He nodded but said nothing more. His eyes were bright, knowing. He looked like a man with a secret.
“Frankly,” I went on, my voice defensive, “I’m not sure whether it’s any good or not, whether it’s just an exercise in sublimated sadism or something more than that. As for the tone, I think I got it.”
“Do you like Klaus?” he said to me, leaning forward over his desk.
This second bald question caught me off guard. He held his eyes on mine, and the directness of his gaze startled me. My abdomen tightened. I crossed my legs. His expression was wry, almost smug, and despite my discomfort, I looked at him, drawn by what he seemed to know but wouldn’t say. I dropped my eyes. “Why do you say that?” I mumbled the words. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Do you like him?”
“Is that pertinent?”
“To what?”
“To the translation. Whether I like him or not. What difference does it make?”
“It could make a great deal of difference, don’t you thnk? To the tone of the narration I was speaking of earlier, to how we finally remake the story in English.”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t know if I like him, Professor Rose. I just don’t know.” I spat out the words.
The professor raised his eyebrows. “Good enough,” he said, smiling at my vehemence. “We have time. We’ll uncover it slowly, get down to it. Keep going, and we’ll talk next week.”
“What about the tone?” I said.
He waved a hand in the air. “Oh, you’ll get it,” he said, and with that, I was dismissed.
This conversation, during which very little was said, spawned innumerable dialogues I invented as I lay in bed.
I argued with Professor Rose and explained myself. He was wrong about the tone. I knew. I understood Klaus. I had entered the story completely. The new words I chose were never haphazard. Couldn’t he hear the music of the language I was giving to the boy? I saw the professor’s green eyes. What do you know? I thought. What do you see? Old men think they own the truth. And so I fought him when he wasn’t there. Alone, I was strident and articulate in a way I could never be when I faced him. His presence made me shrink, and though it irritated me, I also looked forward to that sensation of being dwarfed, couldn’t wait to sit beside him in his office again. In my solitude, these conflicting impulses were positively boisterous. I careened from one to the other, a rebel one minute, meek the next, a crusader who turned to jelly. It wore me out. Had I known how long this war would continue, I might have negotiated a truce, but the future was an enigma.
The Brutal Boy grew in English. I worked hard all week. By now Klaus was moving through the house touching things, his stealthy fingers exploring taboo anatomies, and the words I found for him excited me. Every room he enters becomes a site of secret knowledge, every object a treasure because he has handled it. I saw the house too, every detail, even though Krüger leaves much unsaid. The image of this house was stolen from somewhere, but where? Klaus picks up a figurine—a girl with a goose. It was familiar to me. The boy strokes the porcelain dress, the shoes. He turns her upside down. Writing the scene, I felt breathless, agitated, and had to stop. For the rest of that week I translated nothing more, but I had already done fifteen new pages. On the morning of my appointment with Professor Rose, I changed my clothes several times, choosing in the end a skirt and small sweater. I’ll provoke him, I thought. Serves him right.
The professor gave me a fast, hard glance when I entered the room, motioned for me to sit down, and handed me an edited version of my earlier pages. The manuscript was covered with slashes and notes in the margin. I felt my face redden in misery. Without looking at him, I gave him the new work.
“Would you go over those pages for next week?” he said.
I didn’t answer him.
“Don’t worry, Miss Vegan,” he said, his voice tight with formality. “It’s not as extensive as it appears.”
His tone of voice wounded me, struck me as a fresh betrayal, and I looked at the floor, intent on hiding the pain in my face.
He was reading, his gray head bent over the typed pages, his mouth set in a tense grimace. Screw you, I thought to myself, Mr. Know-It-All. I listened to the sound of his pen. He coughed once. Then, out of nowhere, he snorted. I looked at him. He was staring at my feet. “Good heavens, girl!” he shouted at the feet. “It’s cold outside! Don’t you freeze in those ridiculous shoes? Where are your galoshes?”
I didn’t know what to say. Had he been anyone else, I would have howled with laughter, but the man was angry. I glared at him.
The outburst was already over. He returned to his reading as if he had never spoken. I looked at him and folded my arms. Then I had a powerful urge to climb up on his desk and start singing. I can’t sing, but that was beside the point. I imagined myself belting out a song in a big voice from his desktop and stripping. I saw myself pull off my sweater and throw it at his head. I smiled.
He raised his eyes from the page. “This looks better,” he said. “I think you’re finding it.”
“What?” I said. It was a curt, rude response.
He gazed at me and pressed his index finger into the hollow beneath his cheekbone. Then he nodded. It was the nod that unraveled me, with its suggestion of penetration, almost telepathy. I looked back at him and felt my jaw relax, my lips part. Who are you? I thought. He took in my whole face with a leisure that astounded me. We looked at each other too long, and the impropriety made me tremble. My question was forgotten. He blinked, took a breath, and collected himself. His sharp gaze clouded and his face changed. I nearly spoke then, but I felt only sound in my throat, no words.
“Perhaps this is a mistake,” he said. “The story, you know.” He seemed to be addressing a third person in the room. “It’s a Pandora’s box of sorts, isn’t it?” His voice was soft. He doesn’t want anyone to hear us, I thought. Then he spoke more loudly. “How old are you, Miss Vegan?”
“I’m twenty-two.”
He nodded, running a hand through his hair. “I see,” he said. This information appeared to make him sad.
“Professor Rose?” I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I would have spoken had he not ignored me.
“I think that’s enough for today,” he said. He gave me a bewildered look.
I gathered my books and left, closing the door behind me. In the hallway, I heard him muttering to himself. The words were indistinct but came quickly, easily, as if he knew them by heart. He’s quoting something, I thought. I wished I were alone in the hall so I could press my ear to the keyhole and listen.
That evening I sat down to work on the novella again. The boy is leaving the house. The passage was troubling. I rewrote it several times. He pulls on the heavy door, dreading noise, feels the night air, and slips out into the street. I changed the verbs, the adjectives. Each time I did it over, I saw Klaus going through the door into the street. I looked up from the book and my mind wandered. I remembered a white nightgown my mother gave me when I was seven. I had forgotten it. Then I imagined myself pushing open the door to my parents’ house and stepping outside. I felt my bare feet on wet grass. I saw the lights from Webster a mile away. Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town, I thought. Upstairs and downstairs. In the fantasy I peeked into a window but then stopped myself. Don’t look. Go home. I remembered the sound of Professor Rose’s voice from the other side of the door. I bent down to hear the words, but they were monstrous, and I suppressed the daydream. Then I spoke sternly to myself. Keep your distance, I said, your sense of irony. You’re losing your grip, confusing one thing with another. Buck up. This little speech was an attempt to save myself from what had, in effect, already happened.
During the meetings that followed, Professor Rose scarcely looked at me. The novella was the exclusive site of our communication. Little Klaus became a go-between. When we sat side by side on Thursdays, and I watched his pen move across my pages and listened to his criticisms, I was invariably grippe
d by a nameless excitement and anxiety. His violent editing of my translation left me feeling battered but not unhappy. I could see that he was usually right, and my admiration made me humble. It was clear to me that the professor loved the story, and when he mentioned Klaus, his voice would often break in tenderness. His German was perfect, as nuanced and beautiful as his English, and I sometimes wondered why he had let me touch the story at all. He was also extremely possessive of the text and presumed a knowledge of the author’s intent that confounded me. In a single mad moment I actually suspected him of having written it. But I had the little book in front of me, complete with copyright page, and my doubt shamed me. Still, his relation to The Brutal Boy was oddly personal and his opinions about it absolute. Once, during a session, he roared at me about a paragraph I had mistranslated. “This is a passage of great sexual tension, Miss Vegan. Erotic power—latent, of course, but there! You’ve left it all out, made it bland! My God, girl, look here. It’s loins, not limbs. Where did you get limbs? Lende! There’s a great difference, don’t you think, between looking at loins and looking at limbs? Do you want to denature the entire work?” I stared down at the page and uttered an apology. Then I turned to look at him. His eyes were keen. He didn’t smile, but I thought I detected faint humor in his glance. “Get your anatomy straight next time,” he said. “Yes sir,” I replied, and we returned to the page. It is impossible for me to say why this scolding made me feel loved, but it did. The heart is unfathomable.
• • •
The winter was short, the spring long that year. My life continued to be punctuated by Thursdays with Professor Rose, during which nothing and everything happened. And I was slowly making my way toward Klaus’s last vindictive daydream. There were others in my life too, and I saw a lot of Ruth. Although I didn’t tell her about the professor, we shared everything else, which basically came down to books and men. Ruth liked to call the boys who came around “suitors.” It was a grand word that summoned both Homer and Austen, and using it lent a kind of artificial formality to the disorder of “dating.” Those young men were a mixed lot, but they were plentiful—a little more so for me than for Ruth—and the fact is, I don’t remember all of them. The warm weather made the boys eager. They were all in search of an object, and some of them believed I was it. Their styles varied, but there was often some sort of hesitation or scuffle at the door. The daring ones attacked me bodily, grabbing me in the hallway outside my apartment and planting big wet kisses on my lips. One student who had lectured me soberly on Kierkegaard all through dinner actually picked me up off the ground as he made his move on the sidewalk outside my building. The action so startled me I had to throttle a laugh. Others were timid, hemming and hawing at an evening’s end, looking at me expectantly, waiting for an invitation to stay. Stanley was among the shy ones, an Orthodox Jew who lived with his parents in Riverdale and studied Renaissance literature. We had long talks on the steps of Low Library in the sunshine before we had our single dinner date. I suppose Stanley fell in love with me during those talks about life and books, but he probably loved someone else, a person who wasn’t me. His tiny mannerisms and careful conversation made me feel large, bold, almost crude when I was beside him. Irreverent jokes, sexual innuendo, and a general zest for things forbidden poured out of me in his presence. I couldn’t help myself. Stanley seemed to enjoy my patter, and the truth is, I liked him. We had Chinese food, and while we ate, I noticed he was trembling, but we talked and drank beer and laughed and his hands stopped shaking. After he walked me home, he kissed me at the door. His face was flushed, and from so close, his features were delicate and lovely. I asked him to come in, but at the last minute he fled and never called again. It probably was for the best. My attraction to Stanley was short-lived. I think I wanted him because he never pushed me. That was the problem with most of the boys. Their intense wishes made me claustrophobic. They were always breathing on me, pulling, tugging, even begging for some mysterious gift they thought I could give them. But I didn’t really have it—the thing they wanted. I know they dreamed of sexual triumph, of some erotic cataclysm that would erase their need, and I know that by eluding them I became more and more a creature of their hopes, a vaporous being with blond hair and blue eyes. They weren’t to blame. Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.
• • •
Late that spring my life changed in three decisive ways. I ran out of money, Ruth fell in love, and Paris popped up again. May was a beautiful month—clear, warm weeks that made me ache with restlessness—and I would have liked to go out every night, but my stipend was quickly coming to an end. I hadn’t paid the rent for May and I lived in fear of a visit from Mr. Then, my landlord who lived in New Jersey. That was his real name: Mr. Louis Then. I’d never seen him, but his spectral name was horribly apt to my predicament, calling to mind the already gone, the past due. I began to refuse dinners in restaurants when I knew I would have to pay, and subsisted on a diet of noodles and eggs. My weight dropped. I needed new shoes but couldn’t afford them. Now I find it incomprehensible that I didn’t turn to my parents for help. They had very little money, it’s true, but they would have gladly given me enough for shoes. I couldn’t bring myself to ask them. Asking would have been an admission of hardship, not only to them but to myself, and I was stubborn. Although my shoes had holes in the bottom, the rest of me was never shabby. In fact, I noticed that students much richer than I was often affected poverty, wearing torn jeans and ragged shirts. Unlike them, I was always pressed and neat and very careful with my clothes. I hid my true straits even from Ruth, although she guessed and paid for more meals than she should have and brought me gifts she pretended weren’t charity. Ruth’s parents sent her money every month and she shared with me. I loved her for it, even though the indebtedness pained me. That was before she met Robert Cohen and disappeared in a cloud of love. He was in advertising, of all things, but as Ruth said—rather defensively, I thought—he loved Wittgenstein. My friend was rarely at home, and when I did reach her, she was full of news about the remarkable Mr. Cohen. I was jealous, I suppose, and withdrew rather than confront her. But I missed Ruth terribly, and I understood once she was gone how much her presence colored mine. Ruth was the heroine of her own life story, and when we were together, she made me the heroine of mine. She gave daily hardships the stature of romance or drama. Once when a mutual friend asked about my apartment, and I reported it was small and dark, Ruth laughed and said, “David, it’s a rat-infested hovel, a student garret, just awful, but wonderful.” She meant it. In the middle of the month, I returned home one evening to discover that a mouse had broken into a package of macaroni, leaving his tiny turds all over my dinner, and as I rinsed off the noodles under the faucet, I started to cry. I cried through the entire meal and didn’t stop until I had washed and put away the last dish.
• • •
Just around the same time, I ended up at a dinner party where Paris was one of the guests. Tim, a handsome, phlegmatic boy from my linguistics and philosophy class had invited me. I went, tempted most by the idea of a large meal. I remember that the dinner was held in a big ruin of a loft on White Street, that it was given by a painter named Sam who had turned all his canvases to the wall for the occasion, that his girlfriend was beautiful and silent, and that two of the other guests, Jonathan and Rita, were introduced to me as “a performance team.” “They work with objects,” Sam explained, but I never found out what this meant, and throughout the party, I had occasional visions of the two as jugglers. Paris arrived last, wearing a deep pink suit, and when I saw him coming through the door, I felt a spasm of discomfort. But he greeted me like an old friend.
“Iris, Iris, Iris, how are you?” He moved close to my face. “You look pale. Are you all right? Is the city disagreeing with you?”
“I’m just fine,” I said. “This is Tim.” I took my friend’s arm. I don’t think I’d ever touched him before. Tim smiled.
At the dinner table, Paris pla
nted himself directly across from me. We ate pasta, a disappointment. The conversation meandered. I’ve forgotten most of it. There was talk of artists I didn’t know, of galleries and their politics. I had three helpings of noodles and looked from one guest to another. The beautiful girlfriend, Laura, ate quickly and smoked. Tim showed himself to be well informed but delivered every comment in the same bored tone. Jonathan and Rita, however, were lively and had the same laugh. It made me wonder if years of intimacy could produce a shared tone even in a primal sound like laughter. I tried to keep my eyes off Paris, which was difficult. He demanded my attention even when he wasn’t speaking to me, going so far as to lean to one side in order to keep himself in my sight. No one seemed to notice but me, and’ I pretended indifference. Then Paris brought up the painting. I had lost track of the conversation, but the name brought me back. “ ‘The Tempest,’ ” Paris was saying, “by Giorgione. It’s better than anything.”
I looked Paris in the face. “You’re right. I’ve never been to Venice, but I know it from reproductions. It must be three years since I’ve looked at it, but it made a huge impression on me. I remember it well.”
Rita said, “It’s the one with the woman and the storm?”
Paris nodded without turning to look at her. He stared at me. “You have a good memory for paintings?”
“I do, especially that one.”
“Could you describe it now?”
“Is this a test?”
Everyone at the table was silent.
“No, I’m really curious, interested . . .”
“Go ahead, Iris,” Tim said. “If I’ve seen it, I don’t remember it.”
“Well,” I said, conscious that all six were listening. I looked at nobody, focusing on the backside of one of Sam’s canvases. “There’s a woman sitting on a riverbank in the foreground to the right. She’s nursing a child—not a tiny infant, a baby who also sits on the ground. One of her arms rests on the child’s shoulder, I think, and the other is on her knee. She’s naked, except for a cloth draped around her shoulders.” I closed my eyes to see it better, to remember it exactly. “Her right breast is exposed, the one the baby sucks. Her body is turned sideways, but she’s looking up, her eyes lifted, staring straight out of the painting, and her face, her expression is . . .” I shook my head. “It’s calm, remote, but you feel that she’s looked up for one instant and seen you, and that that single second is forever.” I stammered over the last phrase, embarrassed by the emotion I felt. No one said a word. I went on. “The most delicate foliage grows in front of her, and it makes a pattern on the pale skin of her leg without hiding its shape. There’s a tall tree behind her, lush but narrow, and other trees to the left, also young and thin. Behind her is a bridge and the buildings of a city, but they look dead and uninhabited for some reason. And then there’s the storm with dark clouds above and an exquisite bolt of lightning which gives the painting its curious illumination. It’s not real light but a kind of inner light, the light of strong memories. I can’t explain it, but even while you look at that painting, you feel that it’s already past, that you’ve already seen it. Maybe that’s why it has such a powerful effect afterward. I mean, the thing itself is memory, is an afterlife, and so you’re remembering a memory . . .” I coughed, put my hand to my mouth, and looked down. I’m sure I blushed.
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