“Actors seldom refuse a free meal. Malachi had made a favorable impression on most of them, even if some assumed he was some kind of nut. The obviously reputable friends who’d brought Malachi to South Beach (and whom he’d also invited to dinner) vouched for his honesty, his shrewdness, and his bank accounts. When everyone had arrived at Las Delicias de España and had had time for a drink or two, Malachi stood up and asked for their attention. He presented his promotional plans succinctly and confidently: a routine TV ad for Ford cars and Malachi’s Ford Plaza would be interrupted by an unannounced serial, and the serial itself fragmented according to strict application of time slots. With unconcealed pleasure, he expounded his theory of syntactic fracture as a new way of getting viewers involved in a plot, or not even a plot, in a scene, a situation, a character. The Buoys loved these ideas and immediately started thinking up ways to use them. But one of them spotted a problem: ‘If it’s a serial you’re planning, there has to be a story. We’re not good at telling stories, we’re better at sending them up.’ Malachi replied, ‘I wouldn’t think of giving you a story to tell. You make up your own story, or your non-story, or whatever you feel like doing.’ He’d define a subject for them, no more than that. Its tentative title was Medical Warfare in Metro-Dade County. He’d also supply material to work with, that is, three characters. A white doctor, Sean ‘Speedster’ Cotton. A black doctor, Johnson ‘Hands On’ Johnson. A Cuban nurse, Coralina ‘Cora! Lina!’ Abreu, who was in fact a prestigious nurse practitioner, a sexy, savvy freelancer who worked with many doctors, including Speedster and Hands On. (Both of them were after her, but so far neither had made out.) Speedster had his office on Anastasia Avenue in Coral Gables, a block or two from the legendary Biltmore hotel; Hands On worked out of a public clinic in Little Haiti. Speedster drove a stick-shift Mustang, Hands On a F150 Ford pickup (these are the only references in the serial to Malachi’s business). Coralina owned a Camry, but only as backup — she had a waiting list of admirers who’d drive wherever she wanted at any time of day or night. Malachi concluded, ‘Those are your parameters. What you do with them is up to you.’
“One performer brought up ‘a sordid detail: money.’ Malachi promptly offered $1,000 a week (worth something like $5,000 these days). That made the Buoys happy: so far they’d been trying out chic variations of passing the hat; it was a comforting windfall to have a regular stipend for doing what they liked for exactly six minutes and fifteen seconds. They all agreed to Malachi’s terms; he said he’d have contracts for them by noon the next day. When could they start? ‘Yesterday!’ So they were in from the beginning, which was two days later, on Sunday evening.
“They did their stuff with gusto; they started innovating immediately. They invented a third possibility for the tantalizing, undecided ending of an episode or incident. Remember the example I gave you a while back? ‘Dr. Sean now gambles on sex (good) or death (bad). The Buoys would propose ‘places his left pinkie in his right nostril’ or ‘places ten dollars on Piffle in the third at Hialeah’ — that is, neither good nor bad, just undramatic and off the wall.
“So Malachi’s clever insight and his choice of interpreters got the job done. After three weeks, the hook had plainly set. A steady stream — a steadily increasing stream — of curious fans invaded Malachi’s Ford Plaza. His lead actors became objects of street recognition; even the Beach Buoys’ beach performances drew bigger audiences once the word had gotten out about their second venue. Malachi managed to always have one or two of them wandering around his showrooms. But Malachi himself soon became the star attraction: as its episodes accumulated, so did the questions about the serial, and he was the only one who could answer them; and if his answers were ‘wrong,’ that made for even more questions. He was swamped with attention.
“What did Malachi do with all these people? Why, he sold them cars. If customers had any money at all, he would invent credit schedules tailored to their needs and show them how painless it was to become a car owner. He made the brilliant decision to make Mustangs his loss leaders. Ford had stopped producing them in 1970, so Malachi recruited a network of dealers to supply him with second-hand Mustangs. This woke up the entire distribution system. The head office in Dearborn started to take notice of him. He astutely persuaded Carroll Shelby to come to Miami for a weekend, which brought on even more visitors. (Shelby’s 1-2-3 win at Le Mans in 1966 had led to the creation of Ford’s ‘Shelby Mustangs.’ ) It was about this time that Malachi bought the adjacent parking lot and created Malachi’s Ford Plaza. Given the guaranteed crowds of potential customers, he was able to sell concessions there at downtown rates. Two years after his first broadcast, he was making enough money to pay off his bank loans and buy himself a house at 3810 Alhambra in the elegant green gloom of Coral Gables — as well as his own customized Mustang.
“His business sponsors were proud of him. One way they expressed their affection and approval was to introduce him to the nicest, prettiest, and richest Jewish princesses. To their consternation, Malachi was never interested. He had affairs with women who were original, demanding, and usually married or closely involved with another man. These affairs were not necessarily brief, but they seemed almost planned not to be lasting; they left his friends bemused and the women often embittered. It was the one dark zone in Malachi’s Miami life. But he never revealed its source, and few guessed it.
“Malachi didn’t give a damn about his success — it was simply a necessary step on the way to satisfying his undeclared, obsessive passion. A passion that he’d kindled and rekindled ever since he’d found himself alone on the streets of Antwerp in December 1942, knowing that his father and mother would never return. He dreamed endlessly of revenging their deaths on what was left of their murderers. And he had imagined a way of doing it.
“Malachi felt nothing but scorn for the legal means of retribution. A former Nazi official was revealed to have served in the administration of a death camp; he was arrested, brought to trial, sentenced to life imprisonment; and soon afterward, given his or her advanced age, transferred to a prison hospital to die a more or less natural death. That was no punishment. He wanted these criminals to suffer as he had suffered after they killed his parents. Of course they had no parents; but many had children, and grandchildren, whom they especially loved to dote on publicly. Killing these children and grandchildren, perhaps torturing them first, might sufficiently devastate the surviving murderers in their last years.
“For a long time Malachi imagined carrying out this project literally. He assembled the family trees of every known or suspected Nazi killer, he located their residences, followed their travels at home and abroad. He researched methods of abduction and concealment, of inflicting pain and death, of recording pain and death, of inconspicuously crossing borders, of disposing of dead bodies. . . .
“As he told me this, Malachi started letting his words tumble out almost uncontrollably; then he paused a long moment as if deliberately returning to a quieter state. In time, he said, he understood that merely initiating his plans required a vast organization of detectives, informers, lawyers, and professional criminals that he could never fund, no matter how much money he made; that it was a scheme that not even the Mossad could have pulled off, although probably one that they themselves had considered. Furthermore Malachi saw that his obsession had begun to contaminate the rest of his life: his loathing of Nazi crimes was slowly spreading so as to include all of Germany, and Germans past and present, and their heirs in every Western country. He knew this was another form of madness, and he had no desire to become a madman. I can’t vouch for his exact words, but what he said on the subject, halfway across the Indian Ocean on our flight to Europe, went something like this:
“‘So I came to realize that actually killing the children and/or grandchildren was out of the question. So what, I asked myself, could be the next best step for creating a stink, a stink that served the dictates of my single-minded end? What that necessary en
d required was a step that would associate a notional killing of offspring with the name of the original bastard so that an indelible stink would be glued to him, such that any subsequent step that might cleanse him of it would be out of the question. In which case what was the next step I should take? Then I remembered what Kafka said about expressing love. A bouquet of roses can’t do it. There is only coitus and literature that can achieve this end. Well, if Kafka said so, then choosing literature was my obvious next step (since for “coitus,” read “killing,” which was not an option). Better than direct denunciation: even if newspapers can still engineer a stink in the right circumstances, nothing can approximate the truly colossal stink that expert writing is capable of, something on the level of Musil or Proust, writing that cuddles up to the so-called truth but never pretends to be it, and it was not out of the question that even real names be kept, it was only a lying fiction (that pleonasm!) that made the end, the obliteration of its target as deadly as actually killing it, that is, him or her: all that would be needed as a next step was a hint to e.g., Der Spiegel — a prominent member of the media was best equipped to propagate and inflate fictitious shame into a stink of nationwide magnitude: and the subject matter would be of course the killing of the undeserving offspring of each SOB — and if no offspring, the next of kin would do very nicely thank you. But, in the end, that the author of such fictions be an amateur, even an impassioned one, was inconceivable. So not me,’ Malachi said: ‘my role would simply be dictating the events, step by step, which didn’t mean imagination was out of the question, but each step had to be guided toward creating the unique and best effect. I would then not accept anything but the first rate. But in the end I would have the last word. In fact I dreamt of surpassing the initial stink by infusing it with something like a pornographic attraction, so that it would inspire the next potential step, and one or a few readers would kidnap one or a few offspring for an actual killing — now wouldn’t that be not only a delicious revenge but a work of genius?’”
Geoffrey stopped. Not another word. Just like that. He was implored to go on. His listeners were all itching with curiosity, he had involved them so slyly in his tale, but he slumped in his chair. At last, all he said was, “I have to wash my face.” Berenice and Andreas later confided that they had shared the same impression of watching a well-oiled machine breaking down. It’s true that naturally his face was a mess. He’d started crying while he spoke of Malachi’s vindictive obsession — it was an appalling project, but it was still shocking to see tears running down the face of this normally quiet-spoken man. After a moment he added, “I seem to have painted myself into a corner. I won’t be long.”
He kept his word and soon came back, very much his “old self”; Andreas later said, “The screws on that leaky sump of his were now bolted tight!” That wasn’t quite true. If Geoffrey had fallen silent before without a word of explanation, he now became as communicative as his companions could desire and, what’s more, gave them his best reason for being so. His usual urbane composure had surprisingly yielded to a softer, more relaxed liberality.
Geoffrey resumed his story. “To continue from the point I’d reached — that Malachi had decided that his revenge would be accomplished through a work of fiction — what I’d have had to say next is that Malachi wanted me to write it. And how could he possibly have thought of me for the job? As far as you know, I’d never written anything. What you don’t know is that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three I led a totally different life. No one here knows this, not even Margot. Earlier in my conversation with Malachi, for some reason I had told him about it. For some reason! For the same reason we form intimate friendships and initiate rapturous love affairs on skiing vacations and ocean cruises, even on bus rides. Malachi was a likeable, intelligent man, and I knew I’d never lay eyes on him again. It was a golden opportunity to at last divulge my secret, to someone. Now it’s time to tell it to real friends like you. And most of all to my beloved Margot.”
Andreas: “My God, Geoffrey, what were you so ashamed about? Were you a Ponzi schemer? a sly pornographer?” “Oh, shame had nothing to do with it. I changed from one life to a very different other one. The first life became irrelevant. Nevertheless the fact is that for ten years I was a writer. I lived for writing and reading and nothing else. And not any sensible sort of writer, but a poet, no less. I breathed and ate poetry, I planned my present and future around it. I wrote dozens of poems every month, some promising enough to earn the interest of readers I respected. I even published a few in little magazines. Then I gave it up. The details hardly matter. I don’t want to dump the whole story on you.”
Andreas laughed — a gentle laugh, without a hint of mockery: “No dumping necessary. We’re all ears.” Geoffrey shook his head. “At least tell us why Malachi really thought he needed a writer — when it came to stories, he was an expert after all.” “He said he lacked what I had, what poets had — an irrational passion for pure language, that was what was real for them, and it was essential for him — ” Andreas: “But he was right! Geoff, would you consider reciting a poem from your unspeakable past?” To our surprise, he acquiesced.
“It’s not one of my best, there’s really nothing beautiful in it. But it’s relevant to the change in my life. It’s my last poem — no, next to last. It’s called ‘Cassation on a theme by Jacques Dupin.’ It was written two months before the May ’68 events in Paris — my one prophetic work. Almost every word in it reads like a gloss on what happened then, even the title — one of the first meanings of cassation was ‘street music,’ and the legal sense was ‘quashing,’ very appropriate! Jacques Dupin was a well-known poet and authority on Matisse, he was also an excellent boxer, and he used his boxing skills effectively late one afternoon in mid-May when he led an attack on La Bourse, the Paris stock market. I have no idea what you think you know about mai soixante-huit, but if you weren’t there, you don’t know anything. I’d been in Paris for a while, studying French poetry at one of the satellites of the Sorbonne. I saw what was happening. I was part of what was happening. Just to give one simplistic idea of that: the city I’d left a month earlier functioned according to the social principles of skepticism and discretion, one click away from cynicism and indifference. In the city I returned to, everyone was communicating spontaneously with everyone else, strangers with strangers, old with young, you name it. It was a new world happening over and over. It was a lot more fun than poetry. Let’s leave it at that.” Andreas: “Not for long I won’t!” “You’re on. But not now.” “What about your poem?”
“It doesn’t matter. I quit my poetic studies, took a few courses at HEC, then went back to the States and landed a job as a customs official. That was my revelation. I learned that bureaucracies are designed to kill innovation in the name of predictability; and that the pleasure and purpose of customs offices are to implement rules that are meant to keep things from happening. That meant they were domains ripe for the kind of permanent revolution that I’d glimpsed in Paris during that wondrous month of May.
“One day I spotted in the classified pages of The Economist the announcement of a vacancy in the municipal offices of this very town: that of Mercantile Assessor for the Borough. I called the number supplied in the ad to find out what these words meant, and after a lot of prodding deduced it was to run a local board of trade. I sent in my application and to my amazement I was hired for the job. Perhaps I was the only candidate — why would even a moderately ambitious man or woman want to be confined in a place at the end of the world, with no major financial center nearby, no prospects of advancement, and with a job description that sounded like a career’s dead end?
“Well, I was full of beans, I had to start my active life somewhere, and so after two final interviews with a New Zealand banker (from Dunedin, of all places) and a municipal representative, who both probably took me for a harmless airhead, I made the journey to this charming town. I stormed into my job with undiplomati
c fury, fired three of my staff of four before anyone noticed, and to replace them brought in competent friends from the civilized world with promises of fun and games. I’m told things have improved.” Andreas: “Geoff, I learned all about you. You took an office basking in routine and turned it into a dynamo. You ‘promoted trade’? You invented the global village! Look what you did for Paul, our recalcitrant twin. I don’t think even he realizes how you connected him with his markets overseas.” (Berenice thought, ‘Kepi Kaps in every pub in Glasgow!’) “Maybe. The main thing is, here’s where I met Margot.” By now she was sitting in his lap with her arms around his neck. Geoffrey: “I know, I know I should have —” “No, it’s OK like this. At last I know why you bring all those strange books to read in bed.” Andreas surmised: “Ceravolo, Violi, Charles North?” “Yes, also Pastior and Cavalli! You know these people?” “I’m mad about poetry, too. I just can’t afford to publish it. We can compare notes, I trust.” “You bet. And thanks for getting me out of my chain-mail pajamas. Well, that’s my story.”
The Solitary Twin Page 5
