug announces, but you overdo it, lady. Charlotte drags herself slowly, agonizingly, along the ground to Francis's side. Are you going to let him treat me
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this way? she hisses. Francis has his own score to settle, though he has never fought with a knife before and is uneasy at having such a weapon in his hand, wary at the retribution it invites. I have no right to take the law in my own hands, he thinks. The rapist slinks off, glances at Francis over his shoulder to see if he's being followed. Charlotte, not Francis, pursues him. You're not even man enough to fight for me, are you? she chides. Who says I'm not? he asks, looking around for his accuser. The rapist returns swaggeringly to the high ground, puffs out his chest, glares menacingly at Francis, lip curled. You want to make something of it? he says. What did you have in mind? Francis asks in return. Charlotte encourages Francis to strike a war-like pose, advises him not to give his opponent the advantage of thinking him afraid. You're a rabble rouser, Francis says to her. She takes it as a compliment, as a gesture of forgiveness, and kisses him on the cheek, which excites growls of jealousy from the other. The fight lasts no more than a minute or two, though its symbolic time is extensive. This is what happens. The rapist rushes at Francis, though trips before reaching him and sprawls on his face. Francis seizes the presumption of opportunity by charging his fallen adversary and stumbling over him. Motherfucker, he yells. The rapist rolls backwards out of the way, deflecting the brunt of Francis's attack, takes a glancing blow to the side of the head. (Francis holds the knife in his left hand, using it as warning rather than weapon.) What, are you crazy, man? the rapist shouts at him, voice like stiff-arm. Francis is over him with the knife pulled back as if he means to deliver fatal news. - Man, you can get the chair for killing me. Is that the kind of future you want for
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your family? It is like dreaming you have murdered and waking to find the bloody knife in your hand. When the rapist pleads for his life, squeezing out tears, exhibiting the most abject cowardice, Francis loses interest III vengeance. Give me a little room, okay? says the other. Take two steps back and I'll take off, you'll never see me again, okay? Don't be a fool, sweetheart, Charlotte calls out to one or both of them. Francis is reluctant to give up his advantage but doesn't know what else to do with it. Charlotte has apparently wandered off. That's the end of it, of Francis's account. He steps back and the assailant scrambles to his feet and leaves, though not before rasping some final bravado (She said I give her more pleasure than you ever did.), leaving Francis with the anxiety that comes of unexpressed violence. There is no hero's reward. This is a second version of the incident, an inconclusive fragment. The assailant, rejected by Charlotte-he has asked her to be his lady-takes her car and drives off. Are you all right, honey? she asks Tom. He doesn't answer, seems to look at something in the distance, or to stare blindly at some unformed horizon, his sight diffused by distance. Say something, will you? Do you think I wanted it to happen this way? She slaps his face, laughs pointlessly. Tom has nothing to say. She retrieves the knife and comes back to cut his ropes. Holding the knife away from her body as if both ends had killing points, she tries to read Tom's expressionless face. Forgive me? she asks in a tinkle of a voice. Charlotte wants some talk from Tom, some clarification of his feelings toward her. She can't bring herself to cut his ropes. - You have to say something, I don't know what you're thinking.
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She gets down on her knees. Please, she would say, but she has lost her taste for pleading, waddles toward him in a penance of humiliation. Instead of cutting his ropes-he has still not forgiven her, not said so-she cuts open his pants. The gesture astonishes him. Charlotte chokes back a laugh. You take everything so seriously, she says. It's what I've always liked about you, you know. Her long-fingered hand wanders into the crack in his pants, pretends to blindness, the fingers feeling their way in the dark. Her nails tend to prick. After a discreet interval, her head follows after her hand, bulls its way through the seemingly inaccessible space without a backward glance. Not even the sound of a car coming down their road interrupts her from her purpose. Her concentration is unassailable, inviolable. They are connected by a chain of interlocking tunnels, his open pants, her mouth, his retracted organ, her circuitous tongue. I want him to say he forgives me, she remembers herself thinking. He doesn't have to say it, merely indicate it by a touch or a glance. Tom's wrists ache from the bondage of his ropes. He is the victim of several opposing sensations, none he chosses to make known. If the other were to slip up behind her, she has no reason to expect that Tom would warn her of his silent appearance. Nevertheless, nothing of the kind is on her mind. What is Tom thinking? Tom has no thoughts. He is experiencing his assailant as the wife she affects to be, the woman in his life-not Nora, but another wife of equal claim. His wife, Charlotte, is balancing accounts, he thinks (if he thinks anything). He resists pleasure. She works on him, at him, with all the imaginative skill at her command, the event a struggle of wills between them.
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I followed Francis and the woman from the Grand National, partly out of curiosity, partly out of concern for his safety. (Did you?) Yes. They got onto a pot~holed road, half dirt, half-paved-the third or fourth road they had risked-that snaked its way into an area of woods I had never been. They traveled a little over four miles on this road before stopping at a clearing in the brush that may have been a campsite at one time, though hadn't been used in years. (When they stopped did they see you?) If they did, nothing was said. I left my car at the side of the road about a thousand feet back and climbed up a promontory, overgrown with brush, just above Francis and the woman. I assumed from what he had told me that the woman with him was either Charlotte or Emily. From my vantage, I couldn't quite hear their conversation, could only imagine it, though I was able to make outthe sun sometimes in my eyes-much of what took place. The woman ordered Francis to tie her folded orange scarf around his eyes, which he did with what seemed to be only token resistance. (What did she look like, this woman?) Tall, dark, angular. She was wearing a purple hat that cast a shadow across her face. They were talking quietly, or Charlotte was talking. Francis unusually laconic. The woman gestured as she talked, though I doubt that Francis could see more than a blur of her, if that, through the blindfold. The word 'wisdom' reached me without perceptible context. The woman kissed Francis, barely brushing his lips, her head pulling back before he could offer response. She needn't have troubled. Francis appeared not so much annoyed as indifferent, treated her gesture as invisible. As if in response to his ignoring her, Charlotte took some clothesline from her shoulder purse and tied his hands behind him. Again, Francis offered neither resistance nor
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objection. (So it was her and not anyone else?) I'm telling you what I witnessed. The woman sat cross-legged in front of him, in a modified yoga posture, for a long time-it seemed a long time to one observing though may have been no more than fifteen minutes in actual time-whispering. From the look on her face and from what came after, I would guess she was describing to him the sexual adventures she had in store for him, the things she would do for him and the things she expected in return. An occasional word or phrase reached me. Impossible, Francis said at one point, the last word of a sentence. It may have been that he had said, What you want me to do is physically impossible. (Or not impossible.) Or not impossible. Charlotte seemed to be waiting for a particular response from Francis. While she was whispering her litany- I hadn't noticed this right away -she was unbuttoning her blouse. (He couldn't see that she was doing it, could he?) There was no reason to believe that he could see through the blindfold. Francis reached out a hand and touched her face, visualizing it with his fingers like a blind man. (Wait a minute. She had tied his hands behind him.) She had. He managed, while she was whispering of the delights and horrors she had in store for him, to undo the knots. The woman remained absolutely still as he traced the contours of her face with the fingers of one hand, the other hand at his side or in his lap. Charlotte, still in her lotus position,jockied herself toward him, taking his head in her hands and pressing it against her wide, flat thick-nip pled breasts. I shifted my position to erase the cramp in my leg, disturbing the brush just enough to attract her attention. She turned her head-I doubt she saw me-then turned back with a shrug. Wild animal, I heard her say. When Francis withdrew his face momentarily, his blindfold was askew, one eye uncovered. Let me fix it, Charlotte said. I don't want you to see me. She tied it as before, though perhaps somewhat tighter this time, her knuckles white from the effort. (You couldn't see her
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knuckles.) When she was sure he couldn't see, she took his hand and showed him where the zipper to her skirt lived. With uncharacteristic delicacy-perhaps a function of his not seeing-he opened the zipper and removed her skirt. When Francis's shirt and pants were removed-the woman kept her blouse on, though open-they embraced in sitting position, the woman's knees circumscribing his. They sat facing each other, barely touching, defying conventional urgency. Nothing happened for too long a time. It was as if they believed the afternoon had no duration. (Do you think everyone is in a hurry like you?) Is that the way I am? (Not always. I was being amusing.) When he kissed her- I don't remember him kissing her on the mouth before-she asked him if he could find his way in. (You heard her say that, if he could find his way in?) I heard the word "way" and imagined the rest. He had his hand between her legs, she between his, her other hand around his neck pulling him forward. Her legs wrapped around his back like strands of rope. (Did you envy him?) Not for long. It's difficult, watching like that, not to feel a little left out. (And also part of it too, I imagine.) Okay. Even when they shifted positions, as they did from time to time, they barely seemed to move, savoring intensified sensation. They might have been underwater or being filmed in slow motion. Watching them, I was aware not of being aroused, but of hunger, and I took a stick of chewing gum from my jacket pocket. (I never knew you to carry chewing gum in your pocket.) They kept at it, sitting front to front, then lying down, he on top then she, then he again, moving persuasively against each other and away, tall, bony, flat-breasted Charlotte, her hat and blouse on throughout, and Francis, like an ancient moth, softlooking in the late afternoon light despite his loss of weight, without notable passion or urgency, barely increasing pace and slowing again, then resting in suspension, recharging the self, getting in touch with the otherness of pleasure. Perhaps feeling nothing. I had seen enough. (I should
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think so.) Still, it was hard to get up and leave, like walking out of a movie, even when you think you know how it finishes, before the actual end. I wanted the word Fin on the screen before me, something to release me from the obligation of witness. Finally, I climbed down through the brush and back to the road, worrying when I didn't see it right away that someone had gone off with our car. I could still see them, the woman, hatless now, on top, looking at Francis through closed eyes, rising off him and returning, lifting and falling, fucking in endless repetition and variation, a mechanical toy with the machinery awry. I didn't see or hear a car drive up so that the woman who appeared must have come on foot. She was blond, her hair in a rope down her back, dressed in a brown corduroy jumper and white blouse, looking a bit like someone's idea of Alice in Wonderland. The only incongruity were the black gloves she wore. The early fall wind made itself felt in the late afternoon, more premonition than actuality, a foreshadowing of harsher weather to come. Francis and Charlotte must have been oblivious to her presence. The gunshots seemed almost to precede the fact of the gun in her hand. They were like a signal, the shuts. The bodies, moving in slow motion, increased pace perceptibly, quivering, convulsed, shaking like the ground in the first stages of a quake. The third shot was a gift to herself. The evidence, the three tangled figures, recreated the scene like a freeze frame in a film. I saw enough from the road not to want to get any closer, then I got into the car which was where I had left it-the doors of course had been locked-and drove home to tell you, Genevieve, how the story ended. (And that's what actually happened?) I nod. (I know it's a personal reaction, Joshua, but the ending leaves me unsatisfied. It's not what I want.) The way it is is the way it happened. (It's the way you insist it happened, isn't that so?)
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Insistence is not to be discounted as a piece of the picture. (What if the text stopped before it happened, before Emily, if that's who it is, arrives on the scene?) Would that satisfy you? (It might. It might. One never knows.)
It was hard to get up and leave, like walking out on a movie, even when you think you know how it finishes, before the final curtain. I wanted the word Fin on the screen before me, something to release me from the obligation of witness. Finally, I climbed down through the brush and back to the road, worrying when I didn't see it right away that someone had gone off with our car. I could still see them, the woman, hatless now on top, looking at Francis through closed eyes, rising off him' and returning, lifting and falling, a routine of endless self-perpetuation, formalizing itself like a machine gone awry. rising off him and returning, the final throes.
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