by James Lasdun
I remembered my ‘plaindealing’ moment with Mr Kurwen, and for an instant I imagined how similarly large-spirited it would make me feel to stand up, reveal myself for the man I was, beg their pardons for intruding on them in this way, and ask outright if any of them knew a character by the name of Bogomil Trumilcik.
But once again caution prevailed:
‘I’m still … I’m still a bit overwhelmed by things,’ I said lamely.
‘Of course.’
Trixie, the girl next to me, took my hand. ‘Poor baby,’ she breathed. She shifted over and gave me an intent squeeze. She smelled of bubblegum and patchouli. It was a strange, painful delight to feel a woman’s body against mine. I was careful to keep my own hands on the sofa either side of me. After she let go, I noticed that Sister Cathy was still looking at me. Her eyes were long and narrow, set like curving willow leaves above the high, almost horizontal planes of her cheekbones. A fierce, sensual heat seemed to spill from them. As she continued staring, I realised to my horror that I was going to blush. I sat back in the sofa and lapped frantically at my tea, hoping to conceal the scarlet fire racing up over my face. But I had become luminous: I felt it; pulsatingly incandescent! My whole head was throbbing like a beacon.
The meeting ended shortly after, and I went straight to my room, too disconcerted to think of pursuing my mission any further that evening.
After a couple of minutes there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find Sister Cathy.
‘May I come in?’
She shut the door behind her and stood close, eyeing me in silence. I looked back at her, not knowing what to say; feeling only that things were moving out of my control.
After a moment she spoke:
‘Do you know the scientific explanation for blushing?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s an evolutionary anomaly. It’s controlled by a part of the mind that answers to the interests of the social group rather than those of the private self. It alerts people to the fact that something duplicitous is occurring in their midst.’
All her features, I noticed, were a little larger than life – her long eyes and full-lipped mouth, the high, smooth planes of her cheeks. She was like an image created to be gazed on from afar. Up this close there was something overpowering about her.
‘Are you hiding something, Marlene?’
‘I thought it had to do with sex – blushing,’ I said; an attempt to disguise my nervousness under a mask of flippancy.
A sardonic smile appeared at her lips.
‘You’re attracted to me?’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe …’
Her smile remained.
‘Well I’m afraid I’m a nun,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken a vow of chastity.’
I said nothing.
‘I’m also heterosexual,’ she added.
‘Yes.’
‘But perhaps that’s why.’
‘Why I blushed?’
‘No. Why you’re attracted to me.’
I was unsure what she meant. I said nothing. She reached her hand out to my cheek, then drew my head toward hers. Her other hand ran down across my chest, under the lapel of Barbara Hellermann’s padded jacket. For a split second I thought I was about to find myself in a situation of excruciating awkwardness. But a moment later she smashed her knee into my groin and I fell to the floor, writhing.
‘I know who you are,’ I heard her say before she left the room. ‘She isn’t here. Now take your things and fuck off.’
CHAPTER 11
It was Melody who had suggested the outing to the Plymouth Rock: Melody Schroeder, the actress girlfriend of Carol’s colleague. Blumfeld.
I remembered this as I sat nibbling a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Corinth. The place had emptied; waiters had begun stacking chairs on the tables. I had six more hours to kill before the next bus out of Corinth. I was in my own clothes now: tired but strangely content, as though I had accomplished something after all, though I wasn’t sure what it was.
As I thought back to the moment when Melody had first mentioned the club, it seemed to me that I could hear her offering, as an added incentive to go, the fact that an acquaintance of hers, a colorful character, frequented the place, and that we might run into him there if we were lucky. And through the murk of elapsed time a phrase suddenly flashed out at me: a European guy; totally bizarre …
I could hear Melody saying it, clear as day. Her voice had a gravelly rasp that was pleasantly at odds with her fresh, girlish appearance, and I remembered thinking (only a little disapprovingly) that she knew this contrast was appealing.
A European guy; totally bizarre … The description, of course, had meant nothing to me at the time. But now, as the implications of Sister Cathy’s parting remark began unraveling in me, and the circumstances of my ejection from the shelter started resonating with those of a similar confusion of identity and a similarly violent ejection after I’d made my own pilgrimage to the Plymouth Rock that night, it dawned on me that her remark might not have been without significance.
Was it possible, I wondered, that in both instances I had been mistaken for the same man?
The upturned chairs were approaching like a herd of inquisitive cattle. I paid and left. Out in the damp air, I wandered through the town. Handsome old brick buildings, browed with fancy moldings, lined the streets. There were churches everywhere; resplendent edifices from the last century – white-spired wooden toyboxes, stone mini-cathedrals with florid finials and crockets. Apparently Corinth had once thrived, had had a reason for springing up here on this dreary plain, though whatever it was, there was no trace of it left. I found a bar down a side street, and sat for a couple of hours, continuing to puzzle out what had happened.
After our guests had left that night, taking Carol with them to the club, I had felt piqued and a little resentful. Though I had merely tried to put Carol in mind of the healthy skepticism she would normally bear toward the kind of thing she now seemed intent on doing, she had retorted with such vehement and cutting defiance that I was left feeling as though I had been caught – I, of all people! – trying to exercise some defunct male prerogative over the comings and goings of my spouse.
Alone in the apartment, I had cleared away the dinner, trying hard not to start reading things into Carol’s uncharacteristic behavior. We had a blissful, solid relationship: I was certain of that. We might not have married as soon as we had if my continued residency in the US had not required it, but there was no tension attached to the fact that we did. We had had the ceremony at City Hall, then gone out to dinner with friends. It was all very simple, and we hadn’t tried to pretend it meant anything more than it did. Even so, I think I was not alone in finding surprising new depths of emotion opening inside me in the days that followed. I remember feeling undeservedly lucky in having found someone whose every quirk and foible, from the calls she would make to our congressman whenever an important bill came up, to the way her fingers moved when she flossed her teeth at night, touched off different nuances of affection in me, as though some splendid shimmering mosaic of love were being assembled piece by piece in my own heart.
Before this dinner party there had been no sign that Carol felt any differently from the way I did. I told myself not to set any store by the episode. It was a freak occurrence, I remember thinking; a one-off, without significance. Maybe she had certain ancient, deep-seated erotic fantasies connected with the kind of role-playing activities Melody had alluded to. If so, she was possibly a bit embarrassed at having disclosed this, and had become aggressive as a way of covering up her embarrassment. That was all there was to it, I assured myself. Telling me get the fuck off my back will you in front of her friends, as she had, was just an unconsidered outburst. It wasn’t intended to imply that I had been in any way on her back, that there was some prior act in this drama which I had been unaware of playing a role in.
So, I had gone to bed. I had to be up early next morning for my Employment Autho
risation interview at the INS. Carol would be home soon, I reasoned: a few moments in this club would be enough to remind her that the incorporeal world of private erotic fantasy was something quite separate from the lumpish, flesh-and-blood solidity of real human beings, however they conducted themselves. Her old, stabilising scorn for the more extravagant manifestations of human folly would reassert itself, and she would be out of there.
But by two in the morning she still hadn’t come home.
I was wide awake. Ancient doubts; insecurities which had seemed miraculously vanquished by the act of marriage, were creeping out of their graves. I wondered if I had once again made a catastrophic misreading of a situation, got myself entangled with another Emily Lloyd. Was I wrong about our happiness? Had I misconstrued Carol’s habitual quietness as contentment when all along it was the quietness of a steadily burgeoning antagonism? The rational part of me dismissed this (after all, she had married me of her own volition!), but anxiety, like arousal, has a mind of its own, and by two-thirty this mind was racing.
I felt suddenly that I didn’t know my own wife: didn’t know who she was, or what she was capable of doing. It occurred to me that for her to have behaved as she had, on this particular night – the eve of my big day at the Immigration and Naturalisation Services, where the fundamental questions of where and how I would be able to live were to be all but settled – was perhaps not an accident. Was she deliberately trying to sabotage my life in the States; use the great impersonal levers and wheels of the INS regulations to do what she perhaps lacked the courage to do herself: separate us? Was there perhaps even an element of pure, gratuitous spite? I felt as if the ground were dissolving under me. The entire basis of my existence seemed to be suddenly in question. Some-where in its whirling fog, my imagination conjured a scene where an immigration officer came to our apartment to check on the authenticity of our marriage, only to find no sign of an American wife at all. Would she engineer such a scene? I wondered; could she all this time have been nurturing a hatred, conscious or unconscious, extreme enough to do such a thing?
As I’d lain there examining this conjecture, an incident from the real past had come back to me; one that I had dismissed as unimportant at the time, even if trivially disturbing, but which now seemed to contain some possibly larger significance than I had allowed myself to think.
This concerned a visit she had recently made to her parents in Palo Alto. Her fear of flying was such that she would always ask me to go with her on these rare trips. If I couldn’t, she would make the journey by train. On this occasion, however, when it turned out I was unable to go, she had decided to fly alone. It was time she got over this ridiculous, irrational phobia, she had said, or at least learned to ignore it. I didn’t try to dissuade her, though I felt a certain anguish: I was worried for her, but I was also a little saddened on my own account. In a strange way, her phobia had become one of the things I most cherished about our relationship. Not only did it turn our journeys together into interludes of extreme intimacy where her guard was down so completely I felt as though I had been entrusted with the care of some infinitely vulnerable child, but I had also – having made quite a study of it – come to see the phobia as a peculiar distinction.
To describe it a moment: it was chronic, extravagant in its effects, but self-contained. Carol herself seldom gave it any thought when she wasn’t about to fly, and before meeting me she had considered it merely an aberration in an otherwise well-balanced disposition; inconvenient but without wider significance.
For me though, the serial terrors she began feeling as soon as she woke up on the day of a journey by air represented a kind of spiritual badge of honor, setting her apart from the great mass of people, who dwelt – as one philosopher put it – in ‘the cellar of their existence’. There was something otherworldly about her feelings, religious almost, like the seizures of ancient sibyls. I always encouraged her to indulge them to the full, so much so that she once playfully accused me of making a private cult out of her fear, and it was true that I was as fascinated in observing every detail of her trauma as I was intent on supporting her.
The whole journey would take on a ritualistic quality, like a sacred procession, with its own stations and advances, its own precise gradations of solemnity as we passed through the airport’s successively more confined and concentrated spaces. At the check-in hall, the day’s formless anxieties would converge into their first distinct manifestation: a bright, uncharacteristic chattiness, where Carol would attempt to engage every passing flight attendant in seemingly casual conversation on subjects such as the incidence of freak storms, or the safety policy of their respective airlines. After that came the passage through the X-ray security checks into the more purposeful atmosphere of the departure lounge. Here, Carol’s fear would begin to acquire force and discipline. Excuses to go home would invent themselves, each more flimsy than the last: she had left the stove on, the door unlocked; there was a TV program she had to watch … And when I had patiently talked her out of these, she would fasten her attention on the flight information monitors, checking which flights were delayed, which canceled, divining from these dim flickerings of intelligence whole inauspicious skies. ‘Oh Lawrence, let’s fly another day,’ she would implore me, and it would seem to her that nothing could be simpler or more obviously correct than to go home and try again another day. If our own flight happened to be delayed, she would gather her things and stand triumphantly, certain that with this incontrovertible portent of disaster she had won the right to abandon the journey; tearfully amazed when I insisted we carry on. So, with a gathering feeling of impending catastrophe, she would follow me down the muffled corridors to the confined, glassed-off room reserved specifically for our flight – the boarding gate – where a trance-like stupor of apprehension would settle on her. Warm, melting undulations of fear would travel through her belly; her muscles would go limp, her insides loosen. She would go five or six times to the bathroom, feeling – she told me – as if she were wading through a medium denser than air, hearing her heart beat with a crunch-like thump. And then, delaying it until the last possible moment, she would let me lead her to the low-vaulted, thick-doored opening of the plane, pausing before it, as one might before the charged darkness of a sacrificial chapel, glimpsing through the divide of the curtain, the immense, green-lit zodiac of the pilot’s console; the whole vehicle humming as if possessed by diabolic forces. And as we taxied out, and the hum grew to a roar, and the lumbering momentum that seemed to her at once too much to bear and yet at the same time nowhere near enough to keep us airborne heaved us up into the clouds, the wheels knocking and whining as they were retracted, other noises more mysterious traveling through the fuselage – thumps and rumbles, sudden alarming cut-offs of certain pitches – she became wholly consumed by the terror of death. She lay back in her seat feeling by turns a vertiginous faintness as if the life were already evaporating from her, and a sudden, intense, unbearably vivid alertness, as if everything death was about to take from her had packed itself into the present moment, and was bursting in her like too much air in a balloon.
All the while I would sit gravely by her, holding her sweaty hands; sympathetic, curious, adoring. When we flew shudderingly into a patch of turbulence, or climbed abruptly to avoid thunderclouds, and she felt herself thrust into a still more poignant realm of dread, I would interrogate her on the precise nature of her suffering, and if she was too over-whelmed to speak, I would tell her my own theories – ‘what you’re experiencing is a revelation of the full reality of death … This is what it’s like to be alive at every level of your existence. You’re a house with every light blazing … You’re in naked contact with the actual substance of your life. You’re seeing it in its full, terrifying splendor. Most of us never even glimpse it. It’s a gift, like healing or clairvoyance …’
It had been a surprise then, an astonishment really, when I called her in Palo Alto to ask how the flight had gone, and she had answered me with a stra
nge breeziness that it had all been fine, then changed the subject as if she were barely even willing to acknowledge she had ever had any difficulty flying. And on her return to New York, she had seemed almost irritated at my concern, serenely declaring once again that everything had been just fine.
That evening, as she unpacked, I had seen her stowing a small bottle at the back of her night table drawer.
‘What was that?’ I had asked her.
She had turned around looking surprised – evidently unaware that I had come into the room.
‘That? Oh. Halcyon. I took it for the flight. Dr Elearis prescribed it for me. It seemed to work.’
‘Must be very powerful.’
‘I guess.’ She gave me a bright smile and returned to her unpacking. I’d stood there, feeling rather stunned.
After a moment she turned to me again.
‘I thought you maybe wouldn’t approve,’ she had said quietly. ‘That’s why I didn’t tell you.’
That was all. But two weeks later, on the night of her expedition to the Plymouth Rock, as I lay in bed trying to stave off my own feelings of encroaching disaster, I found myself reliving the little pang of hurt that the incident had triggered, and this time, instead of suppressing it with a little inward shrug, I let its full resonance unfold inside me. The clandestine nature of it all – the secret visit to the doctor, the covert purchasing of the pills, the non-mention of them when she spoke from Palo Alto, the apparent attempt to conceal them on her return – all that I could forgive, as I knew Carol well enough to know that the motive was to spare my feelings rather than to ‘deceive’ me in any improper sense. What stung was the act itself. That state of more-than-human vulnerability, of absolute unshieldedness from the dark terms of existence, was one of her glories, like her beautiful hair or the delicate fluting of her hands. She knew I felt this, and so for her to sabotage it, to smother it under a sedative, was an act of self-mutilation that seemed, as I reflected on it, to be aimed at me; aimed specifically and defiantly at me, its principal connoisseur and sole admirer. I pictured her swallowing the pill (minute and violet; I had looked), imagined it unfolding inside her, shedding its artificial calm in great drifting sheets that settled one by one over the disturbance inside her, swathing it in blankness. And it seemed to me that in obliterating this fear, she was also obliterating my own presence inside her, and that this, whether or not it had been her original intent, had proved an unexpected liberation.
