The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  But you could not. You had to sit there the whole eighty minutes, thinking, This is like a recording of dreams, like a peephole into fantasy, but I like my own fantasy and dreams much better. Before it was all over, it had become repetitious, trite, unimaginative, almost boring, and the actresses and actors seemed to view their work as an assignment, a workout, a perfunctory fucky and an insouciant sucky. “Here comes the obligatory lesbian scene,” I. warned you, and a full ten minutes were consumed by another actress, Candi Dare (pseud.), pretending that she had a lust for Gwyn, and employing her nin all over her, and later an artificial penis with rubber glandes at both ends of its yardlong length for mutual male becoming. Ot. The movie was full of props and devices: There were several bananas fondled, peeled, licked, and eaten; several phallicized instruments of different shapes that seemed to have on-off switches and that pulsated; and a string of small balls to be inserted rectally and jerked out. Ot. As the movie progressed, the motions and devices became more and more stilted, synthetic, and desperate, until you were no longer aware of individuals or any pretense at plot, but only of a variety of light and dark lefva, meats, in constant urgent motions that were sometimes aimless, pointless, funless. You stopped saying Ot. Eventually you discovered that you could appreciate the film as a total abstraction, like a nonobjective painting by Kandinsky: thrusting diagonals and oscillating circles, overlapped, underlapped, lap upon lap.

  Back at the mansion, you offered I. a nightcap and he offered you his cards and said, “Well, tell me what you thought of it.”

  You wrote, There must be a better way to earn a living.

  He asked, “For the actors, you mean? But didn’t the movie make you horny?”

  “‘Horny’?” You reached for your dictionary.

  “You won’t find it in there,” he said. “What I meant was, didn’t it make you want to go to bed?”

  Yes, put me to sleep, toward the end, you wrote. I. did something he hadn’t done yet: touched you. He put his hands, his palms, on the sides of your arms, as if to draw you to him. “The movie made me horny,” he said.

  You put two fingers up beside your head, horns, and then wrote, Like cokewold? You remembered only the way Chaucer spelled it. Or like bull? Or like points of crescent moon? Or maybe you are impaled on a dilemma.

  He read it and made his strangled chuckle. “Not like cuckold,” he said. “Maybe like bull.” He waited to see what you would say next, and when you said nothing, he waited more, and then said, “To be blunt, I want to screw. How do you say ‘screw’ in Svanetian?”

  “Tchackrog,” you said, and then you wrote it down: caxrag. You pantomimed the insertion of a corkscrew.

  He corrected your pantomime: not a spiral motion, but an in-and-out one, like the urgencies of the movie. Then he asked, “How do you say ‘fuck’ in Svanetian?”

  You wrote: It depends on who is doing to whom, bull to cow, man to woman, man to man, man to cow, man to himself. Different word each situation. Basic root is čoš-. I pronounce it for you. “Chosh,” you said, forming your beautiful lips carefully.

  Again he put his hands on your arms. “Let’s me and you chosh.”

  “In Svanetia, one never does ‘chosh’ without having known each other for at least two months.” This was a fabrication of yours, Kat, an improvisation; it’s not true at all. But how else to handle him?

  “Really?” he said. “I’ll remember that, then.” He consulted his wristwatch, which had a calendar but badly needed cleaning. “On March eighteenth, I’m going to chosh you out of your eyeballs.”

  Chapter nineteen

  That remained to be seen. When that March with its sweet showers had rolled around, as we shall see, I. had given up horning after you. He had fallen in love with someone else, we might say, and had left you alone…or left you to Kenny.

  At the beginning of the third class in narrative techniques, the professor, who uncustomarily was wearing a necktie, returned the obituaries to their authors. Written in red on a sheet attached to yours (Cathlin’s) was the letter grade A+ and this note: I am mightily impressed with this. It is the only obit in class written in the first rather than the third person, an achievement of singular inventiveness. It is also the only obit with a true narrative thread of suspense. It is one of the few obits with good humor and an attempt to observe my guidelines re exaggeration, extravagance, outrage and offense. To whatever extent it is “real,” i.e., based upon your own life, you are a marvelous person and I am dying to get to know you better, even if you call me “a forgotten novelist.” Ha ha! But you will get rich if you continue to develop the talent you show here. What would you like to write next? Do you really know about John Ross the Cherokee? I once thought of doing a novel on him myself. Let’s get together for a chat after class, shall we? But meanwhile, do you mind if I read this obit to the class? If you don’t mind, hold up your hand momentarily after you’ve read this note.

  And from his vantage at the head of the Scottish Room, he kept throwing glances toward the rear of the room, where you were slumped in embarrassment in your seat. You didn’t want him to read your work to the class. Proud as you were of it (proud as I and I. were of it), you hadn’t written it with this audience in mind, and you didn’t want them hearing him read it aloud. So you did not hold up your hand, and after a while he gave up waiting for it, although he continued glancing at you, as if to assure himself that you actually existed. He read other obits, commenting upon their shortcomings and their good points. He analyzed in detail the work of the lady whose wake was held in her swimming pool. You sat half listening, wondering how you could get out of any after-class meeting he had in mind for you.

  He began to discourse about, or against, autobiographical fiction, telling the class that now that they had their obituaries out of the way they could start to ignore themselves. Stories about oneself are doomed, he said, not because of lack of objectivity nor because of their egotism but because art must always transmute “reality,” and the reality of one’s own self is the hardest to transmute.

  “Allow me,” he said, “to read you a poem. Not mine. A colleague’s, and you may have heard it or read it before. Don’t stop me if you’ve heard it. The title is, ‘My Penis.’” Without embarrassment I. proceeded to read the forty lines that describe, in infinite lyrical detail, the configurations, the associations, the sensibilities, the impressions, the history, and the uses of the poet’s personal qvens, the organ whose Svanetian word, in one of those coincidental transpositions wherein mama means “father” and deda means “mother” in Georgian, is closer to the English female quim. It was a good poem. Too good. “Now, if that had been my own poem,” I. said, “you’d think me a dreadful exhibitionist, a flasher. It’s a marvelous example of the so-called confessional school of frankly self-obsessed poetry. Is it art?”

  I. began to stroke his necktie, and you began to guess why he had worn it, that broad regimental-striped silk foulard that was, as far as you knew, the only necktie in his closet. “Now consider this,” he said, fondling his necktie and presenting it. “See how long it is. See how it hangs down. Notice the swelling down here. Look at the brilliant stripes all over! See how the knot expands at the top and clinches it. If men are advertising their pricks with their neckties, the double-Windsor knot must be a big pair of balls, right?

  “The question is: Which would you rather look at and believe in, this necktie or”—he suddenly unzipped his trousers and thrust his hand inside.

  “Ot!” you cried out, but your Svanetian was drowned amid the gasps and exclamations of others.

  But I. did not expose himself. He had made his point, and he zipped himself up and said, “I want you folks to write some gorgeous neckties and leave your pricks in your pants.”

  Thus it was that you spent the rest of the class period secretly practicing Cathlin’s handwriting, to make it as unlike your own as possible, so that, after class when the professor caught up with you outside the Cathedral of Learning despite your hurried foot
steps, you could stand there beneath the glare of the street lamp and hand him a card, not one of his blank three-by-five whites but one of your own lined pink ones, already inscribed: I am only a necktie. You do not want to see my prick. He was standing closer to you than you’d ever expected him to be, and while you knew that the combination of the floppy hat and the dark glasses was shielding you from his identification, you began to wonder if possibly you smelled like Ekaterina.

  “I hope this doesn’t mean you’re a transvestite in drag,” he said.

  You did not know those words, but you had another card ready for him: Thank you so much for the kind things you said about my obituary, but I think you and I should be teacher and devoted pupil, not pals.

  “But, pal, we have so many interests in common!” he said. “Did you know I’m part Scotch-Irish myself! And I’m crazy about that Tchaikovsky first piano concerto.”

  You did not have a card ready for that one, and you had to write it down, using your books as a desk, there beneath the street lamp. Can you hear music?

  “Listen,” he said, “you don’t have to write down everything. Sure, I can hear music, and I can probably hear your voice. Try me.”

  But of course you could not. You could not hear me, you wrote, because in addition to my photodysphoria and hebephilia I also have speech defect.

  “Hebephilia?” he said. “What is that? Did you mention it in your obituary?”

  I alluded to it, you wrote.

  “Speaking of allusions,” he said. “Talk about allusions. In your obituary, those allusions to Nabokov really killed me. Nabokov, I should tell you, is one of my very favorite writers, but so few of your classmates have read him.”

  You wrote, I have not read him myself, but I know of him.

  “Who have you read?” he asked. You hesitated. Whom, indeed, had you read? You started to mention Gogol and Dostoyevski and Turgenev, but decided against it. Fortunately, he took your hesitation to mean that you were exasperated to be standing here under the street lamp on a cold winter night talking about literature, and he said, “Say, there’s a nice little pub down the street there, called Tiffany’s. Do you know it? Could we have one drink together as teacher and devoted pupil without becoming pals?”

  So you stopped off, farther along the avenue, at the bar at Tiffany’s, the only oasis between the campus and the mansion. It was rather posh, a quiet, dimly lighted lounge, and he was poorly dressed and you were overdressed, his trench coat threadbare and soiled, even if he was wearing a necktie, and your coat (borrowed from Loretta) a fluffy, shaggy thing that belonged to some flightier era. You wanted vodka but had to be careful not to give anything away, so you had Scotch instead and found it not at all undrinkable.

  You discussed many things over more than one drink. Several drinks. I. chain-smoked his Pall Malls but you had decided, in order to distinguish Cathlin from Ekaterina, that Cathlin would not be a smoker. It took much willpower for her, for you, to do this.

  I. started off by observing that the light in Tiffany’s was awfully dim, so why couldn’t you take off those dark shades? Because, you said (or wrote), your photodysphoria, extreme light sensitivity, was really terrible. In fact, it was the reason you had come to this city, to be treated for the condition at the university’s medical center, whose chief of ophthalmology, Dr. Morris Heflin, was doing his best for you. For old Inquisitor’s benefit, and in answer to his several questions, you began to assemble the details of Cathlin’s current situation in life: You worked days as a typist in the payroll office of one of the steel manufacturers. In the eighth form of school, back home in Ulster, you had begun to manifest the symptoms of hebephilia, which, along with the speech and vision disorders, had led you to leave Ulster and come to America. You were also under the care of Dr. Horace Mifflin, specialist in personality disorders at the Western Psychiatric Institute. The depth and extent of poor Cathlin’s afflictions brought empathetic tears to your eyes, and your sunglasses couldn’t conceal them as they rolled down your cheeks, and you concluded a card, I am a crazy mixed-up kid.

  I. laid one of his hands on top of yours and said, “But a potentially brilliant and successful writer.” He skipped just a beat before his next question, which caught you by surprise: “Was there really a Bolshakov?”

  Yes, there is really a Bolshakov.

  “Then perhaps you ought to write, for me, for the course, about the story of your experience with Bolshakov.”

  But you insist we write neckties, not penises.

  “Wasn’t Bolshakov a prick?”

  You laughed. It was the first time since coming to America and escaping from that prick that poor Cathlin had really experienced a good, resounding laugh. Oh, Ekaterina had shared a good laugh or two with Kenny, and with Dalrymple, her boss, and even with I., but Cathlin, who was destined to become, if her own predictions and Instructor’s came true, one of America’s wittiest writers, had not yet had a good laugh on these shores. It was almost like having her first orgasm, and laughter is, after all, a close cousin to climax.

  And such was the relaxation and release of the laughter that your guard was down when the old Inveigler said, “Why don’t we stroll over to my apartment and talk about chess and Cherokees and Tchaikovsky? Without becoming pals, of course.”

  You went, challenged by the task of pretending you’d never been there before, challenged by being that close to your own room and having to think of it as a place remote from you, and challenged by something else too, although you could not quite formulate the words or even the thought for it—but I can do that for you: Ekaterina was passionately enamored of faunlets and almost constitutionally incapable of feeling desire for a grown man, but might not Cathlin possess the “psychological distance” requisite to such desire? You were curious. And curiosity, as I. or I could have told you, is the supreme faculty of the creative artist. When curiosity flourishes, worlds can be changed.

  On the way upstairs, Kenny spotted you but looked at you only long enough to convince himself that you were some bimbo that Professor I. was bringing home with him. You were glad that Loretta hadn’t seen you; she might have recognized her clothes and jewelry. In I.’s room, you looked at his accommodations as if you were seeing them for the first time: the mirrors, the tall windows, even the murphybed, an interesting contraption. On his windowsill, in a Burpee Seed-N-Start container, he was sprouting twelve tomato seedlings, and, remembering that Cathlin was interested in weeds, you dutifully sniffed them. He tried to get you to take off your huge hat, but you couldn’t, and you insisted that he leave the room’s illumination as dark as possible: just one reading lamp on, nothing else.

  “I’d like to show you my novels,” he said, “but I’ve loaned all of them to my next-door neighbor.” His face lit up with a thought. “You’d like Ekaterina. She’s about your age and has some interests in common: ghosts, and chess, and Indians. She’s a European too. Comes from Svanetia, in Soviet Georgia. Why don’t I pop next door and ask her if she’d like to meet you? She’s read your obituary.”

  You didn’t like the thought of his having shown your obituary to his neighbor. And you didn’t like the thought of some woman as his next-door neighbor. You wrote: Is she single? Is she attractive? And you lifted an eyebrow while he read it. “Yes, she’s alone, and she’s quite beautiful, but I’m not having a relationship with her or anything like that. I’ll be right back.” He was gone three minutes, knocking next door longer than he needed to, in order to bring the woman out of her shower or her bed or her trance or whatever she was in. She was not in. “I guess she’s working late,” he said. “She teaches botany at the university. Are you really interested in weeds?”

  Not especially, you wrote. But I needed to give myself in the obituary an avocation. Didn’t Nabokov chase butterflies?

  “I can’t believe you haven’t read anything of his,” I. said. He scanned his bookshelves and fetched a paperback for you. “As I say, Ekaterina has all my novels, but I can loan you this. You must read
it.” It was Pale Fire, and I. gave you a précis of it: a professor named Kinbote who thinks he is the exiled king of Zembla comes to extensively annotate a long poem, “Pale Fire,” by his colleague John Shade, who was mistakenly murdered by an assassin out to get Kinbote, whose annotations of the poem become the story of himself. “The main reason I was hoping Ekaterina would be in was so I could borrow a cup of Cutty Sark from her. I’ve only got bourbon. Can you drink bourbon?”

  You could, and he certainly could, and the two of you proceeded to get pickled. You told yourself to be careful; you wanted enough to relax your inhibitions, to make you amenable to things your sober self wouldn’t want, but you didn’t want enough to let you do something you’d be sorry for tomorrow or something that might give away your disguise.

  I. apparently had no restraints, and he threw back a snootful. After a while, he got up and staggered next door again to pound on Ekaterina’s door, and he staggered back to say, “Maybe she’sh gone out on a date.” Then he sat down beside you on the sofa (where Knox had died) and said, “Y’know, I t’ink I like you a lot better’n her anyhow.” When he was not sober, I. pronounced “I” as “Ah,” so for the rest of this evening, and whenever he’s drunk, I think that I shall call him that instead.

  Ah began to sing. In the same vibrant bass voice that he had sung his “Svani Ribber” for Ekaterina, which she and you would have considered abominable had you realized how off-key it was, but which you considered operatic because you didn’t know the key, he began singing this: “Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling. From glen to glen, and down the mountainside…

  “The summer’s gone, and all the roses fall-ll-ling.

  It’s you, it’s you must go, and I must bide…”

  Even off-key, it was lovely, beautiful (even my own exquisite sense of pitch was not offended, since the words are addressed to one Danny, and I, after all, am Dan), and after the first stanza, he interjected, “Don’tcha know it? Ah wish you washn’t mute and could sing it along wif me.” And he resumed singing,