Cast in Doubt

by Lynne Tillman

  She pours us tea, while asking the usual questions. How’s the work going? She loves my title, Household Gods, for reasons already given. But I’m sure she’d be disappointed or confused by the project were she to read it. No one ever has. The crime books I write go out under another name, and no one here reads them, I’m fairly certain. Alicia and Roger don’t consider it to be real writing, which bothers me but not very much since I too depreciate it. I am more than ambivalent about what I produce under the name Norman East. Now I’m not even sure why I chose that name. It may have had something to do with East Lynne or summers at Northeast Harbor, in Maine. In truth, I’ve forgotten.

  Alicia is all in white—white Indian shirt, white duck trousers, which billow about her, and white espadrilles. There’s a white cotton scarf around her throat and probably she is hiding her neck, which may be crepey, showing more years than her face, which is remarkable for its taut skin. But the scarf is tied loosely so that she may be wearing it solely for decoration, not to disguise her age. Alicia doesn’t strike one as a woman who would hide anything in an obvious way, simply not to be a cliché, simply not to appear bourgeois, not to seem to care about what ideally oughtn’t be a concern to an intelligent, rational person. But I always think it is the irrational that tells us much more than the rational; and I am eager to have her get to the point of our meeting. She does so more quickly than is usual.

  “Don’t you think it is terrible what young Helen did to poor John?” My first impulse is to say, Who is John? But then I vaguely recall having seen in the distance a lanky, long-haired, nondescript guy—I can’t think of him as a man—wandering in town about the time Helen arrived; then I saw him no more. Or did I? Dear, what did she do to him? I ask. I really have no idea.

  Alicia won’t believe this as I have intentionally laid into my voice a qualified archness, and so she will believe that I know what I don’t. I hate not knowing what everyone else knows. She continues and divulges, more or less in this fashion, that John followed Helen here after she refused to marry him. Helen led him on. She allowed him to follow her here and now she refuses even to see him. She abandoned him and the poor boy has tried to kill himself. Ah, I retort, you mean that boy. Alicia, he’s not a child, after all, and if she doesn’t love him…

  I’m playing for time. Alicia goes on: John is in the hospital and even now Helen refuses to go to him. And he nearly died. Helen was horrible to him. It’s bad enough that she didn’t want his child and had an abortion when he didn’t want her to.

  At this revelation I open my eyes very wide, surely they are popping out. Alicia, dear, are you really in a position to blame a young girl just setting out in life for not wanting to be hampered with a child from a man, a boy, who’s wet behind the ears, one she doesn’t love? Alicia says nothing and looks toward the harbor. And giving up a child for adoption is better? I continue.

  Now Alicia’s eyes widen and perhaps it will be this very moment when she can no longer contain within her that horrible secret—the abandoned child, the reckless life she led—but no, she just closes her eyes, takes a breath, during which time she collects herself so as to be able to dissemble, and says, I wouldn’t know. I suppose I don’t really approve of abortion. Then I say something to the effect that it is a good thing she is living here rather than in the States because she would surely be out of touch with the women who have recently won the battle for reproductive rights. I feel foolish putting it that way, as if I were making a speech. Perhaps my feminist ancestors are speaking through me, though probably they wouldn’t have approved of abortion, either. Come to think of it, in the first half of the nineteenth century it was not illegal. Still it is strange to argue what I assume to be the woman’s side, with a woman. I would not call myself a feminist, as I am uncomfortable with almost any label, and also, as I am a man, and rather uncomfortable generally with professing to understand completely the woman’s point of view, I hesitate to make the assertion. Yet I don’t really believe my being a man ought to prevent me from supporting or voicing support for the cause.

  Alicia and I agree to disagree with some regularity—she maintains eclectic and inconsistent positions and has erratic views, some more obsolete than my own, some more advanced. In this case, her position demonstrates her stubbornness and a sort of prissy old-fashionedness that may be evidence, or the cause, of her enduring secretiveness. Actually I don’t believe Alicia fully subscribes to what she is saying. I’m sure she’s had abortions, as most free-thinking women who have sex lives usually have had. She is being irrational. Perhaps this is serious.

  John visited me days before he—Alicia pauses—before he slit his throat. Slit his throat, I repeat after her, how ghastly. I love the word ghastly. Now I am thinking, there may be more to John, whoever he is, than I imagined. He is a sweet, sweet young man, she goes on, and I can’t see why he clings so to Helen.

  Alicia is calling on me, she has summoned me to defend Helen, about whom I know not enough, not that much at all. Helen is brilliant, I respond quickly. She is honest and good-natured. She is independent, a different kind of young woman, Alicia, very different. Rising to the occasion, I continue rhapsodically: Helen is to me like new poetry, a kind of writing I don’t quite fathom; her rhythm and style will be discerned in time. I say this with a flourish and then sip some tea.

  Alicia doesn’t know what to do with my exaggerated view, my way of describing Helen, and neither do I. It just came to me in a flash, but I think it’s true, or rather, I am prepared to defend its truth. Especially if Helen is my tabula rasa. But then that means I am writing her, and I am not, since I couldn’t possibly make her up. I do try in my modest way to make it new, as Pound exhorted. It is also important to be able to recognize what is new, as I do in Helen. I attempt, in my real work, to follow that adage. On the surface, and to the world, the world of appearances, I seem not terribly underground in my manner and thinking. Burroughs, for example, is not to my taste. I live my life and exist, in a certain sense, underground, but even that is underground. I am guarded. I don’t flaunt anything, except when I’m drunk. There’s nothing novel about that. Maybe bohemian or vulgar but not new.

  Alicia asks me what I’m smiling about. I tell her, as winningly as I can, that I’d once fantasized that Helen was her daughter, that it seemed to me they should like one another. Why don’t you? I ask her. What happened when she came here for tea? Nothing, Alicia answers, nothing at all. Then, with some hesitation, as if biting back more damaging words, Alicia complains that Helen sleeps with too many men and reveals that she, Alicia, can’t bear it, that it upsets her. I feel humiliated for her, she admits, because Helen hasn’t the sense to feel shame. The way she walks, Alicia adds.

  Alicia pauses and pours us more tea. That doesn’t, I say finally and primly, sound like nothing. Perhaps Helen is guileless, I expand, rather than shameless. But why then have you offered her piano lessons? I ask. Alicia explains that it is because she is older than Helen and ought to set an example, especially as she hasn’t had children, nor did she ever want them. I suppose I feel guilty, Alicia offers with reluctance. Ah, guilt, I repeat, I am no stranger to that. I smile at her fondly. I do wonder with whom she’s involved now, if she is. She’s more secretive than I, surely.

  Alicia walks down the hill with me. She intends to visit John in the hospital. Just before we left her house, she applied a peachy lipstick to her full lips and now she looks rather peachy herself, as if she were a Renoir still life of that fruit. There’s some excitement in her gait. She may be in love with John. Why not? I like young men too. Perhaps, she says to me as we go our separate ways—quaint but true—perhaps I am being harsh about Helen. But suicide, Horace, and John’s a darling, very special. We cluck each other on the cheeks like aging hens.

  Alicia disappears in white down the dusty road. I am both full and weightless. It’s mad but I enjoy the melodrama enormously and suddenly feel that I am privy to Helen’s life, the one she hides from me. Perhaps she doesn’t hide it.
Simply doesn’t mention it. After all, that was the vow I took with her—not to ask, not to pry, to be free of all that.

  The hotel is divided, cast equally in sun and shade, appropriately enough, I reflect. Nectaria greets me—Yá sou, Horace—and I greet her and take the mail.

  Where is Yannis? There Helen is, on her sun deck—she says Greece is like southern California. I’ve never been. Her head is down; she is reading a book, and just now she glances behind her, and I see a form in the doorway to the terrace, a male form. It looks like Yannis from here, but that’s mad. Besides, the figure is taller, more like John, though that too is mad as John is in the hospital. When Yannis appears here moments later, I am assured that I am crazy, driven by paranoia, the fate of homosexuals, wrote Freud, driven to bizarre conjurings and hallucinations, to flee the face of the true loved one. Alicia could be right about Helen, of course; it is within the realm of possibility. Helen might be cruel, sadistic in the extreme. Amoral. But it is not probable. I am not paranoid about her. In any case I don’t subscribe to Freud’s theory about paranoia. Doubt is doubt, as a cigar is just a good smoke. Helen waves to me suddenly; I’d forgotten I was staring in her direction. She draws circles around her eyes with her fingers. A movie tonight? Why not.

  Why not? Because I ought to be working, getting on with the crime novel. A simple story: a rich boy murders his mother and father. It is based on a case that occurred not far from where I grew up. I knew boys like him. I might have been a boy like him, if we’d been even richer and I’d been more aggressive, even more perverse than I am. The rich boy evades the law—he has an alibi—until the canny, sarcastic detective, Stan Green, discovers evidence that the boy thought he’d destroyed. But he hadn’t, otherwise there’d be no story for me to tell.

  Much of it is written, and some parts I am rewriting, but lately I am filled with such ennui, I wonder why go on, why bother—and my novel, Household Gods, awaits, petulantly, in a special box, one I’ve had since college, with a drawing of a rat in the style of Michelangelo on its cover. A cloud shoots across the sun and covers it; the sky darkens and with it my mood. Just like that, just as if I were a Manichaean or some such dualist. Why does one have to do anything, especially if one is, as I am, relatively well off, especially here. Might I not just while away my short time on this mundane stage rather than engage in the drama of creation? Blow it out your asshole! Roger’s crude phrase echoes heartlessly. I laugh aloud anyway. Yannis glances at me quizzically. Roger’s right occasionally, right on the money, as they say, even if he doesn’t have any money, another one of those things that makes our friendship tense.

  It’s 5:30 P.M., and where has time gone; the day is gone. I must have been with Alicia for over an hour and have been sitting here for an hour or more, staring into space and toward the harbor and then gazing inward, inward staring, navel gazing, my father called it. There is a word for that, Greek, of course, which has come into English: omphaloskepsis, or meditating while staring at one’s navel. Marvelous, isn’t it. I love words. I shuffle across the floor, slap after-shave on my puffy face, ask Yannis whether he wants to join us, and leave without him, running, not exactly, to the spot where Helen and I always meet.

  She is punctual, which I find disarming in a young person. She is even waiting for me, sitting on the curb and reading a book. As I approach she closes it and pats it, as if saying good-bye or, more likely, adieu. She takes my arm and without a word, except Hello, we walk toward the outdoor cinema to see an old Clint Eastwood movie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—it’s been here many times before, but it’s always such a pleasure. I’m very glad the Italians took up the Western when we’d let it drop, which was as it should be, given the history it covered over or distorted. But still, and I hate to admit it, I love those early Westerns, with their picturing of the bold and brave crossing the old frontier. I can feel my breath nearly stop when all the wagons line up next to each other, or behind each other, ready for the shout—Westward Ho!—that starts the dangerous journey. And I know all of this is wrong to feel-there is such juvenile pride in these feelings—and the West couldn’t possibly have looked the way it did in the movies; and Turner’s frontier thesis was incorrect anyway. But for a movie, it’s breathtaking—the screen filled with women in bonnets and men in rawhide. I suppose rawhide gives off a horrible odor. The Italians don’t go in much for wagons in circles. But those close-ups! Clint Eastwood is not my type at all, though I like his squinting in the sun and chewing on a stogie. The lines at the corners of his eyes are deep as burrows in the ground and I think of Alicia and the thin, scratchy lines about her eyes, her dark, penetrating eyes.

  Helen’s knees are clasped to her chest; she’s like a human ball, curled up into herself. Of course mental patients do that too, and rock back and forth. Perhaps her uterus hurts her. Oh hush, Horace, I say to myself. Shut up. The movie’s so exaggerated, the actors, their gestures and expressions, the divide between the good and the bad, the music so grand and wonderful, that after a while I do forget the lines around Alicia’s eyes and my questions about Helen and John. It’s a long movie, and time will stretch and stretch here. I feel happy. I take Helen’s hand and squeeze it. She looks at me furtively; I realize she’s crying. Tears are most definitely in her eyes, but could they be there for any of the characters on the screen? It seems unlikely. I hand her my handkerchief and she takes it with a small laugh, so she must be all right. Nevertheless she does wipe her eyes and, I might add, blow her nose. It’s possible she’s allergic to the weeds here, to something in the air.

  The Greeks are swinging their worry beads full force now. I tried them when I was first here but discovered that I am in no way the sort to be able to go native. I felt completely ridiculous. Helen is not the type, either, which relieves me.

  As we walk out of the theater, several men make quite a show of watching her bottom—her ass—and I pretend not to notice them. But Helen turns on her heel and in Greek tells them to fuck off. They are as astonished as I am. My Smitty, my Helen, is full of surprises. She has yet to disappoint me in any important way and if she’s now being crude, it is her right, for, I ask myself, why should she let those men devour her with their greedy eyes and make rude comments? Yet the speed and harshness of her attack is a shock. Helen takes my arm and we walk back to the harbor.

  These are the only Westerns she likes, she tells me, she can’t sit through the others; they’re too straight. Instantly I feel a twinge of sadness, even futility, at this blatant expression of the gap between us; the sadness settles just below my breastbone or in my solar plexus where anguish resides, I think. Certainly I can’t adequately explain to her my nostalgia for the older American ones, mendacious as they are. She’d be mystified and out of sympathy with me, though I’m sure she’d listen attentively and without malice. Helen doesn’t make fun of me. Were I to express myself, she’d respect my opinion and be very interested, intrigued at how differently I thought from her. Still, I’m embarrassed, as if mentally enfeebled, hobbled for a moment by age; I am determined not to let that show. Jovially, I invite her to dinner. But no, she won’t join me. And no, I can’t find the words to ask her about John, and besides I’m not supposed to. She expects she will encounter the Gypsy and intends to speak to her soon, maybe tomorrow. But will she visit John, I wonder, but I don’t dare ask. Helen says she may travel, take a short trip, for a few days perhaps. Each of us—Alicia, Roger, Helen—comes and goes. We often do not see each other for days; but we do not monitor each other’s movements. There is a way in which time is not of the essence here. It is a luxury each of us cherishes.

  Chapter 4

  I might visit John. I just might. Later, that came into my mind—rather than having to ask Helen anything. She might not like my doing it, but I’m free, as is she. I could pay him a call in the hospital—do a good deed, be a good Samaritan. Tell him Alicia said he needed company. She didn’t say he didn’t. Alicia never mentioned the idea of his needing company at all. John could be entirely
harmless, a blessed event, or a malevolent soul, and it would be perfectly within reason for me to want to see if what Alicia thinks of him is true or has any relation to reality. Even a trace. Since Helen is my good friend.

  The water dashes against the harbor, excited by something stirring beneath it. A beast, a hideous octopus is moving down below, a war is being waged between monsters of the deep, that kind of thing. I have been working steadily for some hours. Helen is not on her terrace.

  The restaurant beckons, and I take my usual table. The wine is cold and tingles in my gullet and on my tongue. Alicia is not here again, which is good, as I might feel compelled to reveal something I oughtn’t, but that awful Wallace is. Is he out of jail so soon: Do I have to talk with him? He’s not really one of our crowd, such as it is, but an interloper on the scene, a madman, different from Stephen, whom I haven’t seen in months. Perhaps Wallace will tell me again his idea for irrigating the Sahara—planting a gigantic rubber tube in a fertile source, from which it will suck water, carry it miles and miles, then expel it into the parched desert. He talks about his invention with such unwarranted excitement he means it to be taken seriously.