“If I want to go back to my own place, I’ll tell you,” I said.
It was a slower week than usual. Apart from work, which provided a relief, my only break from the new routine were my visits to Klotzman’s office.
I reported my dilemma in wary understatement. I knew his response before he actually made it. “Tell Eva what you want,” he said. “It is the only way to avoid resentment, which will build and destroy your relationship.”
“I don’t know how to,” I said.
“Is overcoming this fear of being outspoken worse than destroying your feeling for Eva?”
Another question to which I had no answer. “It’s not so hard living in her apartment,” I said. “I’ll get used to it.”
“If it isn’t hard, why bring it up?” he asked.
“It’s only for a few more days,” I say.
“And then what?” he asked.
“We have to decide whether we want to continue living together,” I said.
“What will you say?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“And if you don’t want to continue, what will you say?” he asked.
I didn’t know and couldn’t say. “I’ll think of something.” I said.
“How much easier life would be for you, if you could tell the people you’re close to how you feel when it is in opposition to what you think they want to hear.”
We had been down this road before. Yes yes yes yes yes, I wanted to say but didn’t. “You had said I was making progress,” I said. “Are you recanting now?”
He looked exasperated with me. “You go back and forth,” he said. “Living with Eva was a huge step for you.”
“That’s why I don’t say anything,” I said. “I don’t want to lose what I have. I just want to modify our arrangement.”
“Eva seems to care for you, Mel. Do you really think a modification in your arrangement would cause her to break things off?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What I really don’t understand is why she cares for me.”
“That’s another matter altogether,” he said. “You do accept that she does care for you.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “Maybe she’ll wake up one day and discover that she doesn’t.”
He shook his head sadly. “You’ve been friends for a while now, haven’t you. Do you have any reason to believe that her feelings are frivolous?”
I admitted that I didn’t. And that was that. Nothing was solved except that I knew I had been in the wrong again. And there was nothing to be done or at least nothing that I was willing to do.
When we finished the week living together in her place, I said, “Let’s take a few days off before making another decision.”
“If that’s what you want,” she said. “I thought the arrangement went pretty well, though it was more comfortable in your apartment.”
I’m glad she recognized that. In her apartment if I wanted to be by myself, I’d have to go in the bathroom, which I did a few times.
The next few days we each lived in our separate apartments and I confess that after the first day I felt kind of lonely. On the fourth day, at my suggestion, Eva moved back into my apartment. I was comfortable with her there, even occasionally happy.
We completed a week of living together in my apartment. I was reluctant to move again into hers, which seemed the next step, but Eva suggested that we spend another week in mine. It was as if she were reading my mood. I agreed, feeling grateful to her, though I played down my appreciation, not wanting her to know that I was not happy with the other alternative.
“When it’s fixed up,” Eva said, “your place is quite nice.” I neglected to mention that Eva had done some redecorating, mostly in the interest of neatening things.
So we lived together another week in my place, which was mostly okay. During one of our walks I said, muttered actually, “Why don’t we just stay in my place?”
She didn’t answer for a while—perhaps she hadn’t heard me. I wasn’t up to saying it again. A few minutes later she said, “I’m not ready yet to give up my own place altogether. Why don’t we try another week in your apartment?”
I agreed, though I worried where we would be after the week ended. All week I concerned myself with what lay ahead for us.
I had a chance to talk to Klotzman before the week was over.
“I’m impressed with how you’re doing,” he said, “but nothing comes easy to you.”
“If I could,” I said, “I would go back to the way things had been before Eva and I started living together. Life was simpler then.”
“There were different problems,” he said.
“I can imagine myself on a more casual footing with Eva. I was less tormented then.”
“That’s failed memory,” Klotzman said. “There was never a time when you were less tormented. I am witness to that.”
“Still, life was simpler then or at least seemed so,” I said. “We were neighbors, we took our walks, we each had our own place. Now it’s all matters of life and death.”
“Going back in time isn’t a real option,” he said. “Do you want to break off with Eva?”
“God, no. I love Eva in my way.”
“What then do you want? Do you know?”
“I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to spend another week in her apartment, though it seems only fair. That’s my dilemma.”
Klotzman looked me over before speaking. “I understand what you’re saying, Mel. Eva spent the week in your apartment so quid pro quo you need to spend the week in hers.”
“She spent two weeks in my apartment, three in all since we started this regimen, and I’ve only spent a week in hers. I can’t tell her that I’m uncomfortable staying in her apartment.”
“You could if you would, Mel,” he said. “From what you tell me Eva may already have an inkling into your problem.”
“I am ashamed that Eva perceives my resistance to staying at her place,” I said. “I am also ashamed at the resistance itself if the truth be known.”
“I get the picture,” he said. “Which would you say was the stronger factor, your resistance or your shame?”
I didn’t have to think that one over. “My shame,” I said.
“Does that mean you would stay in her apartment so as not to feel ashamed?” he asked.
“I suppose,” I said, “but I’d rather not. I’d rather backtrack on our relationship if that’s possible. In my worst moments, I’ve even considered giving up the relationship. Don’t worry, I won’t. I’m just making a point.”
“Tell her what you feel,” Klotzman said. “That’s my advice which I’ve given to you over and over again.”
“And which I’ve never taken.”
After I finished my stint as Head of Security and came home to my apartment, I expected Eva to be there waiting for me. Her absence created a flash of anxiety, but I didn’t go to her place to look for her. I lay down on my red couch—not as new as it once was—and closed my eyes. In my dream, Eva and I were taking a walk in unrecognizable territory and I felt sure we were lost. A police car that was trailing us rolled up alongside. I asked them the way to our building. “First you have to come to the station,” I was told, “We’ve assembled a new lineup for you to pick apart.” It wasn’t clear whether I had a choice in the matter. Eva and I got in the back of the police car and we drove to the station, which turned out to be just around the corner. The lineup they had assembled was notably odd—two very tiny men, midgets perhaps, Ron in a version of my gray suit, a giant in the fourth position, and my old couch in the fifth. “Don’t give yourself away,” Eva whispered in my ear. “Which one do you choose?” the cop that had been driving said to me. I didn’t know, which I didn’t want them to know. I made a pretense of studying the lineup carefully when I was shaken awake by Eva. “It’s walk time,” she said.
It took me awhile to fully wake, the dream reverberating in my head. “Do you want to forego the walk?” she asked.
But what was Ron doing in the center of the lineup?
We took a different route for our walk then we usually took and in short order I didn’t recognize any of the buildings we passed.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked Eva.
“It’s fun to lose oneself once in a while,” she said. “It’s boring to always know where you are, don’t you think?”
Being lost held no pleasures for me. “Maybe we ought to head back,” I said.
“A few more blocks,” she said.
We passed a police station and I figured we could always go in and ask directions, which eased my anxiety.
A few more blocks passed and it was as if the streets were moving and we were standing still. I shared this perception with Eva, who said, “It always seems that way to me.”
I was tired and I suggested we sit on one of the benches we had passed, though there were more benches ahead of us. The street was virtually bench-lined.
So we sat awhile, Eva’s head resting on my shoulder. A feeling nagged me that we would never get back, which I was reluctant to share. I noted that it was getting dark and we usually returned before dark. “Can we go back now?” I asked. Her eyes were closed. She seemed to be sleeping on my shoulder. I had my arm around her and—I don’t know how to say this—I felt connected to her. I felt that in protecting her I was protecting myself. I wanted to get home, but I also didn’t want anything to change. I was content to stay this way, to stay seated on this bench, lost, with Eva asleep on my shoulder, our bodies joined. The sky darkened, but it seemed to get warmer rather than cooler. Perhaps it was this flush of happiness like a secret from some unchartered place that kept me warm. I thought Eva would wake after awhile, but she didn’t and I wasn’t going to change anything—that is, I didn’t move, wouldn’t, not an iota. So we remained in our set positions, into the night, as far as it would take us. We stayed this way, closer than we had ever been, joined irrevocably as I said before, until a passing cop rousted us and sent us on our way into the unforgiving night.
FORGOTTEN
“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
—HENRY JAMES, “THE MIDDLE YEARS”
This, what follows, would be the story I planned to write, had I not, in sitting down to write it, forgotten what it was. As almost all my stories tend to be about love or its absence, I have to believe that this one, the temporarily lost and forgotten event, would fall or slide on its self-created ice into that approximate mode. It may be, this story, about a man and woman, who have been close friends for a long time, each married to another, who discover when it’s too late or almost too late that each has been the great love of the other’s life. That could be the story I had in mind, but I tend to doubt it. In the story I might have conceived, only one of the friends would discover that he loved the other and the other would resist believing her friend’s revelation. And then they would fall into bed and one or the other or both would regret acting impulsively. The needs of self, of perceived love, would not be repressed. The act itself, the acting out of long-denied imperatives, the violation of moral restraint, would be glorified, if uneasily acknowledged, by the trick of memory.
Or it could well have been the story of a couple, each married to someone else, who have an off-and-on affair over the years and finally decide that they want to be the main event in each other’s lives for as much time as they have left. It’s a delusion, of course, and they discover, in short order, that their relationship in order to survive needs the space their decision to live together has deprived them of. Or at least one of them feels that way. And the other, or the same one, much as he has justified his behavior by finding fault with his former spouse (who had taken him for granted, had failed to appreciate him sufficiently, had renounced sex or at least sex with him), feels debilitatingly guilty for causing his deserted wife pain. When he and his lover got together for their once-a-week liaison, there was a lot to talk about—it was a time of catching up—or talk itself was less important than the fast-fleeing time they had to make illicit love. Once they move in together, the exhilaration of urgency is hopelessly lost. So what comes of it, what’s the implication of the story? They can’t go back to what they’ve willfully destroyed. So they pretend to be happy in the new arrangement—they can’t do otherwise—and so suffer in begrudged silence, displacing their regret. This story is too unrelentingly sad. Even the ironies are unamusing. If this was the forgotten story, which I doubt, letting memory trash it, even if circumstantial, is undoubtedly the right choice.
Possibly the forgotten story had been about a married writer like the author, though younger, more like a former self, in residence one summer at an artist’s colony in upstate New York being visited, unannounced, by a married woman with whom he had a brief affair, which separation had ended several months earlier. The day of her arrival is the day, as it turns out, of a trip he has planned to take to the college town of Copington on the border between New York State and Vermont to visit this famous writer, IM Tarkovsky, whose latest novel he, Joshua Quartz, had reviewed in The New York Times. The review, admired by its subject, has elicited the celebrity’s invitation to come to dinner. Josh has no choice but to invite his inconvenient guest to join him on this trip, which will include another more established writer from the colony, a sometime friend and rival of the celebrated Tarkovsky, and an older woman painter, with whom the other writer, who is fucking his way through the female population of the colony, is presently involved. That’s the down payment of the story.
The story itself is an old one or a version of something that had actually happened that I had been holding on to in the hope of reimagining eventually into something livelier and more complex, but it is probably not the forgotten story of this occasion. That doesn’t necessarily exclude its possibility. If we are to go on with it—it may be all we have at the moment—we’re going to have to give our four characters greater definition. But then I think the reason the story has not been written before is that, beyond the charge of its given, nothing of consequence is in the cards for the two illicit couples making the trip. The character revelations are for the most part predictable and consequently trivial.
Say they get lost on the trip over, take a wrong turn which goes undiscovered for an extended period of time. Or they have a flat tire that neither of the men seems able to contend with. That the story takes a comic or even a farcical turn does not preclude it from an ultimate seriousness.
Or Harry Berger, the other writer on the trip, a mid-level celebrity in his own right, makes himself charming to Joshua’s aggrieved guest, offering the smart and sexy Genevieve an occasion to get back at Josh by making him jealous.
Or, more likely, they arrive uneventfully at Tarkovsky’s house in Copington, make small talk, munch peanuts, take a turn around the college grounds, return for a sit-down dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes and string beans. Perhaps not string beans, perhaps carrots and peas. The stack of sliced white bread on the table, even for the 1960’s, suggests a kind of unsophistication with potentially comic implications. Everyone is exceedingly civil until Mrs. Tarkovsky, Anna, mentions an interview given by Berger in which he off-handedly disparages one of Izzy Tarkovsky’s recent novels.
In defensive astonishment, Berger insists that he has been misquoted.
But Anna Tarkovsky comes back at him with a wholly different occasion in which Berger is also perceived to deprecate Tarkovsky’s work.
Berger mutters something unintelligible, furious at being put in the wrong, though in truth he is not a fan of Tarkovsky’s more recent work.
Genevieve, who has been silent throughout dinner—it is her mode these days not to give up words in the company of strangers—speaks up in Berger’s behalf in a gesture that surprises virtually everyone. “Harry didn’t volunteer these negative remarks you cite,” she says in her dreamy way. “Someone, some journali
st looking to make noise, asked him a question which he tried to answer honestly. Journalists are always looking to create melodrama through overstatement.”
“Exactly,” Berger says.
“Let’s let the matter drop,” Tarkovsky says.
“Oh Izzy,” his wife says. “Stand up for yourself. These people aren’t your friends.”
“Let’s finish our meal,” Tarkovsky says. “That’s enough, Anna. Sha. I accept Harry’s explanation.”
Anna looks as if she has something more to say, but censors herself with notable displeasure. Izzy will hear about it again after these guests are gone.
To break the tension, Josh compliments Anna on her cooking.
“It was very simple,” she says. “I only do simple things.”
“Yes,” Lisa Strata says. “Simple is good. Making a meal is like making art. And art should always be simple. Of course, cooking a meal is more useful than making a painting.”
“You may mean well,” Anna says, “but I don’t believe a word of what you say.”
During the dessert course of ice cream and cookies, Tarkovsky, apropos of nothing, delivers a lecture on the deficiencies and presumptions of the recent trend toward a “heartless formalism.”
“To deny the human in art, is, in the final analysis, to leave out everything that matters,” he says, stopping himself momentarily to take stock of his audience. No one has moved. Everyone is in place.
“I understand what you’re saying, Izzy,” Berger says, his willfully denied condescension showing through invisible cracks.
And where can the story go from here? The alert reader has already noticed that the story has virtually foreclosed itself.
Berger’s flirtation with Genevieve (or is it the other way around?) has no place to go while the characters remain, sitting at the dinner table, in Tarkovsky’s house on the Copington campus.
Rudimentary courtesy keeps the competitive tension between Berger and Tarkovsky from reaching the level of narrative-defining melodrama.
Flight of Brothers Page 9
