An Artist and a Magician

by Hugh Fleetwood

  But ten days later—ten beautiful, sunny winter days—it was all over. Betty was only a memory; another friend to be missed and mourned. And for the world at large her passing had been dramaless; just another shifting of the sands.

  For Wilbur, however, who had passed these ten days in a state of almost exalted calm, of organizing this and seeing to that, of phoning here and phoning there—because though the pompous son had refused his offers of help, he seemed to have no idea how much Wilbur was doing and had already done; things took time in Italy—of finding homes for Betty’s animals, and another job for her maid; doing, in other words, absolutely everything possible, including drink an enormous amount of alcohol, to keep himself busy, and stop himself thinking, the end of this period of activity marked, as it had to, a return of the sense of unease he had started to feel after Pam’s death. That unease that had only left him when he had decided to sober up and be serious; when he had decided that the truth must be known, and had invited Betty and Bernard for dinner….

  And as the relief that he had felt on not being arrested for Betty’s death—for it was relief more than anything that had sustained him for these ten days—was replaced by a feeling of fear far worse than any law-court could have inspired in him, and as the weather became bleak again, with the skies grey and yellow, he started, at last, to dwell on the nature of, or the reasons for, Betty’s death.

  Because while every doctor in the world might put her death down to cerebral thrombosis, that, as so much that the world had had an explanation for of late, meant nothing to him. That, once again, was the explanation for the literal minded and the prosaic. But it couldn’t satisfy a poet. It couldn’t, and didn’t, satisfy Wilbur George.

  (It couldn’t satisfy Bernard Dale, either. ‘You old motherfucker,’ he had cried when, as soon as he had heard, Wilbur had phoned him to tell him of the doctors’ report. ‘You genius. You are incredible. How did you do it? What wicked brew did you prepare that would leave no trace?’)

  And now, as he sat alone in his apartment, staring out of the window at the four o’clock sky when he should have been having his siesta, he had to come to terms with what had happened; he had to accept his responsibility. And there were no two ways about it—some malign and rampant power of magic, art gone wild and out of control—call it what he would—call it even some intensely destructive waves, of a purely physical nature, emitted by his brain—he was responsible for Betty’s death. And therefore, in retrospect, for Pam and Jim’s deaths too. He had to be. However much he hated the idea, however alien it was, however much he tried to convince himself that it was lunacy to think so. He was a murderer. A murderer malgré lui; but—a murderer nevertheless….

  It was terrifying. To be so out of control. To be so condemned to doing what he didn’t want to do. To kill, whenever a friend of his refused him money…. God, apart from anything else, it was so vulgar; so cheap, mundane, unlike him. If his friends had died for destroying some masterpiece he had written, some painting he had done, at least there would have been something aesthetic about it. But for money…. And where would it end, he asked himself. Where could it end? Oh, that was the most terrifying thing of all, and probably, though it had been a subconscious decision, why he hadn’t—and he hadn’t—spoken to Bernard at all in the last ten days, apart from that once. Naturally he could tell himself it was because he had been too busy. But deep down, he knew it was because he had been scared that if Bernard, even in fun, were to say ‘all right, that’s it’, he, the last, and the best of his friends, would drop dead too.

  Yes, he muttered out loud; that was why he hadn’t spoken to Bernard. And why, what was more, he would try to avoid speaking to him in the future.

  For how long though? Could he simply never see him again, for the rest of his life? No, of course not. One didn’t just stop seeing friends because—he hesitated. Because one was frightened of killing them….

  Yes, one did stop seeing friends for that.

  He sat still until six o’clock. And then, finally, he made up his mind. He would go out now and buy provisions for some time. Then he would come home, call Lillian and Aida and tell them to take a week’s holiday—a paid holiday, he would make it clear. Then he would unplug the phone, and put an iron bar across his door. And then he would just stay sealed up here, not speaking to anyone, until he had found some way out of this mess. Until he had discovered how to divert this stream that was flooding and destroying his life. Until he learned how to break the pattern that was threatening to set around him, and crush him. He would just stay up here, and think….

  *

  Two hours later, he started. With his childhood.

  Were the roots of the evil that was entangling him buried there, he wondered. In his much recounted, always different childhood? In that childhood he had spent being handed round from one person to the other, being taken in, thrown out, taken back? In that childhood in which he had been spoiled and then ignored, smothered with affection and then rejected; used as a pawn in a game of adult lust and adult jealousy, of adult greed and adult need. Was that where the trouble lay? In that childhood in which nothing was ever fixed, nothing ever true, where every day he heard different stories of his dead parents, and different stories of his foster parents, until the only reality he had ever been able to hang on to and pull himself up by had been the reality of books and puppets, of movies and vaudeville shows, of pictures and plays and masks?

  Possibly, he told himself. But if it was so, wherever in that jumbled mosaic would he find the thread that led to the terrible tree, whose spreading, suffocating fronds were stretching out now, over all these years, and strangling him? However could he tell which, amongst all those scattered, multi-coloured scraps of paper, were the ones he had to follow all the way back in his treasure-hunt; in his hunt for the diseased, contaminated treasure?

  He’d never be able to do it. Not now. Now it was too late; the journey was too far. And if there had been street-signs, monuments, which he could have guided himself by, he had torn them down long ago. Torn them down just so he wouldn’t always be searching for the one, true, undiscoverable home. The past, he had always maintained, existed only in the present. So what was the point now of maintaining that it existed somewhere else; a sort of Disneyland set back there in the bayous of the human heart or brain, that could be wandered round and explored at will?

  There was no point at all….

  Well then, he asked himself, did the trouble start later? When he was a young poet, and painter, and actor, and novelist, living in New York and producing crazy, funny poems, wild, fantastic paintings, and comic, unclassifiable novels full of magic and mythology; which, for all that they were highly praised at the time, and for all that he tried to inject into diem some vision of reality—some shifting, glimmering, unstable reality, but a reality nevertheless—didn’t entirely satisfy him; if only because they didn’t quite go far enough; weren’t quite strong enough to transform the stony, soaring city about him into anything other than a fortress whose foundations were laid in the unquestioning and unquestionable?

  Perhaps his presumptuousness had been his sin; perhaps some undetected falseness in his position….

  Or was it later still, the setting up and setting in of this deadly pattern? When, dissatisfied as he was with himself and his work, he had left America and come to Europe, and after wandering for a year, had finally discovered in Italy, and in Rome, the country and city of his dreams? When he had believed he had found at last the one place on earth that corresponded, in almost every respect, to his own particular vision….

  For here it had no longer been necessary to distill, to transform, to create. Here all that was necessary was the living itself; to plug oneself in to the current that was here, there, everywhere about one, and to pulsate with it, tremble with it, glow and burn and blaze with it. And here, too, he had found at last people who knew, instinctively, what he was trying to do; who shared, instinctively, his vision. Above all, the other foreigner
s he met here. The expatriates and exiles like himself; expatriates and exiles of every different nationality, all of whom had discovered, here, the reality they had rejected, or felt themselves excluded from, elsewhere. This reality that was as unsettled as his childhood; as shifting and glimmering as his poems and paintings and novels….

  But, he asked himself at last, had he been wrong all this time, for all these last twenty-five years? Had this feeling of having at last united art and life, spirit and body, been just a delusion; a wicked delusion that now he was being punished for? Perhaps, here, cut off from the influences that had, however haphazardly, formed him, instead of living a higher, truer reality, he was really just finding refuge in a state of mind that had no contact with the outside world. Finding refuge from a world in which if he hadn’t precisely failed, he hadn’t succeeded as he’d wanted to. Perhaps here, far from having found a home, he was permanently, totally exiled in a dream. A dream, what was more, that depended very largely for its survival on extorted or even stolen money. For much as he liked or loved Pam and Jim and Betty and Bernard, and much as he disliked rhetoric of any kind, he had never been able to help thinking that their vast fortunes, dribs and drabs of which had kept him afloat for all these years, were fortunes that had been gained, multiplied and maintained by extortion, exploitation and downright robbery; were fortunes whose capital was suffering and misery, slavery and cruelty and horror. Of course, he had tried, in his way, and with those dribs and drabs, to reconvert this inheritance of suffering and misery into some life-giving, life-enhancing currency. But perhaps, he murmured miserably to himself, exhausted now, he hadn’t done enough; hadn’t been generous enough in the distribution of this coinage he believed himself so good at minting. Or perhaps, simply, no amount of reconversion could ever cleanse the money he had lived on of its blood—and here was the secret of the present state of affairs.

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps … Perhaps all these explanations were valid; perhaps none of them were. Perhaps he was merely losing his mind…. Oh, he sighed, he didn’t know, and it was all so boring and useless. He didn’t know and he couldn’t know why all that had happened had happened. All he knew was that it had; and that he must try to prevent it doing so again. But how? Not only by not seeing Bernard ever again, but also by not seeing anyone ever again? For who could tell if everything would stop even with Bernard? It might, the horror, just go on spreading out in ever widening circles….

  So the only thing to do would be to stay locked up in this apartment for ever; cut off from the world until he himself died….

  No! Enough! Enough, he shouted at himself, getting up, turning on the lights, and pouring himself a whisky. It was futile going on like this. Absolutely futile. He would, as he had planned, have a week off; but he wouldn’t, he couldn’t torture himself the whole time. He must try to relax. He must. And hope that by the end of the week things would have sorted themselves out.

  They didn’t, however, and he couldn’t relax, and he couldn’t stop torturing himself. And if by the end of his seven days of isolation he had managed to do some translating, and quite a lot of writing, he was still just as miserable and confused as he had been at the beginning. He couldn’t forget what had happened, and he couldn’t help but feel responsible for it; and he still didn’t know why it had happened, nor how he could prevent it happening again. Furthermore, he was incapable of making a single decision as to his future. What was the use? He had already tried making decisions….

  The only thing he did do, in fact, apart from his translations and working on his novel, was write a letter to Bernard—which he slipped out under the cover of a snowy night to mail—asking him if they could please not see each other for a while—at least until the memory of a certain evening was a little more vague—and begging him never, ever, to mention the subject of money again. Never to offer him a loan, a gift, anything. He would be all right by himself. He was determined to be. Please, he wrote to Bernard. Please.

  It wasn’t any use though; because on the very day that Lillian and Aida returned, and so-called normal life started again, Bernard phoned. Wilbur had told Lillian that he wasn’t at home to anyone; but the old man screeched so loudly at the gentle Irish girl that Wilbur, standing by her side, heard every word he said.

  ‘Not at home my ass! Of course he’s at home. Don’t give me any of that shit. Call him immediately.’

  With a sign, and a sigh, Wilbur took the receiver.

  ‘You never get any better, do you‚’ he murmured.

  ‘Well what’s this nonsense you’ve written me,’ Bernard bellowed. ‘You’re losing your fucking mind. Avoid each other! I’ve no intention of avoiding you. In fact I’m going to come to dinner tonight, whether you like it or not. You’ll just have to set an extra chair at the table if you haven’t got room for me. And what’s more I have even less intention of not giving you any more money. What do you want me to do? Drop dead? Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Oh Bernard.’ Wilbur made his usual response, unable, as usual, to keep from smiling. But it was a tired smile. A sad smile … ‘I wish you wouldn’t. I honestly don’t need it. But of course you can come to dinner if you insist, and there won’t be anyone here. I’m cutting right back.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Bernard croaked. ‘I can’t stand it. But I’ll tell you something else. I went to see my lawyer yesterday, and added a codicil to my will. I’m going to take care of you even after I die. Just so you don’t make a pact with the devil, and send me to hell.’

  ‘Oh Bernard, you old fool,’ Wilbur said—and now couldn’t stop a flush coming to his face. But he didn’t think it was a flush of pleasure….

  ‘So for God’s sake start behaving normally again. And invite some other people to dinner. I haven’t met anyone new for ages. And I’m bored. And being bored makes me bad-tempered. Invite some of your bright young artist types. That way I can have an argument. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ Wilbur murmured, without even a pretence of a smile.

  For just as he hadn’t been able to refuse Betty’s invitation to the country, he couldn’t refuse Bernard now….

  *

  He couldn’t refuse him a few days later, either, when Bernard invited himself once more.

  And after that he started to feel it was his duty to have him over to dinner almost every night; because he had never seen Bernard in such good form and obviously enjoying himself; baiting the young men, being charming to the young women, amusing the middle-aged, and frightening everyone….

  But while he did have him over so much—and was obliged, therefore, to spend just as much as ever on his entertaining, every evening became an ordeal for him, and each one worse than the one before. And instead of relaxing after the first few times, he found himself getting more and more tense; waiting, more and more, for something to happen. He became so very tense, that eventually he couldn’t even sleep. Which meant that, though he somehow managed to work on his novel, he was too tired to concentrate on doing his translations, which still flowed in relentlessly. And not doing his translations, he was forced to ask, at the beginning of March, for a loan….

  ‘Ha, I knew it wouldn’t last,’ Bernard crowed. ‘How much do you want?’

  ‘If you could spare me five hundred dollars …’

  ‘I’ll bring you a cheque tonight,’ the old man laughed. ‘I am coming tonight, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, Bernard, of course you are,’ Wilbur said.

  He had tears in his eyes….

  *

  He couldn’t go on, he told himself. He couldn’t go on. He was sweating the whole time, drinking the whole time, hardly sleeping at all. He felt sick, he felt exhausted, he felt, for the first time, almost suicidal.

  Yet he had to go on. Day after day, night after night, preparing, planning, cooking, inviting—and then being as bright and witty and magical as he had always been. And he was, he knew. It wasn’t like those weeks after Pam had died, when his unease had prevented him from playing the perfect host, when h
is timing had been off, his delivery wrong. Now, oh God, he had to be good. He had to be brilliant. And the effort was killing him.

  Surely Bernard must see it, he thought. He must realize what he was doing to him. And while, in the past, there had been periods when the old man had been bored and had invited himself to dinner two or three times a week for six months at a stretch—whenever Pam or Jim or Betty hadn’t been among the other guests—now, surely, he must know that it was no longer possible to pretend they were still living in those far-off, carefree days. He had to be aware that he was destroying him.

  Yet if he was, why was he doing it? Bernard didn’t hate him, he was sure—he had nothing to hate him for. So if he didn’t hate him—why, why, why did he keep on coming?

  He tried to take a hold on himself, tell himself that he was over-tired, and that indeed things were just as they had been in the old days—if not better, since now he didn’t have to worry about asking for loans, and didn’t have to juggle with A who couldn’t see B. But it was no use. Things weren’t as they were, and he had three deaths on his conscience, and he was terrified of having a fourth. Because of course Bernard seemed to be enjoying himself enormously at the moment, playing the part of the lone survivor. Yet surely there would come a time when he had a reaction, when he realized that this wasn’t all a joke. And what would he do then—if not tell Wilbur that he didn’t want to see him any more, and certainly wouldn’t give him any more money. And if he did that….

  Oh why hadn’t he agreed to what was in that letter; accepted those proposals?

  Or had he feared that he was simply being tested; and if he had agreed….