by J. D. Landis
But on our first night together, the night of the day we met, as I stepped into my Romantic era, I ate no dinner, I kept to no pattern, I perished. I gave up my life for a new one.
PROBABLY THE ONLY person more astonished than I that I should be walking into my apartment building on Park Avenue with a woman was the evening doorman. He had never seen me with a woman. The apartment had been in my mother’s family, and when she left it to me in her will, I told the people renting it that their lease would not be renewed and moved in when they vacated. That had been some five years before. No woman had visited me, aside from Elspeth, who cleaned for me then as now.
But what astonished the doorman even more than the presence of a woman at my side was my speaking to him. For reasons that I could hardly have explained, unless I’d written him a letter, I had stopped speaking to him about a year before. He must have been perplexed, for I had always been friendly in my greetings, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t at first feel I had singled him out in my silence, until he must inevitably have discussed with the other doormen and with the superintendent as well what he took to be my rudeness, at which point all of them would have realized from their common experience with me that I had simply stopped speaking. I am sure there was such a meeting, for I noticed, much to my relief, so uncivil had I come to think they must find me, that they all stopped greeting me at precisely the same time. From then on, they might open the door for me as I left on and returned from my daily walk into the city or hand me a package they had signed for and kept secure in the parcels closet, but they never said a word, not even when I tipped them. These doormen were, after all, with Elspeth, my only consistent human contact during that period of my silence, and I found it comforting that we be equal in the exchange of language and therefore that the burden of speech be lifted from us all. (Elspeth, for her part, went right on talking to me as she dusted and polished, with her usual lack of concern that I even be in the same room, to say nothing of her seeming obliviousness to my utter lack of response to everything she said.)
But how, then, it must have shocked the evening doorman, whose eyes had already opened wide beneath his quasi-military hat at the sight of my jaunty companion in her rambunctious clothes, when I said, as we passed by him through the door he held open, “Thank you, Frank.”
He actually let go of the door, which would have slammed into my shoulder had I not put out my hand to stop it.
“Good evening, Mr. Chambers,” he finally found himself able to say, though by that time I had caught up to my new friend and was walking through the chalcedony lobby toward the elevator.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he called after me, and only the spreading open of the elevator doors, which struck me for the first time as something vaguely sexual, kept me from turning around and asking Frank what he was sorry for: nearly slamming the door on me; having the clean simplicity of our silence come to an end; or seeing me with a woman for the first time and believing like most men that there has been no dictator yet born who can subjugate a man the way a woman can?
The elevator operator wore white gloves. I was tempted to hold out my right hand to him and let him congratulate me on my reentry into the world. But I settled for a mere “Hello, Eddie” and was amazed to find that he held out his hand to me and seemed about to wrap his other hand around my shoulder until he realized that the elevator would have ground to a stop should he remove that hand from its semicircular brass controls.
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Chambers.” Eddie shook my hand as if I had been gone for a year instead of merely silent.
I could feel his eyes on my companion’s bottom as we stood together on the landing while I turned one key and then another in the locks on the door to the apartment, of which there was one per floor. Only after I had closed that door behind us did I hear through it the clangor of the metal gate being pushed shut and then the coming together of the elevator doors themselves. I thought of Eddie rushing down to the lobby and leaving the elevator while it was still bouncing as he limped to Frank to describe the lascivious pleasure he had taken from his oeillade and to ask Frank if the dead man had spoken to him too and did he think that woman might have been the one who brought him to life with her fabulous backside and the light in her plummy eyes.
“Have you been away?” she asked as she began to walk into the apartment and I followed, as if it were her place and not mine.
Did the apartment look so uninhabited, I wondered, that it appeared I didn’t stay there or perhaps even live there?
“No,” I answered, “I haven’t been away, not for a while. I used to go abroad at every opportunity, but lately I’ve been staying here in the city. Why do you ask?”
She walked through the front parlor and the music room and into the library and headed toward the formal dining room, where not a morsel of food had been eaten since the renting family had departed. I followed her within this maze of my life. “Because the elevator man said it was nice to see you again. That’s what people usually say to someone who’s been away. But you haven’t been away. Maybe he’s been away.”
“Who?” I wondered if she thought I was made up of more than one person. The very idea made me feel desirable, and it was all I could do to keep from sprinting so I might catch up with her and put my arms around her from behind and press her to me and feel the roundness of her buttocks at that place on my upper right thigh where my testicles slept, we being the perfect height for one another.
“The elevator man,” she explained.
“Oh.” I stopped for a moment, but she walked right on. “No, he hasn’t been away either.” Now I hurried my steps just to be able to see her as she went through the kitchen and then the pantry and opened the door to the laundry and tried the locked door to the wine room, which would have been too cold for her despite her three little shirts, and found the door at the rear of the kitchen that led to the back of the apartment. “He didn’t really mean it was nice to see me again. He sees me every night when I come home. If I get home by eleven, that is. If I get home after eleven, then it’s Juan who sees me. Juan is the night elevator man. What Eddie meant was it was nice to hear me again. I had stopped talking for a while. I hinted at that in your shop when I said that language had failed me. I stopped talking for over a year, actually. Today’s the first day I’ve said anything for over a year.”
I thought that might make her halt her self-guided tour of my home, but she just kept on going. “I’d like you to tell me about it. I assume the bedroom’s back here?” she asked.
She went on down the long corridor that led to the bedrooms and various bathrooms and the maids’ quarters and whatever else might be back there in some room I hadn’t slept in and so perhaps had never bothered to open.
“All the bedrooms are,” I answered.
“I meant yours.”
“I sleep in different rooms,” I confessed.
“No wonder,” she said with utter lack of condemnation as she opened one bedroom door after another. “I don’t know how anyone can live like this. All these rooms. All these walls. Everything cut off from everything else. Did you know there didn’t used to be bedrooms? People slept right in the middle of the house. In the great hall. They didn’t go off into private chambers. They didn’t try to hide. They even entertained there. Their guests would walk around the bed in what was called a ruelle. But what about you? Don’t you have a room where you usually sleep? Don’t you keep your clothes somewhere?”
She had finally stopped and had turned to look at me. She was lost. She needed help. The apartment had defeated her as it had undoubtedly defeated me.
“Not really. There are closets everywhere. I hang my suits in one room and keep my shirts in a linen closet outside one of the bathrooms. They smell so clean when I take them from there and put them on. I really don’t have a room of my own here. I didn’t grow up here. I inherited this place from my mother.”
“Then this can be your room,” she said as she opened the door t
o one of the bedrooms and looked in.
I followed her into my new room. It was a room in the cracks of whose walls I had sometimes tried to sleep. Like most of the rooms in the apartment, it was furnished with antiques, mostly American like the Federal cherrywood chest of drawers made by Triphem Gorham in Connecticut at the turn of the eighteenth century and the simple Chippendale maple blanket chest made in Rhode Island about a quarter-century earlier, though the bed was a Charles X mahogany lit en bateau, chunky and substantial but not, thank goodness, a four-poster like the beds in some of the other bedrooms, with their pleated canopies and pencil posts or fluted columns and not at all suited to the night of love I could feel crawling up through my thickening blood as she pushed the claw-footed brass doorstop against the door to hold it open and went to the bed and pushed off her short black boots and lay back against the square white pillows and I prepared to follow her because I didn’t know where else to go when she pointed to the Irish fools chair opposite the foot of the bed and said, “Sit there, I want us to be able to see each other,” and I sat there utterly in her thrall.
I looked at her. She looked at me. I was happy to be exiled to this chair against the wall, for I was afraid of my desires, or at least of my being able to fulfill them in some way that would fulfill hers also, and at the same time I wanted to leap across that space between us and bury her beneath me until she might try to claw her way out into the peach light that melted into the room through the frosted globe held aloft on the tiny muscular hand of the naked male figure of the spelter lamp on the table beside the bed.
I knew she sensed both my fear and my desire. I was grateful to her for this more than anything, more even than for being there with me in the first place: for recognizing my ambivalence.
“Somebody sure mixed the woods in this place,” she said.
I was amused at the thought of my mother so painstakingly collecting all these valuable pieces, only to have the first girl I’d ever brought home point out so casually how they were inharmonious. I felt that I had somehow been put together in the same way, with my unearned muscles and my careful woolens and my guarded spectacles on my pretty face and my vetust mind.
“So talk to me,” she said. “I love to hear you talk. I loved your story about the violin. Tell me about how you stopped talking.”
“One day I just stopped.”
“Just like that,” she said skeptically.
“That’s how it seemed. One day I was reading about the death of rhetoric and how it coincided with modernization, with rationalization replacing religion, and when I saw the word axes, the plural of axis and a word I’d been reading in book after book because it’s the kind of word that language people love, I read it as axes, the plural of axe. And no matter how many times I read that word over and over and over again, all I could hear was axes, axes, axes in place of axes, axes, axes.”
“So is that when you stopped talking?”
I nodded.
“Say something.”
“Yes.”
“So you were chopping off your head to spite your mind.”
It was an image so clear, and so clearly accurate, that I found myself bending forward as if there were literally a blade at my neck.
“You might say that.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Chop off your head.”
“I, as well.”
“You do have such a beautiful face.”
I touched my face.
“But you’re not gay.”
It was only half a question now. But it disturbed me. “Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because I was in love with a gay man.”
“How can that be?”
“How can it not be? It was. He was the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”
“Who was he?”
“My boss.”
“What happened to him? Did he die?”
“He left me.”
“How can that be?”
“Thank you for asking. I destroyed his life.”
Please destroy mine, I wanted to say. I will never leave you. “Do you want me to be gay?” I asked.
“All men are gay.”
“Well, I’m not.”
She smiled as if the whole thing had been a big joke. “But you do admit that it was a homonym that made you stop talking, that gave you—”
“No,” I interrupted.
“—your epiphany,” she went right on. Then she held up her hand to stop me from contradicting her again. “Sorry. Bad pun. But that is the right word otherwise, isn’t it? Epiphany? I always wanted to have an epiphany myself. Not the religious kind. Religions are repressive. They crush women like this.” She crossed her arms over her chest and flattened her hands upon her breasts. “A revelation,” she went on. “Where everything comes together and you feel you know the truth about things. That’s never happened to me. On the other hand, I do have the most incredible orgasms. Maybe some people are given epiphanies and other people are given orgasms. Can you imagine what it would be like if you had to choose for yourself? It would be like Sophie’s Choice, except instead of choosing which child of yours was going to live and which one was going to die, you had to choose between two ways of knowing the truth. Epiphany or orgasm. Which would you choose?”
“Epiphany.”
“Figured.” She smiled and wiggled against the bed, under her hands, which she had kept on her breasts but were now cupped gently over them, as if to protect them from religious persecution.
I found myself reverting to pedantry as I looked at her long, thin fingers unable quite to cover her breasts beneath her shirts and whatever undergarment she might be wearing.
“It wasn’t a homonym,” I explained.
“Axes and axes isn’t a homonym!” She sat up and opened her eyes wide in mock horror. “Hundreds of tax dollars wasted on my education!” She took her hands from her breasts and, with them still crossed, reached down and grasped the bottoms of all three shirts and pulled them up over her head. I noticed first how this disheveled her short, auburn hair, which fell across her face over one eye and made her look like a child taunting me with a naughty smile. Then I let myself look down and saw she had been wearing no undergarment at all. From across the room I could feel her breasts burn the skin of my palms. “So if it isn’t a homonym, what is it?”
“A homograph.”
She looked at me doubtfully.
“Homographs,” I went on, “are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently and mean different things. Homonyms are words that are spelled the same and are pronounced the same and mean different things. And then there are homophones. Homophones are—”
“Homophones?”
“Homophones are—”
“Homophones! Give me an example.”
“Freeze and frieze,” I said. “Autarchy and autarky.”
“Oh, that’s a big help.”
“Homophones,” I elucidated, “are words that are spelled differently but are pronounced the same and mean different things.”
I knew that what I was saying was correct, but I felt that I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was defining language at the same time that language was once again losing its meaning for me. But I wasn’t frightened this time. I wasn’t alone this time. I was with a strange, unfathomable woman who was stripping her body naked as she seemed to expect me to do with my mind.
“Tell me what happened,” she said as she lifted her hips from the bed and pulled her tiny skirt up around her waist and hooked her thumbs under her green tights and pulled them down and raised her legs in the air so the tights would leave her feet, which they did, taking with them the gold socks, which clung to the tights and hung over the bed’s footboard like a ballerina’s slippers in the fourth position croisée. “Tell me about how you were undone by your … homograph, right?”
“Homograph,” I repeated, wondering what it meant. “I read axes and
heard axes. Everything just fell apart at that moment. I had spent years studying rhetoric. It was all so orderly—my life, my studies. Apollonian, if you will. I loved rhetoric for its order. I read Aristotle and Quintilian and Cicero and Longinus. I learned to love all the rules that governed the way words are used to try to arrive at the truth. Inventio and dispositio and elocutio and memoria. Even actio. I used to go around chanting them in my head like a song. It must sound stuffy and dry and foolish, perhaps even sciolistic … excuse me, superficial … but it is really about the power and beauty of language, and language, aside from bodily functions and the termination of bodily functions, which is to say death, is the only thing shared by all human beings. And language was the only way I knew to understand the truth and to try to express the truth. And the truth is all I ever wanted. What is truth? Nietzsche asked. I asked. What does it mean that we ask what it means? I went looking for the metaphors of things. I dived into language, I went far beyond rhetoric. I studied linguistics and psycholinguistics, semantics and graphology. I analyzed conversational implicatures with Grician exactitude. I examined the great medieval trivium, which added dialectic and grammar to rhetoric. Philosophus grammaticam invenit—it’s the philosopher who discovers grammar. I thought I was a philosopher because I thought I was in the process of uncovering the truth. But the truth itself came under attack, or at least the means to get to the truth. Rhetoric was attacked and destroyed. Kant attacked it. The Romantics attacked it. People in our own time, Roland Barthes and Paul Ricoeur and Tzvetan Todorov, they attacked it. Even my beloved Nietzsche. Wittgenstein moved from the worship of language to the belief that it actually bewitches our intelligence. I realize now that I believed they were attacking me, my life, my meaning. One day I was in a bookstore up on Broadway near Columbia and bought a book, and when the clerk gave me my change, I counted it, as I had always done, because that’s what rich people do. And I saw that one of the coins had been rubbed completely smooth. There was no writing on it, no picture. I slammed it down on the counter and screamed at the clerk and accused him of trying to cheat me. ‘This is worthless,’ I said, ‘worthless!’ I don’t think I had ever screamed before in my life. I was lucky—”
