As She Climbed Across the Table

by Jonathan Lethem

  I was thinking of Braxia’s assurances. If it was true that Lack would never take Alice, then my struggle with Lack wasn’t for her body, but for her mind, her soul. It was a struggle I felt I had a chance of winning. I sorted through long arguments in favor of myself, and against Lack. I measured my love for Alice against hers for Lack—which was craftier, which more tenacious? I was sure I knew the answer.

  I’d woo her back.

  On Thanksgiving I drove Evan and Garth to a dinner at the blind school, a large flat factory-like building in the middle of a grassy compound, surrounded by a baseball diamond, a parking lot, and a shallow blue swimming pool, drained for the winter and filling with dry leaves and the husks of summer insects. They invited me in, but I refused. I spent the afternoon driving in the hills above the city, nearly the only car, my radio tuned to live coverage of a far-off parade, athletes and politicians greeting crowds from garish floats. When it got dark I drove to my favorite diner, the Silver Lining, but the doors were closed. I peered in through the window. The vast, incomprehensible Greek family that ran the place was just sitting down to a pilgrim feast at the largest booth. The turkey was huge, golden, classic, and the side dishes were endless.

  When I got back to the apartment I found—surprise!—Alice clearing out the bedroom to create a painting studio.

  Alice was a terrible amateur painter. Or had been. At the start of our relationship she’d given it up. But now her dusty equipment was resurrected from the tomb of her parents’ garage. Paint-splattered easel, drop cloths, and containers of gesso and rabbit-skin glue. A thick, square mirror, edges taped. The bookshelves had been moved into the living room, to expose the north wall. A roll of fresh white duck was leaning up against the door frame, blocking the entrance. Alice was in the kitchen, rinsing old brushes at the tap.

  “Alice. You’re back.”

  Silence.

  “You missed the rest of your shift. Soft took over. I guess you’ll have to wait until next week.”

  Silence. Water running in the sink.

  I took a deep breath, trying to relocate my newfound, rain-washed strength.

  “Possibly there’s been a change,” I suggested. “You’re not so sure about this thing after all. You might be in over your head. Maybe you want to take a step back, get some perspective on this Lack thing.”

  Stony silence.

  “Alice?” I moved up closer behind her. She went on gently kneading the encrusted bristles back to life.

  “Maybe you’re still in love with Lack,” I said. “But feeling like you came on too strong. You’re giving him some space, so he can mull it over.”

  Silence. I felt my schemes evaporating in it.

  “Probably you’re still in love with Lack,” I said. “You’re determined, nothing’s going to stop you. You’re going to try to change yourself for him. That’s why you’re painting again all of a sudden.”

  She shook a handful of brushes dry, and gathered them in a coffee can.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m going to change my approach. I’m going to be lighthearted from here on in. We’ll develop a lighthearted, bantering dialogue. Like an old movie. Like in His Girl Friday, when Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are old flames, but she’s going to marry somebody else. He stays lighthearted. They banter. But at the same time, he’s making a very sly, very persuasive pitch for himself.”

  Silence.

  “Or if you don’t want to banter you could be like James Stewart in Vertigo, after he loses Kim Novak, the first time, and goes into a catatonic depression, and Barbara Bel Geddes has to try to jolly him out of it. With lighthearted banter. Because sometimes it’s just one person carrying on the lighthearted banter and the other person listening. That’s okay too.”

  I followed her into the bedroom, both of us ducking under the roll of canvas.

  “I get it. You’re not saying anything. Not a word. Why, I’ll bet you haven’t said a word since I came in here.”

  She began unrolling the canvas.

  “I notice the mirror,” I said. “I think I understand, I think I get it. You’re going to paint self-portraits again. And offer them to Lack. Get him used to you, in stages. Is that the idea? It’s very clever. If you hadn’t thought of it before now you can give me the credit.”

  Silence.

  “I get it. You’re making yourself more like Lack by not talking, right?”

  Silence that would seem to be confirmation.

  “Okay. There’s just one thing I want you to know, one thing I want to say. This is hardly lighthearted banter, I realize, but I just want to slip this in at the very start, and then I’ll run with the banter from now on. I love you, Alice. It’s important you hear that, it’s important you know.”

  The silence was like a carcass in the room with us. A rotting defrosted mammoth of silence. Outside I heard a car door slam, and blind footsteps tapping their way up the porch stairs. Alice began chopping at the canvas with the scissors, her face beet red.

  “I’m learning to hate the sound of my own voice,” I said.

  “I’m here as a patient,” I said. I wanted roles to be clear.

  Cynthia Jalter’s daytime offices were in a private medical building in a sunny, modern complex near downtown Beauchamp. She shared a receptionist, waiting area, and piped-in Muzak selections with a Dr. Gavin Flapcloth. The office was even more generic than the informal counseling area in her apartment. The curtains, lamp shades, tissues, and the color in the sky of the small landscape in oils above the desk were all the same color, a meek, inoffensive yellow. It probably bore the name buff or cockle. The office had no windows. It was like being submerged in a glass of lukewarm eggnog.

  Cynthia Jalter, on the other hand, was poised and elegant. Her black hair was swept back to expose her eyebrows, which met over her nose. She was the least blond woman I had ever met.

  “I couldn’t possibly take you on,” she said. “We have a relationship outside this office.”

  “I’ll relinquish that,” I said. “I want you to dissect me. Understand my life.”

  She smiled. “We can’t go backward. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “My problems are couple related,” I said. “I’m asking the advice of an expert.”

  “We met in a bar, you and I. You bought me a drink.”

  “That was fieldwork,” I said. “You wanted to see me exhibit my tropism, my need to couple. Let’s call it Life-Scenario Therapy.”

  “Two lonely people meeting in a bar.”

  My eyes wandered to a picture on the far wall. A faded print of a familiar painting: Brueghel’s Icarus, falling into the ocean unseen.

  “I need your help,” I said. “Things you said have been haunting me. Delusory or subjective worlds. Dual cognitive systems. Inequal growth. Do they apply to me? I need to understand.”

  She sighed. “With what goal? Reentry? My understanding was that you’re currently uncoupled.”

  “Am I? See, you’ve helped me already. That’s exactly what I’m missing, a terminology to apply to my situation. Uncoupled. Of course. Cynthia, can’t you see I’m operating at a disadvantage? Everyone around has a theory or an obsession. I’m making it up as I go along.”

  Cynthia Jalter lowered her head and smiled to herself. She set her clipboard on the desk and crossed her legs.

  “You’ve got yourself mixed up with Alice’s experiment,” she said. “Lack’s the one without any method. You’re just using that as a cover.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You say you want my help, but I think you’re kidding yourself. You want to avoid seeing the effect you’re having on someone else. To avoid responsibility.”

  I stared blankly. The Muzak swelled.

  “Do you know what I thought when you called?”

  I was mute, wheels turning silently inside.

  “I have to be honest with you, Philip. I’m not interested in your coming to me with problems about Alice. I don’t think you have any. She’s gone. What I w
ould be interested in is seeing you exhibit your tropism.”

  I felt my face flush, my palms moisten. A common panic associated with frank avowals by dauntingly attractive women.

  “I don’t want to be your therapist,” she said. “I might like to make love to you.”

  She leaned back in her chair. Her cheeks were a little flushed too. I felt courted, dizzy. Was it this simple? No more Alice? Could Cynthia Jalter simply uncouple me like a jigsaw-puzzle section and move me into her frame?

  When I examined myself for response, I found a void, a lack.

  “Is this an abuse of therapeutic confidence?” I said, dodging. “Can I lodge a complaint? Have I got a lawsuit?”

  “I haven’t accepted payment or even verbally contracted to see you professionally,” she said. “We’re just squatters in this office right now, not therapist and patient.”

  “Okay. No hard feelings. I just wanted to know.”

  “I understand. Besides, this might all be just some advanced therapeutic format. What did you call it? Life-Scenario Therapy.”

  I smiled weakly, at a loss. Cynthia Jalter got out of her seat, moved around her desk and out of view, then reappeared behind my chair, her arms draped over the back, her fingertips lightly touching my shoulders.

  “Relax,” she said.

  “I am relaxed. It’s just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I’m very relaxed.”

  “Philip.”

  “Also I am attracted to you. But I don’t know how to approach a woman whose area of expertise is what goes wrong when people overlap.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Also your office is like the living quarters of a space capsule they would use to send television talk-show hosts to other worlds.”

  “Should we go for a walk?”

  “Yes.”

  She had a word with the receptionist, then we stepped outside, into the cold, sunny afternoon. She took my hand and led me around the corner, to a grassy courtyard behind the medical offices, sheltered from the street by a low brick wall. From there I could see the parking lot of the Look ’n’ Like, the milling shoppers examining wreaths of pinecone and fir under a yellow tarpaulin. I looked up and caught a blurry figure moving behind the pebbled glass of the medical building windows.

  I pointed. “Dr. Flapcloth?”

  Cynthia Jalter nodded.

  “Another couple therapist?”

  “Vagina ecologist.”

  “What?”

  She repeated it.

  “You mean a gynecologist.”

  “Yes and no. Gavin prefers to break it into the root words to capture a meaning he feels is lost. The ecology of the vagina, the vagina as environment, rather than just negative space.”

  “And himself as what? E.P.A. official?”

  Cynthia Jalter laughed. The wind blew a strand of black hair into her mouth, and she ran it back out with a finger.

  I thought of Lack as cosmic vagina, laid out across that cold steel table for examination. Unable to close his legs. Peered into by dozens of white-coated experts. Maybe Alice just wanted to shelter this vaginal entity.

  Cynthia Jalter squeezed my hand. She blinked as the wind whipped her hair across her face. “You don’t have to stay with Alice anymore,” she said, apparently reading my thoughts. “You’ve been patient enough. It’s not your fault. You’re free now to do anything you want.”

  Though it was cold, a layer of moisture was forming between our clenched hands.

  “What if I want to stay with Alice?” I said.

  She smiled. “Just don’t forget that there are other options. That your life can change. People do forget.” She tugged my hand and drew me close enough to kiss. Her lips were dry and cool. I thought I could feel her smiling around my mouth.

  It only lasted an instant. Just long enough for me to wonder if I was numb to Cynthia Jalter the way Alice was numb to me, the way Lack was numb to Alice. Were we links in a chain?

  More important, if I woke to Cynthia Jalter, entered her embrace, would that start a chain reaction—would Lack embrace Alice?

  The kiss was over before I could puzzle it out. Our lips stuck together slightly as we separated. Whatever else, I’d have a small secret now. This kiss would be with me, invisible badge or scar, when I went back to the apartment.

  I opened my eyes. A tiny plane droned overhead, low against the fluffy clouds, trailing a banner that read CELESTE WILL YOU MARRY ME MAYNARD. A simple message conveyed across vast distance. Admirable. The answer could only be yes. The plane circled the patch of sky above the courtyard, then vanished.

  I looked at Cynthia Jalter.

  “I need time to think,” I said. “I’m living with two men who can’t see and a woman who won’t talk. She’s painting self-portraits now. She only eats toast. It’s tempting to think I can just walk away, but I can’t. Lack is part of my life at this point. I have to see it through to the end. I’m as bound to it as Alice.”

  Cynthia Jalter took me by the shoulder and kissed me again, quickly, almost furtively, on the corner of my mouth. I was left puckering in the cold air, late.

  “I understand,” she said. She seemed confident.

  What did she know that I didn’t?

  “Relax,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with a slow, awkward beginning. The text for the whole relationship, the sustaining mythos, is built in the first few encounters. The whirl of emotions, the push and pull. So the more of this kind of material we generate, the better.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “We’re sitting pretty,” she said.

  My knees were locked. I had no voice. A tendril of her hair floated loose and swept against my cheek. I tucked it back behind her ear, and came awfully close to grabbing her and kissing her again. But the impulse tangled into knots. Instead I raised my hand and pointed to the parking lot, indicating my small brown Datsun.

  “You have to go,” she said.

  I made a steering wheel shape with my hands.

  Georges De Tooth was our resident deconstructionist, a tiny, horse-faced man who dressed in impeccable pinstriped suits, spoke in a feigned poly-European accent, and wore an overlarge, ill-fitting, white-blond wig. He could be seen hurrying between the English department and his car, an enormous leather briefcase gripped in both arms as if it were the cover of a manhole from which he had just emerged. Or sitting in faculty meetings, silent and pensive, chewing on the stem of an unloaded pipe, often held with the bowl facing sideways or down. The library housed a dozen or so of his slim, unreadable volumes, as well as a thick anthology of savage attacks by his enemies. He lived in a room at the YMCA. He had for fifteen years.

  When I ushered De Tooth into Soft’s office it was, as far as I knew, the first meeting between the two great men. It wasn’t auspicious. They clutched quickly at each other’s hands, mumbled in unison, and retreated together into silence. I offered De Tooth a seat and he took it, trapping himself underneath his briefcase, his nose and wig peeking out over the top, his feet dangling above the floor. Soft leaned back in his chair, caught my eye, and screwed up his eyebrows in a frown. I smiled back.

  De Tooth was my version of Braxia. The European surrogate, the trump card. I’d spent the past week wooing him, baiting his interest in Lack. When I captured it I began priming him for this encounter. This was my own particle collision, my chance to bump together incompatible fields. Now I would observe the event.

  “Professor De Tooth and I have conceived an approach to Lack,” I said. “As I said on the phone, I wanted to run it by you. Otherwise we’re all ready to go. We just need some lab time.”

  “You know you have my support, Philip. You know I want to see you in there.”

  “Yes, well. We’re proposing something unorthodox, but very exciting. It’s not as though we’ll be in the way of the other teams. There shouldn’t be any problem.”

  “Unorthodox.”

  “Yes.” I turned to look at De Tooth. He’d slid the br
iefcase to his knees, though he still gripped the handle with both hands. He was studying Soft. “A contemporary critical approach,” I went on. “Very fertile. We want to treat Lack as a self-contained text. A sign. We want to read him.”

  Soft paled slightly.

  “In this field we speak of the text, in this case Lack, as possessing an independent life, free of context,” I went on. “We derive our descriptive standards, our critical vocabulary, from the source. Lack again. The idea is that any given text contains its own decryption kit, if we approach it free of bias.”

  “Interesting,” said Soft. He closed his eyes.

  “Have you heard,” said De Tooth, “of the death of the author?” When he spoke he arched his eyebrows, and they disappeared into the yellow wig.

  Soft looked at De Tooth. I could practically see the interference pattern in the space between the two men. The bad splice.

  “I may have,” said Soft.

  “It’s quite simple,” said De Tooth. “We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. We discard biography, psychology, historicism—these things impede clear vision. We admit nothing outside of the text. Lack is no different. In his case the irrelevant genre is physics, and the irrelevant author is yourself. We will study Lack as if he authored himself.”

  Soft smiled weakly. “Your study consisting of what?”

  “More text,” said De Tooth. “The only possible response.”

  “Georges will create a corresponding artifact,” I explained. “The correct approach to a text as dense and self-consistent and original as Lack is a criticism with all the same qualities.”

  “You mean you’ll sit in the chamber and write?” Soft sounded uncomfortable.

  De Tooth shrugged. “In or out of the chamber, I will compose a document. Perhaps it will not mention Lack. Perhaps it will only consist of the word Lack. And my students, in turn, will study my text. Without access to Lack. We should use up a minimum of your precious time.”

  “With all due respect,” said Soft, “Lack isn’t exactly a work of art.”

  “Leave that to me to determine. Meaning accrues in unexpected places. And drains unexpectedly out of others. Your physics, for example, has proven insufficient.”