‘I’m going’, I whispered, setting my leather suitcase by the couch, ‘to have a look at the boys.’
‘Don’t‚’ she said. ‘It’s a school night.’
‘Just a look.’
‘Don’t wake them!’ she urged, angry again at my arrival, my right to claim half of what was ours.
So I crept through the door, both of us creaking. The fan itself seemed to be the voice of their sleeping; breathing softly in tireless circles, aching now and then, with a noise like the crickets outside. The floor was neat, Missy saw to that, aside from a scooter tipped over, tired. A hulk of computer cluttered the desk they shared, keyboard in the opened drawer, monitor pushed to the edge, joystick perched on top. The light of the screen-saver, an airplane zooming brightly across the night, bouncing and zooming again, lit the faces of my boys in the ugliness of sleep: eyes squeezed and gummy, lips crumpled, cheeks flushed. I lifted from the other pocket of my Harris tweed the pack of Devonshire toffee I had purchased at the Heathrow Harrods (a world away) – a tiny, vaguely Scottish-looking hole-in-the-wall, much decorated by the plaid of shortbread, and the pink of iced salmon, in the window. Toffee, I thought, was suitably British. They should know toffee.
The wrapper crackled unbearably in my thick fingers; but I picked the sugary blocks away at last. It is rare that the imagination anticipates all the details of a plot, however small. But everything happened as I knew it would. Aaron, the older boy, sleeping on top, a fair-faced, easy child, unlike his stubborn father, quick at games and friends, shifted and peeped out of his corporeal shell. ‘Oh‚’ he said, ‘hello‚’ and I put a piece of the toffee upon his lips, a rich brown chunk that melted at once into his sweetened sleep. ‘Thankoo‚’ he murmured, through a sticky tongue. I could see almost how I would slip into his dreams again.
Ben was awake now and wide-eyed, smaller, almost lost in the corner of his blanket. I noted the crook of his shortened arm against his belly, the muffled woolly shape of it. A great shame this arm, root and emblem of his awkward nature, his patient difficulty with life, though it could appear curiously grown-up, wizened, when propped akimbo at his hip – as if his trouble were not youth but a foretaste of old age. I put a chunk of fudge into his other hand, and let him feel it, and smudge it, and press it into his own mouth – he never took anything as given. ‘We’ll talk in the morning‚’ I whispered, tickling into his ear. And left them both to the brown sweet dreams upon their tongues. The sugar might trick them from sleep; but they wouldn’t mind, they wouldn’t mind, I knew. My own father, bald and shining in the light from the cracked door, had woken me once coming back from a job with a stick of cane sugar – which I chewed and mumbled deep into the night, repeating as it were his presence, again and again, never to be forgotten.
‘They were awake already‚’ I said, stepping into the bedroom, and seeing Susie through the bathroom door. ‘They were already awake.’
We have come at last to the description of love, which requires, above all, an attention to this and that. Lord Peter Wimsey, I believe, could track his man by the shape and shadow of his back; there is much to be said for this, for the shape of the back, and I am also skilled in these matters, though in other respects I have little enough in common with Lord Peter Wimsey. Susie, naked in the white glare of the bathroom light, did not turn, engaged as she was upon countless spells and their magical ingredients, ranged along the toothpasted shelf above the sink: bottles of lotion, scented and particular soaps, saline solutions for ‘her eyes’ as she called them, and the little cages in which the fingertip lenses were kept. I knew, of course, that there was some concession in this, that the door was not shut, nor her shoulders draped in the heavy white towel of her robe.
Her hair fell longer now down her neck. A clump of it stuck, brown and glossy at her right ear, where a splash of water caught it when she washed her face. Her shoulders, narrow, half-slumped, always hurt my heart: they suggested so vividly the weight of things borne. I could count the fine ribs breathing down her sides, for the skin covered only lightly the wonderful device in which her clock was kept. A long back, broad-bottomed, pink – a little blue in the chill of the air conditioning. Then the stubbornness of her thighs, the tender ticklish blue veins at the back of her knees, her red ankles wrinkled by socks and her tiny feet, cold on the bathroom tiles, childish, unchanged. ‘You’d better have a shower‚’ she said, turning round.
In class she wore bright flowing frocks from C.P. Shades and, when the Texas sun or Texas air conditioning permitted, sweaters she knitted herself. On weekends and grocery days, cheap Gap blue jeans and plain Nike kicks with the laces tucked in, and a tie-dyed shirt from the rag and bauble market on the Drag. She favoured their heavy and jangly stones as well depending softly from her lobes; necklaces wrapped thrice around and still long and loose enough to tangle in her fingers when she spoke; and a hair-clip, like a tennis sweetheart’s, chalk blue, to free her bangs. Occasionally, in her Jewish moods, a woven shawl, bundled about her head; and she looked like a boy then, with her plump, fair cheeks, broad lips and sturdy nose. She had silk pyjamas, which she called ‘Sears’ finest’, for bed and days spent sick at home – for she grew sick easily and utterly and happily.
And these she wore, under a summer duvet – as I stepped out of the shower steaming and into bed, where the cotton clung to me in various patches, and grew dark. I smelled of great warmth, and the thick scent of my skin filled my own nose with the sour breath of soap and water. She lay with her arms at her sides unmoving; her toes delicately suggested by a bump in the comforter; her eyes, blue as bottles, tilted at the ceiling. Quite silent. She did not stir, even when I tugged and shifted, leaned upon my elbow in the bed, and looked at her. And looked at her again, as the bald pink of my pate pricked and tickled with the sweat of the shower.
I said, ‘Pitt is clean now.’ This was true and unanswerable, so she did not answer; and I dripped and pondered what else to say, to assuage or incite.
I said, ‘Pitt has made good for once, poor Pitt, by chance.’
I said, ‘Pitt is a great believer in abiding by good luck.’
I said, ‘We’re OK.’
(Like tossing pennies and wishes in a deep well, waiting for a ripple and echo and answer, receiving none; dropping another coin and listening again.)
I said, ‘Pitt apologizes for loneliness. Pitt has suffered greatly from loneliness himself.’
I said, ‘Hello.’
I said, ‘I have stumbled upon my life’s work.’
‘Well‚’ she answered finally, in a dead voice, ‘that must be nice.’ At which she began to cry, as if all the stillness had leaked from her bones at last, and she could move again. This endured a minute perhaps, but I dared not touch her. Then she turned in bed upon her own elbow and looked at me. We lay there, eye to eye, our elbows nudging.
‘I harden my heart against you‚’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re so stubborn‚’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘You always do what’s wrong, and say it’s right‚’ she said. ‘And I’m the one who has to figure it out.’
‘No, no,’ I promised her, ‘not now.’
She did not mention then that she told me as much when we married and she wished to discuss the question of our children and religion, beforehand. Not now, I said. It will come to us, I promised; or them. Perhaps I’ll convert, I teased, if we get that far. (We never got that far and I stopped teasing.)
Nor did she refer to the day I decided to finish my Ph.D. and she declared, I know where this will end, and it isn’t New York City; and I said, Things will turn out, you’ll see. Of course, we were the ones who turned out in the end.
And when we came to Texas and she vowed, I won’t move every two years for you, while you get your head on straight, with the boys in school; and I promised, We’ll stay here, of course, and set up shop. (I said shop and meant shop; she would have baulked at the word home.) But I am an optimist, you
see, as Syme was. The world will turn to us in the end, if we are right.
I did not mention this to her either.
Instead, she pressed against me, and squeezed the curious jigsaw of our legs and arms into a single – puzzle. The shadow that fell between us shrank and disappeared, for a time at least, at such proximity. And still, I noticed, breathing the heat of her cheek, there clung to her – a scent of oranges.
*
I missed Syme, I confess it. There is a kind of intimacy, of growing intimacy, in biographical research; we feel, because our subjects grow clearer to us, that we have advanced, in a similar way, into their hearts, that we are dear to them, become dearer, become – confidants, specially chosen to ‘give them to the world aright’. I have known a convocation of biographers – at a conference, in Lausanne, which we had all attended for the seven-course fair – positively jealous of one another, like lovers at a funeral, jostling to lay the brightest flower on the grave. (Never mind that the lover in question was an extremely corpulent, occasionaly gouty, generally rubicund chemist, who suffered, by the by, from the most apocalyptic indigestion, and who had grown, presumably, quite damp and musty in his grave over the last hundred years; still, we fussed over him as if he were Marilyn Monroe.) The trouble, of course, is that the end of knowledge is the end of intimacy; when the investigation is suspended, the friendship begins to die. Our subjects, unlike our romances (though perhaps there is an echo of such decline even in ordinary love), cast us off as soon as we cease to find out more about them. They seem almost to snub us.
Well, there was more work to be done with Syme, more trouble to be had; and I awoke with an almost overwhelming sense of excitement, for – I do not wish to appear ridiculous, I do not wish to appear a fool, nevertheless, I will … explain myself. The day a biographer undrapes his subject (or rather plops a heap of papers upon his dean’s or editor’s desk) rivals in sweetness, in shy pride, in nervous fever, the occasion on which a lover confesses openly to the world for the first time his great love, takes her hand in the street. (Is she not beautiful, he cries, anxiously – do you not find her beautiful?)
In short, I had an appointment with Bunyon that morning.
I woke glad to the heart in the rich scent of the conjugal bed. Missy dozed, smudge-faced, beside me, her hot breath percolating through sleep-fat lips. I eyed her widely, and nosed her, until she blinked; whereupon she squeezed her eyes. “Sonly six‚’ she said, and shut them again. ‘I’m getting up‚’ she added, and fell asleep. (It is always a miracle to me how much of the patois of ordinary love and joy survives in the grand rhetoric of marital Sturm und Drang.) I dressed, donned my Harris tweed and shuffled barefoot into a pair of well-oiled loafers, and stepped into the sitting room. A hot, white morning lurked outside, licking grass and tree, and from its damp maw I briefly retrieved the paper. Six-thirty. Jet-lag had propped my eyes wide with invisible pincers, an enormity of world seemed to tip into them, too much for my brain to unjumble. I couldn’t possibly go to work at six-thirty.
Glad to the heart, I said, and yet, I was conscious even then of the gnaw (I can find no other word for it) of a deeper hunger in my happy appetite for life, an ache of doubt – a worm blindly nudging through an apple, and leaving holes behind it wherever it ate. My palms grew damp at the thought of Bunyon, his magisterial forgetfulness, the bright flag of his attention flapping in a hundred winds at once, and falling as suddenly still. Bloody Bunyon, as the Brits would have it – just the man to look across the Red Sea parted, and observe (with a wonderfully mimicked air of naivety, of grey-headed boyish enthusiasm) an unusual and quite astonishing shrub on the sea-bottom to which he wishes to draw our particular attention. Just the man, in short, to miss a miracle in search of a curiosity.
Well, I could not sit still all morning and stew. So I withdrew from my suitcase (lying tumbled at the foot of the sofa, now happily strewn with newspapers, like a full mouth with crumbs after a meal) the precious sheaf, which I had titled, in staccato type, ‘the syme papers, a journal kept by dr friedrich müller, including an introduction and explanatory notes by dr douglas pitt’ – a good, fat brainchild that woke in me a flush of paternal pride, as if indeed I had given birth to a phonebook. This I slipped (if a phonebook may slip) into my briefcase, a much-battered antique satchel, the gift of my father.
I stepped into the boys’ loo, quickly, for I had grown increasingly uncertain with age of my waterworks (a Monopoly card for which I would gladly sacrifice several Mayfairs). I peed away happily in a fine gold stream, aiming for the fleck of fecal matter one son had left upon the bowl. The porcelain shone – and, toting my portmanteau, I set forth into the enormity of a Texas morning in September.
A thick, hot drapery of cloud hung over the sycamores and the live-oaks and drooped down, sticky as cobwebs, on to the parked cars and the plastic toymobiles tipped over in the front yards. The sharp prick of sweat opened the pin-holes in my skin, tickling my bald pate, my palms, and the bone along my forearms. I was home, in the heat again, in the intimate air of a tropical country, which always awakes in me a thousand desires and slackens at the same time every muscle needed to attain a single one. Susie, I knew, wanted the Volvo to take the boys to Robert E. Lee and get to McCallum High herself. So I decided to walk, to tire my buzzing nerves and draw out the sweet anticipation of arrival – while the sun burned away the clouds and began to shine off the wide asphalt. And I walked, through the wide and wealthy decay of Hyde Park, along Speedway, past the laundromat, where the bums drank from their paper bags against the kerb (how glorious the vicissitudes of their lives, dawn and sunset and the night stars!), across 30th Street and Dean Keeton, past the little booth (10 m.p.h.!) where the university traffic guard scratched himself in front of a fan, along the creek and under the stretch of trees where the grackle-birds shat, to the tall limestone block in which the History Department roosted.
I confess (again!) that I had begun to … perspire by the time I arrived; my bare feet rubbed angry red against their leather heels, browned by old polish; my armpits grew pungent with sweat, little copses of damp (I could not, in all propriety, remove my Harris tweed, had I wished to); my forehead dripped with beads like a watermelon brought out of the fridge. But the great resource of an ivory tower is the … air conditioning; and as I stepped into the halls of academe – decorated by fake new-fangled lounges (red, vaguely French, à la Jean-Luc Godard) and fake old-fashioned portraits (including a particularly gruesome replica of Dr Bunyon himself, stuffed into the pomposity of a bad suit, grinning broadly, his teeth, like brick-work in a New York apartment, exposed, I believe is the architectural term) – I began to chill, ever so slightly, and then shiver, as I strolled up the stairs to Bunyon’s office, top and corner, from which he could look over his little world.
Perhaps I should spend a moment on the battle of Bunyon and Pitt, and the great war of which we are only the soldiers. The study of science is a relatively recent twig on the branch of history; but Bunyon, our dean and leader, has made it his particular care to tend this twig and nurse it to a glowing, if insubstantial, foliage. Now you may be sure that in any discipline with a double-barrelled name the barrels are pointing firmly at each other – and the scientists and the historians engage in a kind of guerrilla warfare unrivalled in academe for the heat of its prosecution. You may suppose that the scientists among us would carry the honours, owing to (well, there is no harm in honest pride) our technical expertise – for the truth is often simpler than the varieties of error, and the wonderful convolutions of ancient thought require considerable untwisting. Yet the historians of science for their part consider themselves the proper equals of their brothers in the History Department – they practise, like the rest of them, an ancient craft, and preen themselves rather on the intricacy of their subject, which seems so much more difficult, more technical, more serious, than the intrigues of kings and queens, the outcomes of wars, the evolutions of economies and societies. Worse still, they prance about in borrowed robes
– white coats, I suppose – and ape the muddle-headed eccentricity of the scientists they suppose themselves sufficiently advanced to condescend to.
I regret to say, by contrast, that the more scientific historians suffer somewhat in our own esteem, less from the eminence of our historical than our scientific colleagues, who struggle at the frontiers, while we map the well-travelled roads that led them there. We stand at the elbow of genius, and glimpse only the legs and bottoms of the new men perched on the shoulders.
Of course, the great prize of any historical enquiry lies in digging up a buried bone and barking over it. But the trouble is this: the bones of scientists tend to decay rather quickly, splinter and open and crumble into the mud, while the bones of kings and statesmen and poets are picked clean by time and come up gleaming. True scientists, for their part, not only stand upon the shoulders of past giants, but kick them over when they’ve had a good look through the window, clamber in, and forget about them what brought ‘em to the dance. As George Sarton declared in an early specimen of scientific history, ‘From Homer to Omar Khayyám’: ‘The acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge is the only human activity which is truly progressive – which begins, in other words, in the negation of the past.’
Except. Except upon those rare and glorious occasions when the scientists, the modern fellows, looking for new worlds, lose themselves in the forest, stumble into an impenetrable thicket, an unexpected gate, chained fast, a chasm too broad for bridges, and realize, in the words of the gentleman from Maine, that ‘you can’t get there from here’. When they are forced to double back, tread old roads again, pore over maps that not so long ago appeared hopelessly out of date and which have long been out of print. Times when, as Wegener had discovered a century before, a dead man holds the lantern at the dark threshold of the future, and we creep behind him, follow his glowing shadows.
The Syme Papers Page 24
