Zupan didn’t know. He only felt desire. He felt it now. It had begun to rain again. They both looked toward her balcony and watched it for a while. He liked to watch the rain. It brought back memories of other times and other places, rain falling on rooftops or beating against the windowpanes, static on the radio, a sudden cooling of the air. But he was different now. The rain turned back the clock but did not enter the moment he was living. The rain did not contain his dreams. He had no dreams now. Once he had dreamed of coming out of the rain with a woman who wore a raincoat and sitting in front of a fire with her and watching the rain fall in the empty streets but that had been long ago. She rubbed her hands together. Her full breasts rose and fell beneath the sweater. The skirt came up above her smooth white knees. It was a woolen skirt and she wore a woolen sweater. Her hair was wild. He wanted her but did not move.
She was silent. Then she spoke. She did not look at him but toward the window though it was not the rain she saw. What did she see? He couldn’t say. She must have been looking at herself the way people have of seeing nothing, detaching themselves from the world as they contemplate their lives. She had been here and she had been there. This and that had happened. The details really didn’t matter. It was the shape they took. Zupan’s life had also taken on a shape. It might have had another shape but it didn’t. That did not mean it wasn’t there, that other life, somewhere inside him. Her life too might have had another shape. Now it was wedded to his, though nothing had been said or done. Her breasts seemed so soft. He wanted to lay his face against them.
After the rain stopped and the sun came out they took another walk together. After the rain stopped they walked south to Washington Square. They sat there for a while watching men play chess and students reading books. Someone was playing a guitar and singing. He had long hair. Her hair brushed his face. She held his hand. He smoked a cigarette, throwing it down on the ground when he was finished. She wore a woolen hat. He felt at ease. The sun was warm and her voice engaged him pleasantly like a familiar melody. There was nothing on his mind. He liked to sit in the sun on winter days like old Mr. McGuire but he didn’t have a wooden
folding chair. He’d sit on a bench in Union Square or Washington Square and watch the people there. She pulled the hat down low and buried her chin in her coat. She wore a checkered scarf. They saw a child running around with a pole between his legs with a horse’s head. Then his mother scolded him. Zupan looked down at the ground. She wore woolen mittens too, the fingers interlaced with his. His own hands were bare. He wore his old suede jacket, zippered to the throat. He was not cold. It was pleasant there.
She said, “We should go ice skating sometime, up in Central Park. Did you ever skate? My father took me skating once. It was indoors, I think. I kept flopping on my behind. There are so many things to do, things I’ve never done and wanted to. I’ll do them yet. You’ll see.”
The child came back and ran around some more. He too was bundled up, in a bulky coat and hood and high black boots and a scarf and gloves and had an angelic face but something hungry in his eyes.
“And sledding. And riding in a sleigh, through deep, dark woods on a snowy day. Wouldn’t that be nice! And staying in a lodge and drinking grog. Isn’t life wonderful! O fabulous sweet land of life, it has so much to offer us.”
She squeezed his hand and laid her head against his shoulder. He hardly heard what she was saying. He watched the child and listened to the music of the guitar. He imagined that it might begin to snow and they would sit there and be covered up like snowmen and someone would come along and stick a carrot in their faces. Perhaps the child with the horse’s head if he could reach that high. Or his mother giving him a helping hand.
Now it was getting cold. They walked back uptown, to Union Square, where there was some snow on the ground. No one was there. It was getting dark too. Another day was ending. They went to the Automat and had supper there. They filled their trays with dishes from the little windows. He ate beets and peas and mashed potatoes. Then they had coffee and a piece of cake. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and excused herself. He watched her going down the stairs. A girl in a white smock cleared the table. He lit a cigarette. There was sawdust in the entranceway and people came in with steamy breaths, making puddles on the floor. And the din of their voices and the clatter of the dishes were like an undercurrent that carried his racing thoughts as on a raging river. He could hear that music now. He could hear the voices in him and they were his own.
He watched her walking toward the table. She moved slowly, almost heavily, as though a certain weight was burdening her thoughts. People looked at her. He did not recognize her at first. Then he saw the hat, the scarf, the coat, the woolen skirt. People looked at her. She looked straight ahead. Her hard, bright eye caught his. He threw his cigarette on the floor. She wrapped the scarf across her mouth and pulled the hat across her brow. Her face was raw and red. Snow was falling outside. It was Christmas now. The air outside was dark but also luminous. The snow fell in flurries. The wind blew in gusts. The icy air was exhilarating, She held his arm. He liked the snow. He liked to wake up in the morning and see it outside. Then the child would shout, “Look! Look! Look, Mommy, there’s snow outside!”
“We deserve some cocoa after that,” she said. “You can dry your hair on a towel in the bathroom if you like. There’s a big one hanging on the rod. I’ll just change and be right with you. Take your shoes off too. I’ll bring you slippers and nice warm socks.”
They watched the snow fall all day long and when they went out afterwards to build a snowman she almost fell. Everything was covered now in snow. A day later it began to melt, turning black. The trains began to run on time again, lurching and swerving on the winding tracks but sometimes standing for a while as though in traffic. It was cold and crowded in the cars. People could hardly read their newspapers. People stared into space as they tend to do in these crowded subway cars. He stared into space too. He would have walked to the Library but the weather was too cold. He got off the train on Times Square. It had occurred to him that he might not get off. Then the cars would empty out and he would find a seat and ride the train into the night. He could imagine riding these trains forever.
He had no plans. He woke at noon and stood at his window behind the curtain. He waited for the knock at his door. He ate in the Automat. He went to the Library and
borrowed books. Sometimes he stopped in the street to observe a scene or spectacle. His mind was full of thoughts. He did not think them. They announced themselves like unwanted guests. He heard the shots. He heard the scream. He heard the voices that were not unlike his own. Had he closed the bedroom door?
In that time and that place he had been alone. Then she had come and then she was gone. But though he counted the hours and the minutes, all time was the same time. It was in him, waiting to be filled and become the time of the world, or remaining undisclosed. In this undisclosed time all things were possible, unlived lives lay dormant in an embryonic form. Even the lazy, distant drone of a plane high up in the summer sky was embedded there, or the sea breeze and the pennants flying in the air, or the report of a woman’s heels against the pavement.
He had seen her at the university, walking in her dreamy way. He had been a student of philosophy then. She had red hair. Her arms and legs were thin. Her skin was pale. She may or may not have been wearing glasses. She held her books against her chest. She has been with someone, he thought. That is perhaps the reason for her dreamy look.
There had been others too, of different shapes and sizes, but it was her face he thought of first. It was narrow and delicately made. The cheekbones were somewhat high. The mouth was wide and inviting. She was tall rather than short. It would not have surprised him to learn that she was a dancer or a gymnast. She was studying botany or biology. She had a level head despite the dreamy look. He had taken her to the Automat and then they had seen a show.
That had been in anot
her time and another place. He was alone now. One day he went to the beach and came back with sand in his shoes and the smell of the sea in his skin and he felt at peace and after supper he walked home slowly from the Automat, savoring the hot, still air, and talked to a woman in the street. It was summer then and the day was winding down and they talked for a long while. She was a neighbor and he hoped to see her again. It was such a perfect day.
He helped Spinelli move. The Horns came and went in their inimitable way. He rose at noon and had his coffee and stood at the window looking through the curtain. Then he put on his suede jacket and walked to the Library or the Automat. Sometimes he sat in Union Square. Once a woman slipped and fell and scraped her knee and he helped her to his feet. Weeks and months went by. Sometimes his head hurt and he wondered if he was well. She no longer came out on the balcony each night. She waited for him inside and was disappointed when he didn’t come. He was drawn to her. Her legs were so smooth and white, her breasts so soft and full. He wanted to touch her but did not. She knew he wanted her and made him want her more. She talked about her childhood and how she spent her days. She made him meals and baked a cake. She let her gown fall open or raised her skirt above her knees.
Evenings were quiet. They only heard the music of the violin and the quiet laughter from the open windows down below. Once they drank wine and it went to her head. She giggled and they looked toward her open bedroom door where her robe was thrown across the bed. Once they danced and he felt pins and needles in his skin and something crawling in his flesh.
He waited for the phone to ring. He waited for the knock at his door. He waited many hours in the dark and airless room. He watched her balcony. He looked down at the people in the street. He heard the three shots ring out over and over again in his head.
IX
He found the invitation to the Horns’ party in his mailbox. Evidently they had slipped it in, as it bore no stamp, which was a sensible thing to do, he thought. The invitation resembled a greeting card, with a figure popping up from the fold when it was opened and a childish little verse inscribed with elaborate curlicues in what he took to be a woman’s hand, no doubt Elizabeth’s, and at the bottom a personal note. He opened and closed the invitation three times, taking care not to damage the figure that kept popping up.
The telephone was ringing when he got upstairs but he didn’t answer it. It might have been the Horns wondering if he had received his invitation. It might have been someone else. He listened to the phone ringing long past the point when an ordinary caller would have lost patience and hung up. When it stopped ringing he resumed his progress through the rooms, opening and closing doors and turning the lights on and off. Then he went into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee. There were two cups set out on the kitchen table. He drank the coffee standing at the window, looking through the curtain. Sunlight was streaming into the room and the heavy trucks were moving in the street. The Horns were hurrying down the block. Elizabeth looked back. He thought he saw her glancing up at his window.
Zupan wondered if it was appropriate to bring something to the party, a bottle of wine perhaps. There was nothing suitable in the house and he had no money, or at least none to spare. He had cleaned out his savings account to meet the rent. He’d sold some more books too but the money was gone and he had nothing left that he wished to part with. He had eaten in a restaurant, ordering the roast beef with mashed potatoes and realizing immediately that he might have had the same meal in the Automat for considerably less money and regretting his extravagance. But that was in the past. Now he had some things to buy. He went to the hardware store and the grocery store. He had a list. He bought rolls and milk. He bought a newspaper and looked at the help wanted columns. There were many promising things to do but his experience had taught him that they were less promising than they seemed. There were clerical jobs of course but he didn’t feel he was cut out for that line of work, though circumstances might conceivably cause his life to take an unexpected turn. He was determined that it shouldn’t, though sometimes a life got out of hand. His had gone fairly well up to a certain point but then certain threads had begun to unravel. He had shown promise. He had had a charming smile. He was neither short nor tall nor fat or thin. He had been a student of philosophy and now for reasons unknown to him the Horns believed he was interested in an acting career. Perhaps they had the right idea. He studied the invitation. It was for tonight, the fifteenth instant, at nine o’clock. At the bottom of the page, at the end of the doggerel verse, Elizabeth had written: “Come a little early. We have a surprise.”
He walked to the Library, returning all his books. Then he ate in the Automat and walked back downtown. He sat for a while in Union Square. He got home late in the afternoon. He straightened out the house and did the dishes. He washed out a few things and hung them up to dry in the bathroom on the curtain rod. He scrubbed the toilet. He swept the floor. Mrs. Miller came by with a bowl of soup. Spinelli’s door was open. Apparently they were still in residence. Spinelli’s blonde wife turned from her window to look at him, batting her eyes as though surprised to find him there. Zupan smiled at her. Spinelli appeared and shut the door. Mrs. Miller went back upstairs. It was a day like any other day. Zupan had neither more nor less to do, the Horns’ party notwithstanding, though he recognized it as an extraordinary event in his uneventful life, a social occasion of the kind he had become unaccustomed to since the time he had been a student of philosophy. Even then he had not been particularly active in that way, preferring more intimate settings or occasions. Marion herself had not been particularly social. She didn’t mind a fast meal in the Automat and then a leisurely walk to the theater, and afterwards, when they came out, late in the afternoon, with the day winding down and the sidewalk steeped in shadow, and the hot, still air bringing a sense of perfect peace, she got that dreamy look again and it was as if he wasn’t there. It was as if her head was in the clouds, or so the saying goes. But she was down to earth in fact, had both feet on the ground, no matter where her head was. She was in the sciences. He didn’t know what she wanted to be. Perhaps she didn’t know herself. They were both young. All their lives were ahead of them.
She must have thought he was extraordinary. He was nondescript but had a quick mind. He was a student of philosophy but with the sharpness of his mind he might have been a scientist too. That was what she told him. It didn’t bother her that he seldom shaved or changed his jacket, the old suede one he always wore. He gave the impression of always being deep in thought, preoccupied, but so did she, though no one would have thought to call him dreamy. Rather, he seemed intense. It put her off a little. She may have been afraid of him a little. But also curious, for she was a student of the sciences. She may have wished to know how he developed his particular ideas, what the process was, how the connections were made. These were interesting questions. No one had the answer. They were always asking each other questions. They wondered what would happen if identical twins were separated at birth and grew up in separate families. Call them Family A and Family B. They would of course be separate persons. But what if Twin A grew up in Family B and Twin B grew up in Family A. Then A’s experiences would belong to B and B’s experiences would belong to A. Would A then be B and would B be A? That was how they phrased the question. She said she didn’t know. He said that surely there was something that underlay experience. He called it the ground of being. Some people called it consciousness. It was constant. It made A, A and B, B, regardless of experience, so that A could have one experience or another experience and still be A, and the same held true for B. She was not sure of that. Consciousness, she said, did not make identity if it had no content. Content made the self. Therefore A could be B and B could be A, depending on their experience. Identities were in a sense interchangeable. That didn’t seem to make sense, he said. We are talking about infancy, she said, when you start from scratch. An infant opens its eyes and sees the world as A or B depending on what he sees. If A is in
B’s place, he becomes B. If B is in A’s place, he becomes A. That cannot be so, he said. The moment the infant is conscious he is conscious of himself. That is the original and primary content of consciousness. That is his identity. They negotiated this point. It was not so simple to resolve. Then they wondered what might happen if the twins switched places at a later date and henceforth A’s experience was grafted onto B’s life, as it were, and B’s experience was grafted onto A’s life, so to speak. Well, then, Marion said, clearly A would continue to be A and B would continue to be B, though in that case you might speak of A1 and A2 or B1 and B2, depending on which experience or set of circumstances apply. But where, Zupan asked, is A1 when there is an A2 and where is A2 when there is an A1? Marion scratched her head. Search me, she said. Perhaps, she added, each individual stands in a certain relationship to his potential experience. Unrealized, this potential experience will remain a form without content. A1 will remain buried in A2 and B1 will remain buried in B2. There will be an A1 under the A2, and a B1 under the B2. Had B’s life been given to A, or had A’s life been given to B, these forms would not have been realized. You can say then that they are dormant, forever in us, waiting to be freed. Zupan was inclined to agree that this was so.
Basic Forms Page 17
