Basic Forms

by Skolnik, Fred;

  “Never confuse the man with the role,” William Horn said when they had all sat down in the Automat. The Horns seemed to be under the impression that Zupan was interested in an acting career and were therefore always giving him little pointers. “Imagine,” Horn went on, “if I were to believe that I was in fact the character I was portraying on the stage.” Here Elizabeth shook her head ruefully to indicate that she appreciated the perils of such folly. “In that case I would become vulnerable to the responses of the audience. Their adulation would inspire me to embellishment. Their contempt would cause me to doubt myself. What then would become of the character as he was intended to be? What would become of me? No, Edward, one must guard against relinquishing oneself to the role. One must remain indifferent to the audience and true to oneself.”

  “Gee,” Elizabeth said. “And here I always thought you was supposed to play to the audience.” This was clearly said on Zupan’s behalf, as though to articulate his confusion.

  “Not at all,” Horn said. “You must understand that the character is complete long before the curtain rises. The actor must therefore affirm it, assert it, in all its peculiarities. I’ve had many a spat with my directors on this score, I’ll have you know. ‘Project, project,’ they always say. ‘Identify.’ As if this very indifference were not the truest form of identification. To stand back and say, ‘Here is the man, for better or for worse, like it or not, take it or leave it’—that is the supreme affirmation.” These last words of his had been declaimed with considerable heat, causing a fine film of sweat to break out on his forehead which Elizabeth dabbed away with her handkerchief, catching Zupan’s eye with a worried look and a little admonishing shake of her head, as though Zupan himself had been responsible for provoking this outburst. But Horn’s face had gone quite slack, his eyes glazed and fixed on some indeterminate point in the middle distance. “Back in the Forties, when we were touring Europe,” he now said, “I had what you might call my greatest triumph.” Here he patted Elizabeth’s knee. “Liz had just come over from the States to join me in Paris. I’ll bet you didn’t know she was almost Miss America.”

  “Ooh-la-la.” This was from Elizabeth.

  “Anyway, in this play we were doing, we were supposed to be in a prisoner-of-war camp. They had us all in a big cell right next to the yard where the executions took place. Altogether there were ten of us, I believe. That is to say, myself and nine others. Well, in the evening, almost midway through the first act, the commander of the camp, or commandant as he is generally called, comes into the cell with a great deal of fanfare and apparently a signed order in his hand. ‘In the morning,’ he says, ‘one of you will be shot. I leave the decision which to you.’”

  “Can you imagine,” Elizabeth said.

  “‘Which to you.’ It took us a while to get the gist of his meaning because of the stilted way he had of expressing himself, if you follow me. One of the men, in fact, a logical positivist and former professor of linguistics lately enlisted in the cause, even went so far as to claim that syntactically the statement was meaningless and could therefore be safely disregarded. But the more experienced men among us knew he meant business. Naturally, when the full import of the message finally sunk in, everyone thought we should cast lots, as the saying goes. Except me, or the character I was playing. I said, ‘No, I shall go.’

  “This was followed by an uncomfortable silence according to the text, which I thought natural enough, but the director called for ‘a confused hubbub of voices’ in keeping with his theatrical flair. After it died down, one of the men said to me, ‘But why, Enrique?’ I was Enrique in the play, you see.

  “‘Because I am the strongest,’ I replied, ‘and it is noble to spare others what one can endure oneself.’ This got a big hand. It was that kind of audience. The truth is, as I make clear in the soliloquy which concludes the first act and in which I try to justify my decision philosophically, all my life I had been pursuing the ideal of nobility. Yes, Edward, to die, to die. To die an exalted death. To die even foolishly. What were these men to me but the instrument of my destiny? Did I love them? On the contrary, I despised them. At the root of all nobility lies a secret contempt. Great acts liberate the spirit. Great thoughts liberate the imagination. Merely to think of oneself as a destiny adds a new dimension to one’s being. Of course, great ideas can destroy you if you haven’t the courage to live them. To have an exalted vision of yourself and lack the will to consummate it—that is death in life.”

  Again Horn had grown excited, waving his hands a little and raising his voice, but since his mouth was full of food and he hadn’t stopped eating all the while he was talking it was almost impossible to understand what he was saying. Now he patted his lips with a napkin and proceeded to light a cigar, having removed the cellophane wrapper with great ceremony and blowing the smoke across the table in thick, spiraling gusts which Elizabeth dissipated by fanning her hand rapidly in front of her face.

  “The next act,” Horn said, “was a kind of long flashback, as we call it in the trade. Actually it was a dream sequence in which I’m seen reviewing my life, as it were. Figures from out of my past drift across the stage and stop to chat a while: my mom and dad, the women I’d loved, Father Balboa, Aunt Yvette, the Tuttles—the Tuttles were these English tourists I’d been involved with before the war, you see. Well, anyway, this goes on till dawn when the guards come to take me away. But instead of putting me up against the wall they take me straight to the commandant’s office. He’s sitting there looking very pleased with himself, all decked out in his Sunday best: boots up to his asshole, riding crop, bus conductor’s hat. And here’s what he says to me. He says, ‘You are free to go. It is the others who will be shot.’

  “‘Others who will be.’ It took me a while to get the gist of his meaning, but when it dawned on me I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘Which others?’ I said. ‘Who ...?’ I tried to put it to him in words he could understand. But all he said was, ‘Dismiss!’ Kind of hysterical. Like he’d been doing Japs. And then I was free. And as I leave the camp I can hear the shots ring out. Over and over again. End of Act Two.”

  “In Act Three he gets the girl,” Elizabeth said. “That was me.”

  “You see, when I get back to my village everyone naturally thinks I’ve betrayed the men. My first impulse is to tell them the truth, but something holds me back. You’ve got to remember that in a manner of speaking I’d been thwarted or stymied in my quest for nobility. Here I’d been ready to sacrifice my life, but apparently it wasn’t enough. It is as if we’re supposed to understand from this that it is harder and therefore more noble and in the last analysis, I might add, certainly more conducive to longevity to live without a world than to throw your life away. Think of it, Edward. With a single word, accompanied of course by signed affidavits and that sort of thing, I could vindicate myself. I might even become a hero. Instead I choose silence. I willingly submit to the hatred and contempt of my fellow men. I become a pariah. And in this secret of mine lies my strength. For in this silence I renounce the world and with it that part of myself that was imprisoned in the world’s idea of me. I am free, strong in the strength of my truth.

  “Then I meet Liz, who is the grain merchant’s daughter and had been away at college all this time studying comparative literature. We fall in love immediately, though this doesn’t sit too well with the villagers and she herself is aware of the rumors surrounding my past. But I explain nothing to her, I require nothing from her, neither faith nor adulation. It is said that only he who is sufficient unto himself can bestow true love, but he who is sufficient unto himself requires none in return. I love her as a god might love a mortal woman. This is perhaps an inhuman kind of love but it is the only kind of love that I can know. Personally I’m not sure how satisfactory this kind of arrangement can be for either of the parties concerned. It seems we are doomed to love either too much or too little. This is the dilemma of human love. But that�
�s another story. As the curtain falls I am seen leading Liz from the village into the night. Paris loved it. We were held over for two weeks.”

  Elizabeth clapped her hands together enthusiastically and said, “Bravo!” a number of times. Then she cleared her throat. Zupan wasn’t sure whether at this point, now that Horn had finished his recitation and cigar, they were all meant to leave together, or whether it was intended that the Horns, who did after all have a theater engagement, leave first. Zupan half rose in his seat and the Horns immediately followed suit, but in the ensuing confusion, with none of them quite sure what the others’ intentions were, they soon found themselves seesawing up and down in a series of tentative fits and starts, so that when Zupan made as if to sit down the Horns made as if to stand up and when Zupan made as if to stand up the Horns made as if to sit down. As awkward as the moment was, the Horns dispelled it quickly enough, fretting and clucking their tongues in the purest theatrical tradition, so that even Zupan got caught up in their charade. This was followed by still another ceremony at the door to the street as Elizabeth readied herself for another of her entrances while Horn stood by fondly looking on. On the sidewalk they circled around one another with apparent aimlessness in an effort to reestablish their relative positions. Elizabeth then took a deep breath. “Did I tell you we was doing a TV commercial?” she said. “Right up on Times Square. I swear, I don’t even know what it’s for.”

  “Something anal, you can be sure of that,” Horn said, looking down the street to find a cab. “Suppositories, hemorrhoid conditioners, sphincter ointments, you name it. That’s TV for you. Where will it end? Ah me.”

  “They told us to come as we are.”

  “Codpiece and all, no doubt. I played Polonius once, you know. ‘At last, poor Something-or-other, I knew him well.’”

  “He’s pulling your leg.”

  “Indeed. Or getting senile in my old age. Seneca, senectitude. I was always very fond of the classics. ‘Et tu, Brute.’ I quote from memory.”

  “Ain’t he sumthin.”

  “Off the record, though, those oldtimers really knew what it was all about. Give the audience what it wants: a good bloodletting and kinky sex. That’s the stuff of which our dreams are made.”

  “You better believe it,” Elizabeth said.

  “What was that dumb bastard’s name? Yorick! What a crew! O that Shakespearean rag. The play’s the thing, you know. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

  A cab pulled up to the curb. The Horns hesitated for just a moment, looking intently at one another. “We’ll say goodbye now,” Elizabeth said finally, taking Zupan’s hand in both of hers and kissing the air beside his cheek. “Take good care of yourself.”

  Horn also shook his hand, quite earnestly. “If you ever need anything, just knock on our door. That’s what friends are for.”

  “And don’t skip any meals,” Elizabeth added.

  “Better Ed than dead,” Horn said.

  They each managed to clasp his hand one more time before the cab sped off. Now that he was alone again Zupan moved into the shadows. Even when the cab was gone he could feel their eyes on him. People were always looking at him. But what did they see? He was neither short nor tall, or fat or thin. He wore a suede jacket. He was always deep in thought. He took long walks. He ate in the Automat. He loitered in Times Square. On Sundays he bought the newspaper. Sometimes he saw a film. Often he took books out of the Library, reading most of the night and sleeping most of the day.

  It had been like this for a long time now. He could not say how long. The days ran together. One day was like another, so that it seemed to him that years had passed this way, or perhaps that they might pass this way if he waited patiently. He could not count the minutes or the hours. They also ran together, repeating themselves, so that he felt that he was always in the same time and the same place, with the same thoughts foaming and gushing in his head like a raging river, day after day and month after month. In this sense, all mornings were the same morning and all evenings were the same evening, winter was spring and summer was fall. Could he cut the cord?

  And yet it seemed to him that there had been another time and another place. It too was in his head but he could not find it. Marion was there, but now she was gone. He was there too and they were together but then he was alone. He had looked for her, at the Library, in the Automat, on many streets, but he had not found her.

  He saw Spinelli as he turned into the block. The street was quiet. The air was hot and still. Their little Puerto

  Rican janitor was taking in the ashcans. Spinelli’s blonde, bubblegum-chewing wife was leaning out the window with her elbows on the sill. Spinelli was sitting on the stoop reading the Daily Telegraph. Today he was wearing his felt hat with the sporty feather in the band, looking for all the world like a carwash attendant on his day off. Spinelli’s face was sharp at the edges with a weasel’s guile in the small, black eyes and the bone high in the cheek. It was a face that one might strike with the dull, brutal impact of a shark eviscerating a fresh carcass.

  “Well, look who’s here,” Spinelli said.

  Overhead he heard a bubble burst and looked up to see Spinelli’s blonde wife bat her eyes incredulously with the gum stuck all over her face. The little Puerto Rican janitor’s silent black wife had come out of the basement and was collecting scraps of garbage from the sidewalk. She didn’t kneel but bent her body stiffly from the waist like an Arab in the field, so that her bony rump was presented in the air and her skirt crept up her spindly legs. “How’d you like to stick it into that?” Spinelli said. But the woman jumped up immediately, and may or may not have blushed. Her face was so dark you could hardly tell. Needless to say, Spinelli winked. He was having the time of his life.

  Mr. McGuire had come downstairs with his little wooden folding chair to sit in the sun. He said, “Hello, Edward. Hello, Vito.” Spinelli nodded at him. “Don’t you ever go anyplace without that fucking chair?”

  Mr. McGuire chuckled and indicated Spinelli’s paper. “Who do you like at Hialeah today?”

  “Your mother,” Spinelli said.

  Mr. McGuire chuckled again. Spinelli’s car was parked across the street in the no parking zone. Now that he was in charge of the Company’s local office he had bought a new car and a co-op apartment in Queens. He motioned toward the car with the car keys extended from his hand like an appendage of the fist. “Let’s go,” he said to Zupan.

  Like himself, Spinelli seemed to have a lot of time on his hands, despite his meteoric rise in the Company. He spent most of it sitting on the stoop or playing pool in the local pool room. Spinelli was a force, stolid and implacable. You could slash and lunge, feint and parry, and he would still be there obstinately holding his ground.

  Zupan walked to the car with him. Spinelli liked company. They drove to Fourteenth Street. At the intersection of Park Avenue South, Spinelli stopped the car and got out. A pedestrian had cut him off. He grabbed him by the back of the neck and made him recross the street. “This city is full of assholes,” he said.

  Zupan heard the click of the balls as they went up the stairs. The click of the balls was like ice rattling in a tall glass. The jukebox was playing the Banana Boat Song. The houseman was smoking a cigar and scratching himself. Through the plate-glass window he could see the traffic moving in the street below.

  “Get a table,” Spinelli said. “I gotta see my bookmaker.”

  Zupan got a table and racked up the balls. Then he leaned against the next table and lit a cigarette. Spinelli came back counting a wad of bills and looked around the room. “Who wants to step up?” he said.

  A Negro gentleman in a camel’s-hair topcoat said, “I believe I will.” He removed his coat and laid it down beside Zupan. “Would you kindly keep an eye on this?” he said.

  Zupan watched them play, but his mind was elsewhere. His mind seemed always to be elsewhere, so it seldom mattered whe
re he was. His mind was like a rudderless boat bobbing in the sea, buffeted, jolted, but in its own way free. He thought for a while about Marion and about lazy summer afternoons. Then he came back to himself, as though over a great distance, in a sudden magical leap that carried him across a dimensionless universe, pausing for a moment to take note of his surroundings. The jukebox was playing Mambo Italiano now and there was a bowling alley next door. The balls rolling down the lanes and scattering the pins made a sound unlike any in the world, unless it was the roll and clap of thunder or the rumble of artillery. Zupan had never bowled. Occasionally he played pool but he wasn’t good at it. Always there was a doubt, a hesitation, a loss of nerve.

  A considerable crowd had now gathered to watch the game. Spinelli missed a shot, shaking his head in an elaborate pantomime of pique. “That’s the story of my life,” he said, “—kisses!” Then he ran the table. The Negro gentleman handed Spinelli a five-dollar bill. He looked at Zupan ruefully and shook his head. His mellow eyes were moist with feeling. There were the two of them together and Spinelli over there against them. “He sure can cut that ball,” he said.

  Zupan lowered his eyes. Spinelli ran the table again and sipped a coke. Nothing could stop him now. He had hit his stride. “In like Flynn,” he said. Zupan watched him run another ten balls. The Negro gentleman dolefully took out his wallet and handed him another five-dollar bill. “That’s all for me,” he said.