Cast in Doubt

by Lynne Tillman

  Gwen is from a lower-middle-class black family in Queens, New York. She attended Radcliffe on scholarship, which is where I met her, in Cambridge in the fifties, years after I was graduated from Harvard. Actually she is now close to the age I was when I met her. Gwen is never without something clever to say. It is, as she once said, her best defense, and then in the next breath she went on to dub herself Manhattan’s double entendre. That indeed does suit her, as it begins to define her complex nature. To me she’s the black Dorothy Parker, as she is a great wit, a talented writer of stories and screenplays, does editorial work for a living, and turns out the occasional review or essay when she can rouse herself to it. She drinks and is extremely critical and, even more, is a cynic like Parker and has, like her as well, a penchant for gay men, such as myself, not that she was ever in love with me. I do, did trust her, even though she can be an outrageous gossip, but it’s true to say that, with her, minds do meet. It’s been too long since we last were together. That must be remedied. I’ll write her and invite her here. I’ll offer to pay her way. Yes. I really need to see her.

  I find it easier to arrive at my typewriter if first I plan a simple task, such as writing a long-overdue letter. Even paying a bill sometimes unlocks the door to creativity. It’s odd what helps, because the activity is so odd in itself. Dearest Gwen, I write, and so on, and will you come, and so on, and be my guest, and so on, and then I use some of what I’ve written about the sky and the sea, and ask her to join my sunbathing club, and so on. I’m as excited as a pup. Gwen is not in any way doglike or puplike. She is an original, a rare bird, a tan, lithe creature. The color of coffee ice cream, she has said, not brown sugar, a locution that offended her in part because it derived from a song sung by wimpy English boys, as she put it in a letter. She’s writing a screenplay called Dark Angels, whose title comes from a postcard Gwen found in the south. It shows three young black boys in a pastoral setting. At the bottom of the card, which she once showed me, there is a motto: Dark Angels. She hasn’t yet let me see the script.

  Gwen is canny as a con man, an art historian gifted with the touch of a grifter. Her postgraduate work was in art history. Will Gwen like Helen? Might they not fall in love, for one Greek moment? But Gwen isn’t really drawn to women. I should probably hate their becoming lovers. I should hate it also if she got on with Roger, and so I immediately amend my letter to include a shovelful of dirt aimed his way. I believe Gwen knew Stephen the Hermit; but he’s so rarely in sight these days, I needn’t mention him. And Duncan is back in England, falling in love over and over, I suppose. God, what if she liked South African Wallace, and what if she went to bed with him, just to spite me; but I will not put one more negative comment in this letter, as I want her to visit me. I ought not put her off by portraying a scene filled with lunatics and failures. I give the letter to Yannis to mail immediately, express. It will reach her in no time. I will also telephone her. That will speed her to me.

  The clippings Gwen mails me are like aspects of her, small pieces of her. André Malraux’s book Lazarus sounds interesting. A meditation on death, the review says; I suppose Gwen has read it already. She keeps up with everything, and the subject of death fits her mordant humor, as it does mine. I see that a Dr. Christiaan Barnard has done a twin-heart operation. There’s a CIA file on Eartha Kitt, of all people, because she yelled at LBJ’s wife at a dinner party in 1968. She yelled about our boys’ being sent to be murdered. Good for her. I would have liked to have been there.

  They ought to hire Roger for the CIA, he’d be perfect, a perfect architect for intrigue. He was furious when we lost the war in Vietnam. We didn’t lose it, he bleated, we gave it away! I lorded it over him that our Kissingers ultimately had to bow low to tiny Vietnam. I could just imagine all those beefy military men in their uniforms, with stars on their chests, stunned and helpless, like octopuses lying on the harbor, gasping their last breaths. So many discussions with Roger about the parallels with Great Britain, when it lost its empire, and how he foresaw the end of Western civilization! I answered, if the U.S. is the last outpost of the West, then good riddance to it. I don’t entirely mean that. After all, I am of the West. But what will come next? Sometimes I am glad to be old.

  I believe I am patriotic in my fashion. I certainly wouldn’t dupe my government and the people the way Nixon did. Power to the People indeed. Perhaps now our masculine American men will develop the self-deprecating humor Englishmen display so effortlessly. It charmed me when Duncan used to say he was so hopeless he couldn’t organize lunch. One couldn’t imagine an American man professing to hopelessness, to helplessness. I miss Duncan. I may even seek out the hermit Stephen; he’s somewhere not that far from here, I heard, in the mountains. Perhaps he is in Mátala, living the life of a hippie. I believe the hippies are still there, in those caves. I couldn’t live in a cave. Why on earth would one want to?

  Alone, unencumbered by Yannis’ incredulous or contemptuous gaze, I raise my hand and clench it into a fist, making a Black Power salute, which I would never do in public. It’s odd, these kinds of desires. And the things one does alone in a room that one would never do in company. My arthritis doesn’t allow me to close my hand fully, the index finger won’t flatten, the pinky pokes up, and my hand flops open again. I lie down on the bed, my bones creaking. I’ve had creaking bones all my life. I never had a middle age, I went from twenty to sixty. In a sense, I’m used to being old. I like to imagine I take it in stride, that it is my stride, in fact.

  I had my moments—raving with Gwen around New York and Cambridge years ago—and still do from time to time. But deep inside me lives a prim, elderly man, and sometimes a woman, like my mother or one of my aunts, or a combination of both, who constantly shakes this head of mine from side to side, as if to say, Oh, no, not that, and oh no, you can’t do that, and none of the family ever did, and so on.

  At the time they were popular I couldn’t have imagined a minidress on Nectaria; it was unthinkable. Helen is surely an offshoot of the sexual revolution. I think she may even be a punk. Her free-wheeling attitudes and containers of birth-control pills, these are indeed the accoutrements of a time Alicia wasn’t part of. Another reason, or the reason, why Alicia takes such exception to Helen; she sees Helen as wild, a libertine, which is strange because I’m sure Alicia is seen or was seen in that way by her parents’ generation. I know my parents saw me that way. Libertine or not, Helen isn’t happy.

  She has taken up painting. Doing watercolors, I think. She bought some colors the other day when she went to Iráklion. I don’t know how she got there. It may even have been Roger who drove her. He desperately wants Helen’s approval or at least my disapproval. While he continues to gossip behind her back, he’s courting her, perhaps fascinated as I am, but I doubt it. I am sure Helen and I are soulmates, which I’d never tell her. Roger must think she’s got deep pockets or her daddy does and if he plumbs the well well enough, there’ll be something for him.

  Helen’s head is bent low, at an angle of extreme concentration. Now she scratches her leg. Now she places her hand on her breast and absentmindedly fondles herself, loving herself. She looks up, as if she’s heard something, and leaves the terrace. The curtains are drawn. Is she entertaining one of the sailors? No wonder she is unhappy. The boys are inconsiderate lovers; they leave women unsatisfied and fall asleep after intercourse or jump from the bed, pulling at their flies to close them quickly and flee. She’s not even afraid of disease. She’s grown up with antibiotics. Syphilis means nothing to her. I told her syphilis was first mentioned in a poem in 1530, by Fracastoro. She asked if I chose to remember that or did I remember it without thinking. I talked with her then about the life of the mind and continuity—how ideas and knowledge pass from generation to generation, about the work of intellectuals, who are the keepers of the flame, and that the flame is ideas and art. She asked if I really believed this.

  I’m unable to decipher what she believes. Are these quick spurts of sex or love what she wan
ts? I ventured one time to comment upon her casual attitude toward men and she stared at me for a moment, about to say something rather severe, I thought, but then she said that she didn’t think of herself as I did and sleeping with different guys was fun sometimes, especially when she was bored and especially since she didn’t want to get involved. I suppose this is just now a very American attitude, a young American woman’s attitude. But she is so young. I am certain she will feel different later, although she doesn’t seem to be full of illusions as I was when I was her age. Helen’s young as the country she was born in, and yet she’s old too, without those ideals and illusions. What a strange girl. Maybe one has no middle period, no middle age, just a beginning and an end. Countries age fast these days. So did I, I aged fast. Yet I made youthful errors. Peccati. When the sins lift from one’s shoulders, Dante wrote, one feels lighter, capable of being borne up to Heaven. I don’t expect to go to Heaven. Heaven defies logic, and I am logical. A.J. Ayer, I heard, is so great a logician that when Somerset Maugham lay dying, Maugham called the philosopher to his bedside to have him reassure him that life would definitely end at death, that there was no afterlife. There’s no sign of life behind Helen’s curtains. And I cannot observe her.

  I move away from the window and pick up a Greek newspaper. The failed coup against Makarios in Cyprus continues to backfire and reverberate; its dramatic and devastating effects play havoc with political life here, much like our Watergate, except graver. The coup must have been engineered by the CIA. This I have argued with Roger. It is rumored that the junta intended to invade Turkey, too. Madness, madness.

  I read the newspaper every day. Reading the newspaper is addictive. But do I do more than observe and keep up, in an endless race with time. I am acquainted with the events of the day and try to stay involved, engaged, and attentive to the world. I rue injustice. But sometimes I fear that I merely repeat others’ analyses, that their involvement and knowledge provide me with a semblance of comprehension, about which I am too often uncritical. This is part of my insecurity. Gwen wrote once that I was, in a way, too accepting, that that was a facet of my appeal. It is funny—appeal. Alicia appeals to me, as do Duncan, Yannis, and Gwen, of course—and Helen. She touches me. Of course she is masculine in her independence, androgynous, I suppose, yet quite female. In a disquieting and subtle way, there is something dangerous about her, something in her that I fear and something that I fear for her. I’ve never thought that before.

  My detective Stan Green is not afraid of anything except snakes, which is why he refuses to work in Texas, where the three poisonous snakes of the United States meet, another demonstration of nature’s nefarious design. Green revels in the bar-room brawl. He’s quick with his hands and dances on his feet, like Joe Louis, though he’s not brazen like Muhammad Ali. I still want to call him Cassius Clay. Cassius is a fine Civil War name. But it is also a slave name, and I can see why a black man would want to be rid of it. Certainly the answer to the question, what’s in a name, would fill a book, and does.

  Stan Green is not a bigot but works with cops who are. These are the people he enjoys hitting, as I would, were I not so morbidly afraid of violence and blood. When I was a small child, I accompanied my mother on her visit to the doctor. The doctor allowed me in the room with her when he took her blood. I fainted dead away. I was never interested in experimenting with any drugs that required needles, and this was another reason the poets around the Beat Hotel in Paris disdained me. I first met Wallace there but I’m not sure he remembers. I hope not.

  A letter from an old school chum, who, years ago, started to write me for reasons I cannot assay, lies nearby. He, like Gwen, wishes to keep me abreast, though, in his case, I am not sure why. He has enclosed some clippings, but without their dates. President Ford fell down on his arrival at Salzburg, where he had traveled to see Bruno Kreisky and to hold talks with Anwar Sadat. I’ve never been to Salzburg and have no desire to go. In fact I have almost no desire to travel anywhere. My friend has also sent me a picture of Nelson Rockefeller in a Mickey Mouse cap, with a caption noting that Rockefeller’s bogus commission has cleared the CIA of domestic civilian surveillance. “There was no widespread pattern of illegality.” Does anyone believe this?

  What was it I meant to do? Have Stan Green investigate the murder at the scene of the crime. He must enter the town of Bedlam, where he will view the corpses, study the autopsy report, and, upon arriving at the home of the young alleged murderer, describe in detail the cruel and sadistic manner in which the young murderer stabbed to death his mother and father, after which he dragged their bodies, wrapped in blankets, to the backyard. There the son buried their mutilated corpses—near the grave of the family poodle, Fifi. Unfortunately I can’t make reference to Edith Wharton who, at her summer home, The Mount, had a cemetery for her dogs. Stan Green wouldn’t read Edith Wharton. Perhaps the murderer’s mother would have. Still, it’s improbable that the family buried their dog, complete with a tombstone, in imitation of Edith Wharton. In any case I can’t for the life of me figure a way to work that into the plot.

  From the records of that time, weather reports, and so on—the murder occurred on January 14, 1943—I have learned that it was a stormy night with no moonlight. This permits, indeed encourages, suspense and dread, as I can weave an alarming fabric of stealthy and dark elements against which to dramatize the evening’s sinister activity. I must show Green as he follows the bloodstained carpet and the path the boy took as he walked down the attic stairs to his mother’s bedroom. She may have turned slightly at the sound of him and probably was startled to see her son at home. Before she speaks even one word, a what-are-you-doing-home, son? he brandishes his knife and thrusts it into her back. A pathetic scream here. Then he slits her throat. He stabs her twenty-two times, plunging the knife in her again and again, until she emits no sounds at all. The son may have heard his father’s footsteps. The boy drops to the floor, behind his mother’s reading chair, a rocking chair—with pillows, a good effect always. There is blood on his hands and blood smears on the floral-patterned fabric. The father sees the slumped and bloodied body of his wife. In fear for his life, he runs downstairs to his rolltop desk where the telephone is. The son follows him and in a similar manner, with his father’s back to him, he plunges the knife in, although he does not slit his father’s throat. So much for the outline of this scene.

  I type: Stan Green had a hunch. It was the father the crazy kid was after. Green thought he’d seen it all, but in the morgue, back then, looking at the father’s corpse, he got sick to his stomach. He nearly lost his cookies. But Stan Green didn’t want to think about that now. Green had a job to do.

  I may include an act of sexual mutilation. It might add just the right touch and may be appropriate, although it was not part of the original newspaper report. But they wouldn’t have included that anyway, at that time. We are much more open these days about such horror. As a knowledgeable detective, Green would surely be able to use his psychological acumen to provoke a response from a neurotic young man with a father fixation. Green could invoke through his own person the figure of the despised father. Green is sharp; he has a nose for crime and criminals. I’ve already established his nose as big and bulbous, something like a bloodhound’s. Using cheap psychology, Green could slyly pry a confession loose; it would be easy as pie for Stan Green. But how to do that? Why do I make matters so complicated for myself? Simplify, Horace, simplify!

  My fingers have gone numb. I shake them and hot points of pain pass through each digit as if my hands were an electrical circuit. I take another stab at it. But I’m not in a Stan Green mood at all. That passage, that chapter, will need a great deal of work and fleshing out, I think, to draw the reader’s blood. I feel contemplative, not like a sleuthing man of action. Of course Green is, as I am, given to depression, which my publisher attempts to edit out as unmanly or undetective-like. We fight about this each time, then compromise. That is, I compromise. No doubt, out will go “big, bu
lbous nose,” because it’s humorous.

  I ought really to work on Household Gods. Great-Aunt Martha argued incessantly, just like Gwen. But unlike me or Gwen, she led crusades and carried banners and was in fact one of the representatives at that first women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls. She was a temperance feminist; her husband was an alcoholic. I can’t prove this but it seems to me that either her father drank or her husband did. The fury with which she engaged the battle against drink must have had some personal meaning to her, must not solely have been an abstraction. In some of her letters I can detect such discontent; that is, it seems to me, she is not just fighting the good fight.

  She is a good woman, a very good woman, her goodness is her goodness alone. She lords her goodness over the brood. It is like a flower is her goodness, it buds and blooms, and it is her armor against him and all that is tainted by the material world.

  I have given her a transcendental slant.

  My fight is a different fight, if it is even a fight. I am not intemperate, but certainly not temperate, in Martha’s sense of the word. My fight may not even be a skirmish. Is each life a struggle? Or does one have to be aware of struggle? I struggle with myself, my sense of futility, my desire to do good and to be original in my thinking, my need to find what is new and to hold on to what is good that is old. I’m actually somewhat less in thrall to and interested in my feminist forebears than in the abolitionist side of the family and the slavers.