Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Avram’s conscience made him say, “But he loves you, Annetje … and you are, I think, still in love with him.”

  “Of course,” said Annetje. “I am always in love with bastards. It is not easy to stop loving. But if I don’t see him I will be all right. I would rather die than see him.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Ah,” Annetje said seriously, “you understand me.”

  Avram wriggled in his chair, blinded by her regard.

  She said, “I am very tough. I am tougher than he is. He is weak!” She spoke with large-scale contempt.

  Avram thought, I am afraid of her. He said, “You’re not actually tough.”

  “No. You’re right,” she said docilely, tensely. “That is true. I am not. But they always think I am. I need a man. I need. I want a man to take care of me—a strong man.” She glanced at Avram. “I think you are strong.”

  “Not strong enough,” Avram said mournfully.

  Annetje said, “Why do men think women take their strength from them?”

  “Well, women do, in a way,” Avram said, weakly amused. “I mean, I sometimes feel very weakened by you.”

  Annetje’s mouth turned downward with sadness. “You find me boring.”

  “No, no. I think you are afraid of being loved. You are tired of it.” He passed his hand over his eyes. “You are not pleased when people lean on you. You don’t like it, and you are afraid, too, you won’t be strong.”

  Annetje smiled slowly; her eyes widened. She said, “You understand me. You are a lot like me—you are more like me than John Herbert is.”

  She sat on the couch, fragile and exposed. She seemed to hold his regard to her breast, to her cheek. For comfort. If he embraced her, she would explore her feelings of similitude to him in kisses that would be like waves—suffocating, soft, private, dense. And then?

  Avram thought with self-distaste that he was too scrupulous in his lechery. She had taken LSD, she was out of the question. But he did not want to fall in love with Annetje anyway; I can’t afford it, he phrased it inwardly.

  “Yes,” he said. “We are very much alike, like brother and sister.”

  “You would be good to me,” Annetje said.

  “No,” Avram said. “I would be less patient even than John Herbert. I am very demanding.”

  “Like Allan!” Annetje exclaimed with sudden comprehension. Allan was the professional skin diver, her second husband. “Ah, God, I was miserable with him!” Annetje said. “The sweet-tempered men are the worst. How he nagged! And jealous! My God, he was jealous. There I was, cooking all day, sewing, and he was jealous.”

  “He probably thought you liked him as a rest cure rather than for himself,” Avram said, with a touch of petulant identification.

  Annetje said, “Ah. No.”

  “He might have thought that,” Avram argued.

  “But no,” Annetje said. “He did not. You don’t know everything, I see. I will tell you something. You have the story all wrong. I loved him more than he loved me. You see, when I was younger and I admired a man, I slept with him, but sleeping was not important to me. You understand when I say sleeping I mean the other?”

  “Yes,” Avram said.

  “I loved the man whoever he was. But I belonged to myself. You understand? But with Allan that changed. My God! I was crazy with it,” Annetje confided. Averting her eyes, spiritually drawing away from him, she said, “Now it is dangerous for me to go to bed with a man. I feel too strongly.”

  Avram said as if studying a cue card, “But you do love John Herbert!” He did not like it that Annetje’s retreat strengthened his desire.

  “Yes,” she said. “No. It makes no difference. I am through with that bastard. Perhaps I should put my head in the oven. It is a gas oven.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Annetje,” Avram said.

  “Yes, it is stupid, but I am a stupid woman. I have had no life. I have been eating tranquilizers all day—six, ten, twelve of them.”

  “You fool!” Avram exclaimed. “We must call a doctor.”

  “I did. He said I was a fool. He came. He checked my heart.”

  Avram was glad he had not kissed her. He stood up. “Come,” he said, all solid reason; even the palms of his hands were drying. “Get your raincoat. We must go. It will be good for you to get out of this apartment. My friends are very stable, middle-class people. They are just what you need at this point.”

  “No. Let us stay here and—” Annetje began.

  “Please,” Avram said firmly.

  “Oh yes. I see. You don’t want to be rude to them. Now, where is my coat? Let me go comb my hair.”

  He nodded. She left the living room. The trouble with women like Annetje, he thought, was that they did not want a man to put his life into their hands; they wanted to put their life in his. Then when he mismanaged it, they could righteously assert that they had earned their freedom. Their men’s wrongdoing gave them the little freedom they had from their guilt.

  “Hurry,” he called. He did not want her to be in the bathroom too long. Twelve tranquilizers! “Come on.”

  He was standing at the doorway of the living room. Annetje came out of a bathroom down the hallway. “I should change,” she said gloomily.

  “No,” Avram said. “You are fine. Just get a coat.”

  “God damn. I am afraid,” she said from inside the closet. “That goddam drug. I will never take it again!” She was near tears.

  “How did you get hold of it?” he asked as he helped her from the closet and into her coat.

  “John Herbert. Who else? He loves drugs. Anything to die.” Her disgust carried her to the door; then she halted and stared helplessly at the locks. Avram counted six. “They don’t all work,” Annetje said. She began to fiddle with them. “I bought some. John Herbert bought some. Whenever we were happy, we put another lock on the door.” Suddenly the door opened. “There,” she said with surprise. “I did it.”

  In the elevator, she clung to Avram’s arm. They did not speak, but they glanced at each other. The doorman in the lobby held the door for them. “I am afraid of him,” Annetje whispered to Avram. He pressed her hand reassuringly.

  The air was gray, like a light flannel; the streetlamps were on. Avram said to Annetje that she had wanted to have a bad reaction to test John Herbert, but it was an unfair test. “People who love get too upset,” Avram said. “No one like us”—he meant unsettled, unsuburban people—“is clever or strong or forgiving enough in love. We are impossible when we love. What we need is humor and patience, but we are too greedy to be patient. We want a perfect love. We should avoid love entirely, perhaps—good, solid, lewd friendships might be more to the point.”

  Annetje laughed suddenly. Her laughter rose. It was not quite normal, not quite mad. Her head was tilted back; her hair fell straight and heavy and fair, strangely alive and enticing. Her jutting, delicate face bones seemed to Avram to burn with a low light in the gray air. “My God, a lewd friendship would destroy me, I think.”

  Avram said crossly, “I think we could all use a bit more repression. I like repression.”

  He held Annetje’s arm, he guided her along the sidewalk. She walked uncertainly; she leaned back as if the pavement were tilting her. Nor did she advance in a straight line—Avram kept correcting her course. “This way,” he murmured as they drew near the corner. “Where emotions are concerned, I say caution! And still more caution!”

  Annetje began to laugh again. “You are a clown,” she said. “You are a great liar! You are not like that at all!”

  “I am,” Avram said.

  Annetje clutched her coat and drew it tightly across her throat. She shook her head; her pale blond hair flew from side to side—an erotic cap, Avram thought. It was a flashing point of emphasis in the twilit, drizzling cityscape. He kept up his pressure on her arm, he kept her walking. He worried about Louise and Ulrich—but it was a faint concern beside his growing impatience to make Annetje walk, escape the talons
of the drug, to move, to rejoin life, as it were. He tried to keep a balance between helping her and not hurrying her, between a reassuring pressure and a persecution.

  “WILL THEY understand that I am mad?” Annetje was crouched against the mailbox wall in the hallway of the brownstone where Avram lived. Avram thought it a good sign that she should have social second thoughts; she was not so cut off from reality after all.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “They are square but not unintelligent—not really unintelligent. The woman is an old, old friend of mine. She was always at her best with me when I was unhappy or in trouble. She likes helping people—there’s some Quaker in her background.”

  “Quakers?” said Annetje. “Those funny rich people from Pennsylvania?”

  “There are a few not quite so rich ones from Connecticut.”

  “Quakers in Connecticut?” Annetje put her hand over her mouth and giggled. “Yes?” she said. She nodded. “It is very interesting.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Now let’s go upstairs.” He smiled at Annetje. He took her arm. “We’ll have a drink, but perhaps you’d better not have a drink. Then we will eat.…”

  He had left the door of his apartment unlocked. “We’re here!” he called out, and pushed the door open. Louise and Ulrich had changed postures; they were sitting stiffly on the couch, side by side, upright, formal. Louise seemed pinker than he remembered. Avram wondered if Louise and Ulrich had been necking. Ulrich looked quite wooden. “Louise,” he said brightly, “this is Annetje Thompson. Annetje, this is Louise—Louise—and …” He could not remember Louise’s married name or Ulrich’s name at all.

  “My husband, Ulrich von Kunnel,” Louise said coldly.

  “How do you do?” Annetje said, rattling the words off with a careless, tumbled charm. She looked quite forlorn except that her face, of course, was so striking, and her hair and her shoulders and her small, pillowy hips, too. “I am in terrible shape,” Annetje confided. “Avram has told you, I am strange. I am not myself. I am not always like this. No,” she said pathetically. “Not like this. Avram said I should come out, but really I am not fit. I will depress you. I am very mad.”

  Avram took Annetje’s coat from her shoulders. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We are all a little mad.”

  “Not from taking drugs!” Louise said, her color rising.

  Incredulity made Avram giddy. He said, “Louise. You can’t. Say that, I mean.”

  “I was merely speaking the truth.”

  Avram stared at her. How did her mind work? How could she not be interested in meeting someone who had taken LSD? How could she fail to be impressed by Annetje—unkempt, exotic, ravishingly, electrically present, and troubled? He wondered if Louise was peevish at wasting her pearls, her dress, her careful lipstick on an evening of improvised sympathy.

  He thought confusedly it must be her marriage; she was stiff. He said with a nervous laugh, “Truth? Don’t talk piffle, darling.” It was an old routine, his speaking comic British with Louise, one he had grown tired of and not used with her in a long time, but he trotted it out eagerly; he waited for her to smile.

  Her face settled into lines of battle. “I don’t like drugs!” she said in a voice Avram thought unconscionably opinionated but wonderfully well bred.

  He said, “Louise, as it happens, I dislike drunks, and I’ve seen you drunk.”

  Ulrich said, “What is this thing that Americans have, that they must obliterate their environment—do they find their country and their life so very ugly?” He raised his eyebrows; he smiled.

  “Annetje is Dutch,” Avram said. He wondered again at that German confidence which allowed them to think they were making a good impression when they were not.

  Annetje turned and smiled at the sound of her name. “Yes. Dutch,” she said. She glided delicately across the floor as if expecting it to trick her. “Dutch, double Dutch,” she said, and collapsed into a chair in the darkest part of the room. Her hair, her pale face glimmered. “Oh, I am in terrible shape,” she said obliviously. “When you take LSD,” she said to Louise, “be very careful.”

  “I would never take a drug!” Louise exclaimed.

  “Louise, you are being intolerant!” Avram cried, whining slightly in his astonishment.

  Louise said, “I am sick unto death of this whole modern business—turning strong people into nursemaids.”

  “No one wants you to be a nurse,” Avram said. He understood her now: she resented Annetje’s capture of the center of attention. “But I have always thought of you as someone who could transcend her limitations.”

  “I am civilized,” Louise said grandly. “If your friend isn’t well, shouldn’t she go to a hospital? They are equipped to handle this sort of thing.”

  Avram said, “Don’t be illiterate, Louise. Nothing can be done for the aftereffects of LSD. For the moment, Annetje is confused, and needs company—that is all.”

  “I am very confused,” Annetje said, “but I am not good company. I—”

  “She’s suffering from drug poisoning!” Louise said.

  “It is not drug poisoning. Do you know anything about LSD?”

  “All drugs are alike,” Louise said. Avram had often thought Louise’s inclination to be immoral was so strong that she had to make her private laws very stringent. And simple.

  “They are not all alike!” he cried. “Some act on the nerves, some on the muscles, some on the—”

  “You know what I mean,” Louise said.

  “Drugs are not alike,” Annetje said, shaking her head. “I have taken many. This is the worst that has ever—”

  “You see!” Louise said. She turned to Annetje. “You are a thrill-seeker, aren’t you?”

  Annetje said seriously, “I do not like to be bored.” She put her fine-boned hands to her head. “But this is terrible. Five days now, I cannot eat, I cannot sleep, the walls look at me, I—”

  “Isn’t that what you ought to expect if you have recourse to drugs?” Louise asked.

  “Louise!” Avram cried.

  “Well, it’s true,” Louise said.

  “Why can’t we say that people who take drugs are braver than we are?” Avram demanded. “They are less afraid of aftereffects—of death.”

  “You are speaking nonsense,” Ulrich said gravely.

  “Why,” said Avram, “do people think a dictum rudely expressed will pass as a convincing argument?”

  “What did he say?” Ulrich asked Louise. He turned back to Avram. “My English is not perfect.” He smiled politely and turned to Louise.

  Avram said, “I may very well be wrong on this issue, I may very well be under the influence of fashion, my opinion may be nonsensical, but I would prefer you expressed your opinion at least in my own house with more respect for the notion that I don’t consider my opinions nonsense.”

  Ulrich looked blank. Louise said, “Pooh.”

  “You are making a joke?” Ulrich asked Avram.

  “I was not. I believe there is a spiritual bravery involved in a living death. In tampering with the mind. It is one I am incapable of, but I believe people have the right to ruin or expand their lives with drugs or whatever. I certainly do not think I am speaking nonsense. Nonsense requires a very special sort of talent—mathematicians have it, witness Lewis Carroll.” Avram felt he was being fatuous. “I have no talent for nonsense. I mean what I say.”

  “You believe drugs should be legal?” Louise demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose you would let drugs advertise,” she said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “You are a visionary,” Louise said with contempt. “You always felt you knew it all.”

  “He is very intelligent,” Annetje said.

  “Thank you, Annetje.”

  Annetje turned to Louise. “Don’t you feel he understands women?”

  “No,” Louise said.

  “I think he is very understanding,” Annetje said imperviously.

  Louise smiled iron
ically at Avram. Avram thought of her face as a flat, lipsticked radar screen. He said, “You mustn’t confuse stodginess with pragmatism, Louise.”

  “Don’t be rude to me,” Louise said. “Just because I haven’t taken a drug doesn’t mean I’m stodgy.” She assumed a penetrating look. “Just when did you enter the avant-garde?”

  “I am not speaking as a member of the avant-garde. I am speaking as a man of compassion and intellect.”

  Annetje said, “Avram is Jewish.”

  “Ah, are you Jewish?” Ulrich asked.

  “Louise didn’t tell you?” Avram asked.

  Ulrich said, “She told me you were a man of belles lettres.”

  “How mad,” Avram said. He turned to Louise. “You charlatan,” he said. “Did you try to pass me off as a Gentile gentleman?”

  “I’m very interested in belles lettres,” Ulrich said.

  “Of course not,” Louise said.

  “I’ve never been conservative. I feel your class unjustly owns and bores this country,” Avram said bitterly.