No, she said, Miss Ruth and her father were not at home. He had gone to a convention in London, and she with him, about a week ago. That must have been when she phoned me, I thought, perhaps the night before she left. I too was familiar with those restless eves of travel when, brave with going, one plucked at the string one was to leave behind.
They would return in about a week, said Anna coldly, making it clear that any really loyal intimate of the household would know this. Only two months ago she would have teased at me like an auntie, her warmth guided, as all of her was, by what she saw on her mistress’s face.
I saw the two faces as I had last seen them together. Honesty impelled me toward the one in the absence of the other. In the small things, I thought, that do not matter. “This is Mr. Goodman Anna,” I said. “This is Pierre.”
“Well, my hosh,” said Anna accusingly, dropping all pretense. “Well, my hosh!” Her glottal, Czech version of “gosh” was a familiar expletive, long since affectionately adopted by both the Mannixes; I could hear them exchanging it over a book, a letter, across the back of a chair.
Yes, I had been away, I said. No, there was no message; I would get in touch with them when they returned.
“Come on to dinner,” said Anna, crafty duenna. “I got nobody to cook for meanwhile.”
I was tempted, as I am always tempted to that house. Then I recalled where years ago I had first heard that “my hosh!”—Walter Stern saying it absently from his hospital bed, then, cheeks flushed, eagerly, giving its derivation.
No, I was going away again, I said quickly, and thanking her, repeating that there was no message, I rang off. Other humps—like his—I thought, were inoperable too. Just then a jet plane soughed over the city, taking us all up for a second in its suction, and dropping us back again, each on his own mote of concern, each absurd pea. But it came too late to down me now; I had already had my bit of conversation, my balance, and striding out of the store without a backward glance, I walked rapidly home, exempted at last from the day.
This flat is four flights up, on the top floor. Years ago, when I first rented it, the old mansion, newly renovated, stood empty, and I could have had my choice of the garden floor or any, but, still the stylite on his pillar, I chose the top. An elevator has long since been installed, but there is a small spiral of stairs in the rear that I often prefer to use. During these weeks I have done so. Ritual has mildly obsessive uses for the solitary; as I climbed the steps on these evenings I liked to imagine that each one advanced me as it were backwards, into the relative composure of the past. And this time I leaned as carefully on habit as on a trusted arm. Night was here again, returning us once again to the illusion of a hiatus in which the world stopped moving and we could judge ourselves; over the chimney stacks of the city one could imagine seeing, if one had the proper ray for it, thousand upon thousand ellipses of memory circling like single birds. I am just on the crux of it—like a man bending over his own headstone—I thought; I cannot stop now. And walking up the last flight I visualized the shades half drawn and even, the desk cleared, the lamp set burning in the way invisible entities managed the task in a fairy tale.
But when I opened the door the flat was dark. I snapped on the kitchen light; there was my morning cup on the table. In the big room the shades were still up, the curtains wide on the floor-length windows through whose blue-black oblongs the lighted panes of my neighbors crowded interestedly, before this transgression of city etiquette, as if at any moment hundreds of inquiring rounds of faces might start up over their orange sills. Down the long room I saw the neglected stubs and ashes of the week’s living—books disarranged here, a jacket lying there, the fallen pile of spring-binders—all sending up the odd sense of oneself departed. No one had been in the place since morning.
I turned on the sharp arc-light over the desk, leaving the windows as they were. A city flat is the thinnest of aquariums, whose element, half out, half in, I still perversely love. On the desk there was no usually propped note from the cleaning woman, large pencil script always written savingly on a grocery bag. As I ransacked for a quick meal and ate it voraciously, calculating that my walk, deceptive as such often are in New York, must have been six or seven miles, I felt a flicker of orderly habit outraged. This was the second time Mrs. Papp had done this, after an unblemished record of three years. No doubt she would arrive tomorrow without explanation, as she had done once before. Yet it was not so much that she had lost her character as that I had lost hers—in the city one tended to set special store by even the faintest remnant of the feudal. There were the notes she left—the last one posed months ago here to a cocktail party: Tal lenlo. Aints oner cink. I smiled, recalling the girl who had read it aloud, one of the researchers from the office, the sudden ferret brightening on her face, our laughter. Of course, she had said, with the authority of the best pupil in the class: Middle European accent, just take it phonetically. “Tell landlord. Ants under sink.” Later that evening, after a restaurant dinner with the remnants of the party, I had taken the girl home, since no other man had volunteered and on the lees of the drinks, had kissed her mildly at her door. She had misread the kiss as the long-awaited amorous tribute to that intelligence which would someday be so requited, and for weeks after, whenever she had managed to bring her copy herself to my office, her lame, grinding joke, “No aints under the sink, hope I hope,” had accompanied it too. So Mrs. Papp’s note, like everything else, had had a place, small though it was, in the event-chain.
And still my mind went ticking along in exhausting clarity; they say the brain itself never tires but sits like a punkah set in the center of a house at the inception, eternally waving in its own sensoria, eternally clearing them, until the subject sleeps, until he dreams, until he dies.
I looked down on the body that fed it, oddly matched, some would say, to its humors—the long, heavy-boned body of my grandfather and his farmer forbears, not the desk body of the natural desk man. I was pacing the room now, but each time that I passed the desk I avoided it—I, I; I, I. There must be thousands of such journals, I thought—self-tender, scared of the present as it approaches, shut away. Stopping at the window, I stared across at the people outside. I had had my turn with them—all day long I had been thinking in thousands like some ruddy philanthropist with a pile of stage money, knowing all the time, as Maartens did, that the minute one ceased to defend the self—en garde!—from the general, the importance of the picture, of the diary, ends. No, I will get on with it somehow, I told myself, and then if I must, move on. And breaking the circuit, I went to the desk and pulled out the drawer so violently that it sagged in my hand, spilling the manuscript in a wide fan on the floor. Cursing, I bent to retrieve it. The thin pages slid as I reached for them, and I trundled after on my haunches, damning my own clumsiness but relieved by it. And it was just then, as I squatted goose-fashion, that it came to me—snapped from anode to cathode quite without warning—that the old woman I had followed might have been Mrs. Papp.
I must have remained squatting there on my haunches for some minutes. It is the ultimate position of self-ridicule, taking us dimly back perhaps to our preprimate days, or to our childish days at stool—either way it is not one in which a man can deify himself. And during all these solitary nights here, that is what I have been doing—in memory we all deify ourselves. I sat down on the floor, spotlighted there in my circle of scattered paper for anyone who cared to look, and after a while I began to laugh quietly to myself; if I had done so aloud it would not have alarmed me now. It was the present, bubbling up in me, humorous and healing, after so long, and it came to me now that I had been scared of the present all my life.
I picked up an odd page and regarded it. What tunnels we breed for ourselves, I thought, when at any moment might come the assault from outside—death, sickness, and all the other taxes, including the ordinary that crept like lichen, Mrs. Papp. There was irony in that I, for years such a self-fancying authority on the variable, had forgotten this. I gla
nced up at the windows, unshaded as I had left them for her that morning. Let them all look, I thought—the others—and let me look too, to be reminded that the satiric distance is not one we impose on ourselves.
Was it she, had it not been she? But what did it matter? I thought of Semple, toward whom in this welter of pages I had always been progressing, and had never yet put down. While I approached him, old dead accident that he was, all that time his counterpart, counterstroke might be approaching me. Memory, though still the powerful vehicle I could not desert, was not safety, and had never been. The present, stealing along my veins even now like some analgesic midnight sun, was the reverse of the medal. This was the variable, and I would no longer deny it. I began picking up these papers. Even if I had left their true element forever, I meant to go on with them, even if I had to write by daylight, as one wrote the biographies of other men; even if in them I might no longer be “I,” but “he.” In whatever way it had to be done, I would put Semple down.
Gathering the pages, I put them into one of the spring-binders, where they looked—perhaps as they should—much like any man’s. Now that I had done so, I let myself fancy, glancing through the thin windows, that the opposite windows no longer stared back at me quite so unitedly, but came at me each humbled into itself, one by one, one and one, and one. I leaned out to look at the house across the way, a foreground floating separate from the crammed pearls of light around it on every side. Unlit itself, the façade moved forward from its nimbus, brooding at me with the clued familiarity of a repeated thing. London, I thought; she is there. Peering, I wondered whether all these years here I had been living in sight of an image of another house, subtly remanded here, but in the same moment that other, oldest house came out to me, clear in its own cincture—a cobbled brown-and-blackish brick that any taste but memory’s would call ugly—not this pale evocation of Portland stone. The term had slipped in of itself—Portland cement, commonly called Portland stone. No, it was not that house nor any particular one, but merely one of the great colors of London, whose semblance opposite, faded by the diamond winters, summer meltage of a harsher city, still remained to obscure and please. I remembered them now, long crescents of such houses, laid like gray scythes along the interchangeable dusks, dullish streets of childhood that quake in a man’s mind and are still sickened for as a boy does for a lost, bad home. But I had not thought of them until I had thought of her there. The brain never tired, but we could never foredoom how memory would seed the future except to know that as we advance, erect, upon the body of the new, we hold up the body-ghost of the old.
I bent my head on my arms. At last I went to the desk and sat down. It took me long minutes to put the pages in order, several hours to read them slowly, as for the first time I did, from the beginning. The confidant’s confidant, I saw how he had arrogated beginnings and conclusions that might be either, good assaults and bad. I heard him refuse to listen except for his own ends—and doom himself eternally to listen. “Nothing one says face to face avails,” he had said—and I watched him look, from his hiding place, at every face that passed.
When I looked up, it was the city hour that I have come to know so well—the hour of minor horns and major silence, and the constant expectancy of a theme. Absolutist that I am, I still awaited it.
The hour passed while I sat; in London, where she dreamed, it was break of day. In my window panes the dots of light went on and off in the darkness, one ellipse of memory resting, the next waking. There they are, I thought: I, they, she—we who so incurably coexist. Tiring, tireless, until the subject sleeps, until he dreams, until he dies. Until, before dying, he wakes. Is that what she dreams? I heard her voice again, across the three thousand miles of air that I could annul in a moment, over the distance between us that no speed could outwit. “It’s getting light here,” she said, and I answered, “Here too.” “Have you gone?” I said again, and she answered, “No, but I can sleep now. Keep—keep well.” I knew what she dreamed, and that it was more than the dreams of women, and that other apostles had had it too. That we may wake in time to cure one another. That this is all the conversation we have.
Time passes, I thought, invisible fluid, rosy and bitter, through which we suspend, can never return. It is the bystander. As is the natural world. When Darwin first made us look at our history, it was not the facts of our descent that set our teeth on edge but the anguish of our final separation from what once had been ours. From the green insentience of the plant risen and reaped with its brothers, from the unpuzzled face of the animal living inseparable and dying back into it, from all that unconsciously waxes and wanes outside and beyond us—slow cactus, piled cloud—all saved from the knowledge that they are as impermanent as ourselves. For which we have exchanged this lambent perpetual in the skull, this responsible, ticktock, weeping flame.
I looked behind me. Nothing was there except the blank page in the machine, the white, cataracted eye of the present, visible from every corner of the room. I sat down and wrote her the letter upon it. When you return, I wrote, I may have something to show you.
The key word is “may.” No one, except his twin, can divine the hesitance of him to whom others have always seemed less important than he to them. Nevertheless, she watches, I thought—how easily I forget that others do.
Downstairs at the pillar-box, its iron flange, wet with early dew, creaked as I tipped it and held it. She watches, I thought, and was comforted. She is the present, I thought, holding the letter, and I am afraid of them both.
A car passed quietly, a second and a third, with the softly attentive sound that tires make on a damp pavement. The citizens were moving again. Then dream as they do, I thought, as she does, as perhaps you dreamed this morning. That we all belong to the same city, the city which is bedouin, which is anywhere.
Letting go the flange, I heard the letter fall, with the brush of paper on paper, on the others inside.
Today, as I sit at the desk here, I face the sign, that reminder which, when I returned, I pinned on the wall in front of me, where it cannot fail to meet the eye. In the encyclopedia office, where the seven and seventy of us sweep our mops against the sands of knowledge, the wall over every desk is covered with such reminders—clippings in type and in galley proof, in every print from Caslon to Goudy, not excluding that weakened but still tenacious imprimatur, the personal hand. Mine here is in pencil, in the large block letters with which we begin our rubric and end it. FALSE ENTRY. And now to Semple. From now on I shall not read back.
Chapter II. Pierre at College.
IN COLLEGE PIERRE GOODMAN learned above all, as so many do, how to handle his humiliations. All around him others were picking up those surface convergences to the center which would help them to live more dexterously with their fellows—the poor boy learning to sport his leather elbow patches with the same worn chic as the quietly moneyed, the rich boy learning to pretend, at week’s end, that he was broke. And Pierre, surrounded by so many who were at that temporarily protean period of their lives when a change of pose was as normal as a change of shirt, learned to bear his own façade more lightsomely, at times almost to the point of forgetting that it was there. It was a happy period, the lovely swaddling time in a company so sharply defined by age, so busy cultivating an intramural difference from the world, that his sense of a personal one could decline. Looking back on it in later years, he often found himself wondering whether even many an Oneida, Brook Farm, Utopian blundering in the wilderness, had not really been harking back to this same shorter experiment of youth dormitoried against its enemy elders, swapping clothing as freely as ideas, self-boundaries almost as freely as clothing—to that springtime of communism which comes only to the young.
Meanwhile, in his own curious way he was learning what the rest of them were—how to estimate, reserve, and refine his own public impression. He learned, as actors do, that a simulacrum of passion, displayed with taste, is more acceptable to the world than the incautious gaucherie of the real, also that
it was more comfortable to himself. He was confounded to discover (and quick to use it) that in those very arenas where the world advised against pretense—the acquisition of learning, of honors, of love—the natural pretender often had a handicap advantage. Luckily, if he was saved from venality, it was by other endowments that also seemed to him specious—his appearance, of which he had never been vain, and his memory, that he still took pains to hide.
His appearance was good enough for vanity; under the currying of the city it improved even more. What he had never counted on in his rare boyish broodings on mundane success (one remembers that it was not “rising” he wanted) was the value of a conventional exterior. Except for his unusual height, which became less noticeable as he consorted increasingly with the well-fed and the racially intermixed, his looks, he began at last to surmise, were of that healthy “regular” sort—too sound to conceal the lacerations of too much intelligence—which inspired confidence in both sexes. Most people assigned certain physical configurations to certain psyches; it was the median that most inspired trust. That his inner self didn’t match their conception of his outer gave him a disguise which otherwise he might have been troubled to seek. And in the end this no doubt kept him more median than he thought he was.
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