Kafka Was the Rage

by Anatole Broyard

  I cried? Who was this boy? I never heard of him.

  He was so skinny, my mother said. I couldn’t do anything with him. He wouldn’t drink milk unless it had Hershey’s chocolate syrup in it. I used to get tonics from the doctor to try to build him up. In the summertime, I bought him books to keep him inside during the hottest part of the day. He was crazy about Tarzan books.

  She was going too far. Sheri was beginning to tire of this skinny, loving, namby-pamby boy. She shifted in my mother’s lap and her eyes glinted. The chair they were sitting in was an early version of the Barca-Lounger, with a button on the arm for lowering and raising the back. Now, looking straight at me, smiling, she pushed the button and she and my mother fell back into a horizontal position.

  Sheri’s bare legs flew up, and in that split second while they rose, I thought that now we would see—yes, this was what she had come for. She had come to Brooklyn on the subway, and had searched out our house on a map to show my mother and father that the woman I lived with wore no underpants.

  It was only at the last moment that she arrested her flying legs and held them straight out before her like a gymnast. But her message was unmistakable. It was a warning—she was warning me, and I knew that I would have to do whatever she wanted. I got up and pulled her off my mother’s lap and she let the album fall to the floor. I raised the back of the chair and pretended she had pushed the button by accident.

  It’s late, I said. I’ll take Sheri home. My mother got up out of the chair, as if she was afraid Sheri would sit in her lap again, and my father rose too. I felt a terrific desire to explain myself to them, to tell them that it wasn’t the way it seemed, I hadn’t changed all that much; the pictures in the album were the real me.

  I had realized as soon as I saw her in our house that I would have to go with Sheri, but I wished it could have been managed differently. Yet there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to go. I wanted to spend the night on Jones Street, even though I knew I would have to leave her again.

  12

  I found an apartment at last, on Prince Street between Sullivan and Thompson, which was then the south-eastern edge of the Village. It was a tenement like Sheri’s, built for immigrants, old and shabby, a tiny top-floor walk-up divided into three little boxes like walk-in closets. It was cramped and dingy, but I didn’t care. I would make it my own, turn it into a home, a studio, as we used to say, a magic word. I gave the super fifty dollars, bought a sterilized secondhand bed, and moved in. Now, I said to myself, I can start to live. I was always starting to live, another beginning, a final beginning.

  I had looked forward so much to having an apartment of my own, had carried the idea around with me so fondly all through the army, that I was astonished to discover, after my first few days there, that I was lonely. I couldn’t understand how this could be. It was one thing to feel lonely in Brooklyn or in the army, but how could I be lonely in my own place in Greenwich Village? I hadn’t yet realized that loneliness was not so much a feeling as a fate. It was loneliness that walked the streets of the Village and filled the bars, loneliness that made it seem such a lively place.

  Looking back at the late 1940s, it seems to me now that Americans were confronting their loneliness for the first time. Loneliness was like the morning after the war, like a great hangover. The war had broken the rhythm of American life, and when we tried to pick it up again, we couldn’t find it—it wasn’t there. It was as if a great bomb, an explosion of consciousness, had gone off in American life, shattering everything. Before that we had been too busy just getting along, too conventional to be lonely. The world had been smaller and we had filled it.

  I thought of Sheri and wondered whether, with all the trouble she gave me, she wasn’t better than loneliness. Yet I had been lonely with her too—I saw that now. She wasn’t company in the ordinary sense. I was lonely between bouts of desire, between distractions. There was no peace with her. She was like a recurrent temptation to commit a crime.

  Whoever had the apartment before me had painted the walls in wide vertical stripes in three different shades of blue. I lay on my sterilized bed and felt blue too, every shade of blue. It shook my faith. It was my first great disappointment as an adult, my first postwar defeat. I rallied briefly and painted the walls grass green. I tacked burlap on the windows, but I was still lonely. It was a green loneliness now.

  After a while, I went to Sheri’s apartment to get some clothes and books I had left there. I picked a time when she wouldn’t be home—I knew that if I saw her we might start all over again.

  Going back there was more of a shock than I had expected. I came in the door and couldn’t get past the kitchen. The place was so dense with images that there was no room for me to move. I felt that I had left Sheri a long time ago, when I was somebody else, younger, wilder. I stood listening in the center of the kitchen, as if she might be coming up the stairs to catch me red-handed, a thief, stealing memories. I saw and felt, as I never had before, what an adventure it had been, she had been. She had taken me in, flaunted her witchcraft. She had shown me the future. She made my head spin.

  The dishes were still in the sink. They must have been the same dishes, piled up for all time, that I had peed on my first night there. They were like a sculpture, or a painting of dishes by Magritte, an enigmatic element of modern decor, for we had never eaten a single meal, even breakfast, in the apartment. There was no food of any kind, not even in cans, in the kitchen cabinets.

  The bed called to me from the other room. How small it was for all the distances we had traveled in it. We had been like angels dancing on the head of a pin. Leaning on the doorjamb, I gazed at the bed as you gaze in museums, from behind a tasseled cord, at the curtained four-posters of kings and queens.

  When I first saw this bed, narrower even than a cot, I asked Sheri whether it opened up and she said no, it didn’t. Though I had noticed what seemed to be a double frame, I assumed it was broken and forgot about it. Now, just for something to do, I reached down and pulled at the frame. It came out easily enough; I didn’t see anything wrong with it. There was a lever on one side. When I pressed down, the other half of the bed came up and locked into place.

  So she had lied. The realization opened up and locked into my mind like the bed opening and locking into place. But why? The only answer I could think of was that she liked to make difficulties. For her, difficulties were art, an art form—you created them. A lie was more interesting than the truth. She hated plain, ordinary truth—she saw it as a failing, a surrender, even an accusation. The truth, she once said, is for animals; they can smell it.

  Perhaps she had lied for fun. I would never know. I’d never be sure of anything about her, and understanding this now, taking in the consequences of this thought all at once, made me feel tired. It brought back the strenuousness of living with her, the terrific effort, the watchfulness. I felt so tired at the memory of it that I stretched out on the bed. How would it feel? I couldn’t remember ever being in it without her. I lay there and thought about her. I had always seen her through my excitement, but I wanted to consider her through my fatigue, to look at her through half-closed eyes. I lay on the bed like a patient in a hospital, recovering.

  Yet it was also true that she had tried to help me, to make me more elastic, or fantastic, more modern. She had tried to lighten me, to teach me how to float, to rescue me from my simplicity. She had set me a number of riddles or parables to educate me by example, the way you do with children who can’t understand abstractions. Like the stairs, for example, carrying her up the stairs—that was one of her lessons. There was nothing wrong with her heart—suddenly I was sure of this. If I had stopped to think about it, I would have known. It was like the bed—she had to find a way to break the monotony. Young men are so monotonous.

  How shrewd it was of her to bring her heart into it when she hardly had a heart, to suggest it might fail or break. I had to smile at the picture of myself climbing the stairs, breathless and red in the face, c
arrying her in my arms. She had given me something to do, a lover’s job, a fool’s errand.

  Always she had opposed my curiosity, and now that she wasn’t there to prevent me, I pried into her; I pawed her secrets. I got up and went into the other room to look at her paintings. The one on the easel, the last thing she had done, was called Anatole’s Ontological Conspiracy. Ontological was one of my favorite words—you could hear it every night in the San Remo Bar, where young writers hung out. In one of the books in my shop John Crowe Ransom said that the critic must regard the poem as a desperate metaphysical or ontological maneuver. It was as if we had just discovered not the word but existence itself. In 1946, for the first time, we existed.

  I dedicate this painting to you, Sheri had said. I give it to you—it’s yours. She gave it to me as if that would make me like it. Now I asked myself whether I did in fact like it, but I couldn’t tell; I didn’t know. It was a part of her that I couldn’t separate from the rest. It may have been the most tangible thing about her—more tangible, for example, than her sex.

  It was an abstract painting, of course, huddled or collapsed planes in olive, cobalt blue, and brown against a dark yellow ground. A heavy black line arched over the upper part of the canvas, like a negative of a rainbow. The composition reminded me of doors stacked against a wall, from a building that had been torn down. When she was painting the picture I had watched her, trying to follow her logic, to see how one thing led to another and what kind of decisions it required. I tried to imagine how she described the painting to herself.

  When she finished I asked her, What do you feel you’ve done? How is this painting necessary to you? But she just laughed. You’ll never be a man, she said, until you can live without explanations. Death is the only explanation. To be explained, to be understood, is like dying. But it’s such a solitary feeling, I said, never to be understood. I think I’d rather be half-understood, or misunderstood, than not to be understood at all.

  Sheri’s expression at that moment reminded me of Bill de Kooning’s answer when he was asked, What does abstract art mean to you? He said, Frankly, I don’t understand the question, and then he started to describe a man he had known twenty-four years ago in Hoboken, a German who had always been hungry in Europe:

  In Hoboken, this man found a place where you could buy all kinds of stale bread very cheaply—French bread, Italian bread, German bread, Dutch bread, American bread, and Russian black bread. He bought big bags of it and let it get even harder and then he crumbled it and spread it on the floor in his flat and walked on it as though it were a soft carpet.

  De Kooning said he’d lost sight of him but then found out many years later from someone who’d run into the man that he had become some kind of Jugend Bund leader and took boys and girls to Bear Mountain on Sundays. He had become a Communist too. I could never figure him out, de Kooning concluded, but now when I think of him, all I can remember is that he had a very abstract look on his face.

  It was time to go. I felt myself getting sentimental, snuggling in the apartment, remembering only the good parts. I decided to take the painting. I would take it whether I liked it or not, whether it could be explained or not. I would hang it over my bed, which was much too wide.

  I was finding it difficult to settle down on Prince Street. When I was looking forward to it, I thought of my apartment as filled with promise, sunny with promise, a box that I would open to find gifts, to unpack my life. But now that I had it, the apartment seemed to be simply a place to wait. I sat in it, or lay in it, and waited. I didn’t even know what I was waiting for. What I needed, of course, was something to do. Going to the New School at night wasn’t enough. Sheri had been a full-time job, but now I was unemployed.

  I would have liked to invite someone to my apartment, just for an hour or so, to drink a beer or a cup of coffee. A visitor would have helped me to break in the place, but there was no one I could ask. I didn’t know any girls beside Sheri, or at least not well enough to invite them to my apartment. Going to a man’s apartment was a serious thing in those days. And it didn’t seem natural to ask a male friend—men met in bars.

  Before long, though, I did have a visitor. One night there was a knock at the door. It was early and I was listening to jazz on the radio, trying to decide what to do with the evening. I had not yet succeeded in spending a single night at home.

  I got up to answer the door. I thought it might be Sheri; she might have found out where I lived. I didn’t have a phone yet and she might have decided to come over to see me. After all, she had gone to Brooklyn.

  But it was a man at the door, a stranger. He was holding something in his hand, showing me something, and I took him for a building inspector or a meter reader. It was my first apartment and I didn’t know what to expect. Then I saw that it was a shield he was holding. He was a policeman. I have a complaint against you, he said, after I had identified myself. You’ll have to come down to the station.

  I immediately felt guilty, and at the same time I told myself that I was innocent. I hadn’t done anything, although it sounded almost shameful to put it that way. The detective stood in the doorway sizing me up, then he snapped his fingers. The painting, he said. Bring the painting.

  It takes a while for a betrayal to register. At first you deny it. You say, Don’t be silly, or It’s not possible. Then there’s a dead spot, a silence, a regrouping. After that you go slowly, gradually through the character of the other person. You examine all the evidence against the idea of betrayal and you say, No, it can’t be.

  Then, like a door swinging on its hinges in a draft, you go back over your history together. You begin to imagine betrayal as a hypothesis—an absurd hypothesis, a bad joke. Skeptically, playfully, you concede that the circumstances could be interpreted that way, but only if it was somebody else who was betrayed, not you. And then, suddenly, you know that it’s true.

  The detective had a car and we rode in silence to the Charles Street station, where we went up a flight of stairs to a large room with wooden desks and pale gray-green walls. Except for us, the room was empty. There wasn’t so much crime in those days.

  The detective, whose name was something like Scanlon, took the painting from me and stood it on the desk, leaning it against the wall. A Miss Sheri Donatti, he said, had reported the theft of a valuable painting and had named me as the probable perpetrator.

  I stared at him because I didn’t want to look at the painting, which embarrassed me in that room. It was like the time I had come home to find Sheri sitting in my mother’s lap. She specialized in such juxtapositions. I didn’t steal it, I said. She gave it to me.

  Scanlon shook his head, like a pitcher shaking off a catcher’s sign.

  The painting is named after me, I said. It’s her idea of a joke to pretend that I stole it.

  People are always joking, Scanlon said, but the law has to take them seriously.

  What am I supposed to do? I said. I didn’t ask for a bill of sale when she gave it to me. Do I look like a thief?

  Scanlon was wearing a gray double-breasted suit and a pale blue fedora. Detectives had to wear hats in those days as part of their uniform. Now he unbuttoned his jacket. He took off his hat and put it on the desk beside the painting. No, he said, you look like a lover. He swung his feet up onto the desk. He was a big man with big feet. There’s an easy and a hard way to do this, he said. The easy way is for you to leave the painting and let me talk to Miss Donatti.

  No, I said. The painting is mine; it belongs to me. She gave it to me and whether it’s valuable or not, I’m going to keep it. At that moment it seemed that this was the only thing she had ever given me, that she had taken back everything else. It wasn’t a question of how much I wanted the painting—it was just that this seemed to be the first clear-cut issue between us, the only time our positions were defined.

  Scanlon shook his head again. I think you’re being foolish, he said. Unless you give up the painting, I’ll have to charge you. And you can’t win. You
must see that you can’t win. All you’ll get is a bad scene and a sore heart. It won’t be a nice way to remember Miss Donatti.

  He was surprising, that Scanlon. He was like an Irishman in a book, like a failed lawyer or a defrocked priest. I wondered whether he specialized in cases like this, quarrels over paintings or books or beds or chairs, to the point where he saw it all as a comedy. I felt a great temptation to tell him the whole story—Sheri’s offer of the apartment, the printing press behind the door, the dishes in the sink.

  He didn’t try to hurry me. He waited as if he had all the time in the world. He leaned back with his feet on the desk and allowed me to imagine Sheri in the police station, sitting in the same chair I sat in now, her face tight with avant-garde indignation, telling Scanlon in her odd speech that I had stolen the painting.

  How could she have done it? It was between us, a lover’s quarrel, yet she had called the police. She had invited Scanlon into our bed, which was so narrow already. She had broken the rules, rules that all lovers recognized, without which love would have been impossible, unthinkable. But that was what she enjoyed, breaking the rules. It was the only thing she enjoyed—she couldn’t forgive me for being law-abiding.

  It isn’t worth it, Scanlon said. He leaned back in the chair until he was looking at me between his feet. Walk out of here, he said, and you’ll see that the streets are full of pale-faced girls.

  I couldn’t think. I didn’t want to think. I was afraid to think.

  Well then, Scanlon said. He swung his feet off the desk and put his hat back on. His expression changed; he became brisk and purposeful. He picked up the painting and held it out at arm’s length so that we could look at it together from our different sides of the desk. He invited me to see it for what it was—but what was it? I had been trying to decide that since I met Sheri.