dividing the unknown between us
He was not waiting for her but he looked forward to her coming home. His whereabouts were well enough known no matter what he did: a New York apartment for him and his wife, for the time being theirs. He was reading the inmate’s letter by the living-room window and listening with his one open ear to the voices of the Saturday-afternoon opera. They were richly preoccupied with themselves and came from far enough away off there in the otherwise deserted bedroom to be at a nice distance. The telephones were in the bedroom and kitchen, which was the American way of consolidating atmosphere and action and privacy. Here where he was, bright-honed window panes shivered and warped, bashed by Saturday winds old and seagoing bearing endless light, and they seemed to come into his plugged-up sick ear from his good ear. He felt not quite alone. He had a force in mind, but he could not quite have identified it even if someone had offered to torture him. Private life in some unexpected simple way was what it was, and he was willing not to betray it. He was reading the letter from prison when he felt the gloved hand upon his head.
It was nothing he would own up to—this private life in all its power— certainly not testify to. But he knew it well when he felt the surprise hand familiar on his head; and had known it before the two phone calls, but especially while he had let the second one just ring. Knew it like an over-slow, a lifelike event rereading some of this letter on ruled stationery from a prison inmate who was not the one he had gone to visit but who had leaned over and said hello and started something there in the smoky, overclean Visitors Room, to the darkly uncertain amusement of the Cuban inmate that he had gone to visit. On a weekday without telling his wife. In a rented car driving sixty-five miles up the parkway and into hills.
Here at the window a block from the North River (as he liked to hear it called), the winds got neighborly and practically sacred banging away like irregular song against the rotten, high-tension system in his ear that an expensive doctor had a French name for and that struck him now in its panic ringing as the American city phone internalized with mechanical flow intact, the sign of it a light in his eye that would be instantly noticeable to the interim owner of this hand upon his head should he turn around, leaving the sentence he was rereading typed on schoolboy-ruled lines of prison-issue writing paper about a jailhouse lawyer who would handle your injustices for the experience, if not rid you of them.
But his head, his single great immigrant brain cell canaled with sounding ire like trapped light, had been spinning prior to the hand. Not with this half idea about private life he could not identify even under torture. And not with the local will, now, of a woman’s movement as near as the philosopher’s cue proving its power on the philosopher’s billiard ball flesh-colored but as yet unnumbered. And not with the history of opera, though on this workingman’s day off to crashland or hit the chocolates (knowing as we now do the truth that the expectation of them was half in the caffeine) or close the eyelids half trusting their pale-rose-filmed insides not to display boringly ancient scenes he knew too well, or have a secret from his heretofore absent wife—he had entertained just now while reading this inmate’s letter an alternative life for exile-Prince Hamlet: arrived in England; on impulse determined to stay; ensconced now in London no longer melancholy making a clean break with all that toxic family history back home in damp Denmark; and, taking responsibility for his life, being surprised and inspired and liberated by the new Italian-import drama-by-means-of-music with its song-soliloquies on plain firm chords like majestically shifting stages, forget your madrigals, homophonic si, polyphonic no—Euridice, the first opera, followed dazzlingly (this soon? and did it come to London?) by Orfeo—the Euridice of Peri followed by Monteverdi’s Orfeo—these Greeks! the latest Greek connection, for Hamlet had in effect more Greek than his businessman sponsor who when Hamlet arrived and decided to stay, was out of town on a trip, some said in Stratford, some said vacationing in the New World.
Which stopped the spin in his head no more than the hand materializing behind him on his bald welcome mat, or the Saturday-afternoon opera continuing like an actual production in the bedroom. His head spinning off the ringing visiting his ear that a doctor had discussed as if it had been his; spinning like final force off the dizzy discharge in the head, a mineral-smelling echo of vicarious death, his, here in this land of sport while disappearances if not traditional deaths of people far away whom he did not know, most of them, except as countrymen were possibly what was making him sick, or at least ring. The crowds that were gathered in a soccer stadium: it reversed, he thought (with the now ungloved hand settling slow onto his head like some limb-substance), the relation customary between locker rooms, underground runways, and so forth of a stadium, and the great visible central white-chalked playing field where the match took place that people came to see.
Yet why labor against love? For if his head was spinning, the hand out of nowhere upon it must be the distaff hand!
So, being less a philosopher than economizing on effort, and still hanging on to this "nothing" he would testify to that was almost here, he corrected his course slightly as he was hauled by sheer dizziness half out of his chair and instead of hanging on to it or the prison inmate’s ruled letter fell tall-ly out of it, out of this chair by the bright windy window and onto all fours for then she would not think he was dizzy or sick and only hear him on all fours growl GRRRRAAAWWHHHH! at that touch upon his hide. But expecting his wife’s approach, heralded a moment before by her silent hand upon his bald head, he could hardly anticipate it for she was here already on top of him.
And as he received her laugh and her slender arms elbow-crook’d around his ribs down where he existed on all fours on the rug and felt again her hand upon his head, for his head was what she wanted (and would have, but could not hold the drowning discharge inside his brain which was part fun because she’s here), he found that well before this he had known that he was not alone, and this was half what he would not testify to if anyone offered to torture him, say in a beret such as the beret she had bought him for his eminent dome. And now this inkling (roused moments before to some unlatching or a lonesome draft of air trying to get at his eardrum or the rustle of a thing coming to rest or a moist cluck—from her mouth opening, as she saw him and thought, His earplugs are in) plus that other inkling that was nothing he wished to identify was clotheslined by the opera long forgotten on the bedroom radio that’s nearing its violent end. What else was it that they had planned for this afternoon?
He rose way down in himself to the cheerful hand on his head, it had taken off its glove. He read every little part of that hand no matter where it came down on him—shin, chest, his ankle, his neck hair. The palm familiar, her palm tenderer than fingers, more delicious than her squarish downright fingers on the skin close to the osso spooko of his dome. Satisfaction with a minimum of means—a head, a hand. "Oh my sweet," she said, and he still had not seen her. She was related to angels, he knew in the warm liquid spread outward in the radiator of his body so he was very wide and inside himself sort of peeing slowly or bleeding not so slow. Not telling her about reading her hand no matter where it came down on him was like reaching out to her (and he thought, Where-wer^-you?-I-was-glad-to-be-alone). What else did they need but each other? He reached out to her without moving a muscle, amused musclewards to feel his face’s calm fixed until he grinned. He was pleased with her that a few seconds ago the shine across his bald eminence must itself have seen the light of his life coming across the carpeted room and not related the message downstairs. Thus interfered he not in her secret progress across the room, her nature. A room that, with the next, was like beginning again—did not these people say such things—in this immigrant city, this city in therapy (when it was the nation that needed it). Taking control of one’s life. Growing. Starting over. Making a clean break. Yet if Relationship was Bone, did not the strange people of this city mean "Amputate"? Then there was A Clean Breast. Yet here were he and she not in that way beginning a
gain but in secret plenty where no one knew you. Though their name was not unknown, nor their whereabouts.
The letter from the convict lay half folded against the radiator as if sitting casually like the skeleton of a ghost.
He sat on the rug, eying the letter and digging out a soft earplug of wax (squashing, then filling out again but not like sponge or flesh), pink wax, rather disgustingly soiled by a short hair from his temple sticking into it; dug it out, squeezed it but not in two lest he leave a bit stuck down the burrow against his eardrum, and she couldn’t stop giggling as if she had been holding back, or would cry, which she never never did.
It was nothing he would testify to under oath or torture, this force he had more felt than said (to himself) before he had known she was even in the apartment with him, and now it was less known than a minute ago so maybe it was not just private life in all its power. (Smile.) The inmate’s letter was punctuated with those parentheses. (Smile.)
And then she murmured (because she could say it to him—because it had been said before and so was O.K. or at least code): "With your brains you could make a million in business," murmured less wickedly than before, when she had felt like an artist working on him, her fingertips and then her breath and throat on his heel—"all that you know." To which he still did not know how to give in: "You mean forget exposing the Americans and create our own mineral cartel?"
"Design your own life," she murmured modestly; but living here she and he were often ironic.
"They do have a way of speaking here, don’t they," he said.
"Oh my sweet ..."
"We have that relationship of which they are always speaking."
She smiled touchingly, and he let jealousy shift from his betraying eyes up into some dumb wrinkles in his forehead. It was nothing he wished to identify. He would kiss her foot in a moment. The letter lay near (or, on the rug and up against the lower edge of the radiator, sat near) the two books that had been in his lap. It was nothing he wished to identify, this force he had detected before the second phone call, the one he had let ring, which had been confused with the also regular ringing in his inner ear, if that was what it was—his doctor was the doctor of a famous singer after all.
His wife reached to caress his skull. She blessed him and he foresaw that when she took her hand off she would find again the creamy shinings making faces off his carved pate so maybe she would skip the nothing to be found upon his forehead, his brow. He stared with obedient doting a trifle fraudulent except in the love.
She, who was less a foreigner than he, had been so much to him Through Thick and Thin that he would sometimes subdue all that in endearments of style like calling her "Madam." Been so unbearably much that he thought he should not be accepting sanctuary here like some earlier immigrant. He thought of all the children of the prisoners in the prison that his letter came from, free children of imprisoned parents, brothers, uncles, relations. Also friends of friends. This one of the letter he had not gone to visit; he had visited the other, who would never call himself a political prisoner though he was one of the New Jersey Cubans, except he might call himself a political prisoner in the black way—a good cover for him. Happening to be spoken to by this other inmate in the visiting room, the visitor had responded once, twice, and, to the disapproving amusement of the man he had gone to visit, he exchanged with this other man, whose letter now sat against the radiator, names and addresses. ("You Irish? You don’t sound Irish." ‘The name is originally Scots." "But ..." "No, I am not from Scotland.")
"Have you been hearing things again?" she asked, and her hand came down his sleeve to his wrist.
"Earplugs are disgusting," he said, and she might have laughed again, she had a right to. He turned his unpredictable ear toward her and named the opera playing in the bedroom. Roman soldiers. Priestess mother. Her niñitos smack in the middle of their mother’s official life.
But she had noticed the letter, if not the light in his eye. "Have you been up there again?" "No." "What is this Cuban planning?" "What does one plan in prison?" "I think I have always liked Cubans. Your letter is from the other man."
The inmate said in his letter it was more dangerous in New York City. You wondered what all those children thought about their grownups off in a castle in the wooded hills (where you didn’t address them with the name of the prison but at a post-office drawer—like an unknown box holder’s discrete freedom: Number 2020 skis in with skis for feet like flippered South Pole gulls, terns, birds, not even God knew their name: no, the unknown box holder mysterious Number 2020 flies in, a small cross moving against the slopes of the sky, Cessnas in from the Arctic Circle once a fortnight to check his mail; canters in from the shimmering middle of a multinational mirage upon a camel whose time scheme is different from his; no, swings in along a hundred forest trees from lush safety to see what’s waiting for him in Drawer B drawn all the way out, and found not the grownup inmate—his fingernail clippings, his unmistakable hand, lock or lack of hair, thumbnail sketch—but his kids instead). Do you know where your children are? The man he had really gone to see "behind bars" said he worried about his little boy, and the visitor knew what he meant without his elaborating and so perhaps it is as well for this beautiful, still young woman on the rug to notice the letter from prison because it is so innocuous, and think this is the man my darling lord and master is mainly interested in at the prison. Did the children write the cons letters?— miniature offspring lying in Drawer B with dolls’ stiffness and calm; space savers seen but not heard (clippings or parings to be restored to fingernails after execution before burial): this, this was where his letter from prison had brought him and it was a substitute too close to his own nothing-he-wished-to-identify to be worth following until you got to the source.
"I said have you been hearing things again?" she could speak from her motionless hands. This time he indicated the opera with a slide of his head.
‘‘What pretty music, but what a lurid story," she said.
Druid priestesses being fed, bel canto, to Roman soldiers, you know.
"Well, two to one, my love," she said, "if we are counting."
He told her she seemed sometimes so much less a foreigner because of being part English; but then he didn’t know. It was his hemisphere. She spoke to him from other points in the apartment. He would turn to his window as he did more often now to see what he would probably never see again from this sixth-floor window, a man he recognized—but had actually met—at Cape Kennedy, a journalist—and liked—but then had been told was dangerous— yet told by a man who himself seemed dangerous but was a business contact (a photo-journalist) whom now upon better thought he could not manage to make go away.
And when fear touched home, he identified it as being on behalf of his children, who were not here. And were not children. Or on his side.
Women and Men Page 24
