Cast in Doubt

by Lynne Tillman

  He may, I answer, disconcerted. I’m not sure why this question irks me. Perhaps she thinks I pry Yannis too. I won’t ask, though to a girl who has stripped for money this might not mean very much anyway. I change the subject abruptly, but she is unperturbed. I observe that she appeared to be excited earlier, when I saw her on her terrace. Had something happened? I ask. Helen stops eating. It was weird, she begins, which always signals to me some fresh revelation. She was reading and felt happy. She was happy for no reason. Nothing was really different. Yet she seems to have experienced a sudden rush, a release. Everything might be all right, after all. She knew suddenly, she said, that she could be whatever she wanted, because she could simply make it up. She felt freer. The past didn’t matter really. It was just a story, and she could always change the story. She asks if I have ever felt like that. Before I can respond, she says, with relish, that the only other time she ever was as happy was when she was watching a movie whose title she has forgotten, but it was as if she were a movie with a happy ending. Helen laughs quietly, her hand covering her mouth. I tell her she’s had an epiphany. She laughs even more.

  Now she looks twelve. Unbearably defenseless. Part of her mask has dropped, and she’s stripped bare or stripping. She may reveal her true self to me. I don’t know what else to say to her. I ought to say something else but the expression on her face reminds me of myself at her age. I remember, even sense, my youthful expectation of life’s limitlessness, my naive belief in possibility. I would not have compared my self or my happiness with a movie’s end, but looking at her, I feel the crush of memory. And, as if memory were physical, it forces me lower in my chair. I drink more wine. I feel queasy, aware of an unspeakable emptiness below my heart. I take her hand and say something to the effect that, yes, Helen, everything will indeed be all right. I shut my eyes so that she won’t see that there are tears in them. But she pats my hand understandingly. It is suddenly darker. She is barely visible.

  Impulsively, to pluck us from this dangerous and lugubrious patch, I announce what I meant not to tell her. I tell her almost comically, making light of it, that I visited John in the hospital, with Alicia. I emphasize the accidental nature of the visit, my surprise as to his identity and their connection, and so on. You’re kidding, Helen responds, and then grows pensive. She adds, If you’re not, it’s unbelievable. It stinks.

  Stinks? I hadn’t really expected her not to believe me. I don’t see, I answer, why you’re so angry. It’s simply true. I had no idea, and frankly, dear, I don’t like being told that any of my stories stink. Helen withdraws into herself for a while, but she doesn’t leave the table. I question why I care, of course, why I allow her feelings any importance at all. She’s just a young girl who knows nothing; and surely it is I who invests her with power.

  I study Helen and recognize a child, hurt, alone, anxiously searching, looking at the sea and the wide world, which I know is smaller and more impenetrable than the object of her gaze suggests. Attempting to dismiss her doesn’t work, as I genuinely like her and am attached to her against my better judgment. In a state, I nervously consume another glass of wine, nearly gagging as it goes down. Helen speaks at last and claims that she doesn’t like liars very much, even though she lies sometimes. “I lie. People lie all the time. But you should admit it.” In this moment she reminds me of Gwen.

  I’ve never been able to admit I’ve lied, to anyone. I’d rather die, and, muddled and soft as I have become, I can’t stand her indignant scorn. Oh, Helen, I sputter, I don’t see anything wrong in my being interested in your friends and your life. It is not precisely prying.

  I am appalled to hear myself sound like a father or mother. John is no friend of mine, she insists with annoyance, he wasn’t really even a boyfriend. He’s a worse liar than you. Then she pauses and asks if John is trying to move in on Alicia—to move in on rather than in with, I note. Her delivery is flat; it’s a sophisticated voice, with little inflection. It’s a voice I hadn’t yet heard, from her. I am taken aback. I visualize Helen in the city, urbanely testing her young tongue in tandem with similarly dressed girls, who sit in clubs with boys like John. They are clever and wild, the girls Gwen wrote me about. Helen may indeed have been one. When I was her age, I would have been frightened to death by people, young women, like her. It’s especially her psychological astuteness that unnerves me. She taps her cigarette on the table, and I light it for her. She looks me directly in the eye. I try not to flinch.

  Helen seems to be weakening. After all, I am her only friend here, I and Chrissoula, who can’t really talk to her. But now Helen falls silent again. Her silence may deepen into a resolve not to speak. So I do, after drinking another glass of wine; I make myself vulnerable to her. Unquestionably I want to appease her.

  Ultimately, Helen, I offer, in the end everyone knows everyone. I don’t know why. It must have to do with age, with how the world grows small conceptually as we grow older. We are connected whether we want to be or not. We are all connected. I toss this out, quite off the cuff, but the reasoning will serve, I hope. Then I follow with the connected notion, to my mind, that physicists deem an equation elegant when it’s executed particularly well, when it is beautiful, and that makes science close to art. Do you mean, Horace, she interjects, again in that sophisticated voice, do you mean, to you, John and I make an elegant equation?

  It is not like Helen to draw paranoid conclusions. I don’t know what you mean, Helen, I answer. I am not Machiavelli. Helen agrees that I am not but goes on to remind me that I am a writer. She’s known a couple, and even had one in the family, but no one really famous. My mind races through some possibilities, but her last name—Nash—only brings me to Ogden, and I’m sure he’s not in her family. Helen may be traveling under an assumed name, carefully hiding the identity of a famous father or uncle, or grandfather. I don’t know why I need to, again I’m being impetuous, but I ask, Do I remind you of your father, Helen? She stares at me quizzically and then answers that I do, but only when I ask questions like that. He’s a shrink, she says. Helen swallows her retsina in one gulp. A shrink, I repeat after her. A horrible word, I think. A shrink, I say again. Helen adds, Children of shrinks are really fucked up. And, in the definitive way she has said this, it is as if she were bringing to a conclusion my own queries and thoughts.

  I nod in agreement. It’s as if we are and are not discussing her. She has already told me that she is, as she puts it, fucked up, but now I think she’s being ironic, at least in this very moment. This is getting heavy, she says, with a half-smile. Yes, I know, Helen, we are not supposed to get heavy with each other. She laughs again—Helen often does when I use her argot.

  It dawns on me that she has told me next to nothing about John and her, only that John is a liar, as am I. She is most definitely artful, and I am still curious. John was a sort of boyfriend. They are not friends. I feel more sadness welling inside me. Children leave each other without a second thought. I was; I did. All those wonderful men, those friends, lovers, and I’ll never see them again. Each face is a drop of memory that is diluted by time and dissolves; nothing rests or stays still long enough to form into a clear image. They’ve drifted away, or I did. Helen doesn’t realize how precious all those moments are, and John—how beautiful he is, with those violet eyes and soft lips. I’d hold him to me forever were he mine. I’d love to make love with John. I gaze at Helen vacantly. Perhaps. With her, too. The thought scandalizes me. Am I blanching? Would this idea horrify her? Probably not. I have learned over the years that only one’s own thoughts can ever genuinely shock one.

  I swivel in my chair, pull myself up and talk to Helen pompously, as if giving a lecture. I suppose I feel the need to appear sensible and knowing, because I am wondering at myself, questioning whether my friendship with her has somehow to do with a kind of frustrated heterosexuality, though I think it hasn’t in this case. I am not attracted to her. I do accept Freud’s notion of an original bisexuality. Certainly in dreams I’ve desired men and wo
men, even simultaneously, yet in life I rarely ever find a woman sexually attractive, sexually desirable.

  I explain to Helen that art makes virtue out of necessity—the artist must do what he does; he can see no way other than the way he sees. That is vision. Science, on the other hand, makes necessity itself a virtue—that is, it says that nature is beautiful, even though it is cruel. Niels Bohr once told his colleagues, I heard, that the task of physics was “not to find out how nature is, but what we can say about nature.” This is much like writing, I go on. Physicists designate equations elegant when they serve many functions, which is part of that beauty. That is what elegance is. I’m defending my earlier assertion, and some other position, my position vis-à-vis hers, but I’m not sure what hers is, except one of disbelief. And she must never guess that I have had, even for the most minute second, a nanosecond, the slightest trace of desire for her. I would never act on it. Am I an old fool like Lear? “O heavens, if you do love old men…”

  Drunk, teetering on the maudlin, I pursue an ambiguous line, but I cannot stop myself. I cannot go home now. I know I should. The white wine is gone, much of it swirling around my brain. Helen is most certainly by my side. I am close to her, but what does that mean? Am I really close to anyone? It must be the alcohol that has produced this phantasm—that I could bed her, could desire her. I feel not a trace of lust for her. It is all a product of my imagination, mental activity—an inventive kind of willfulness, in a sense.

  I focus as best I can. She’s probably not concerned yet with elegance, and may never be. It’s odd how quickly one becomes or feels drunk. It’s true—to me, her father’s being a psychiatrist serves a function; Roger over there with Adonis serves another; even Alicia, who is not here, annoying, marvelous Alicia, serves a function—she appears at the wrong times, as she did in the hospital. But what function do I serve? Am I content with thinking of myself as a storyteller? Isn’t that too easy?

  Wallace, who has just arrived—this I observe with a start—he serves no function whatsoever. He is inelegant. A clod. No, a succubus. The Dutchwoman is with him, propping him up, and with them an aged stooped creature whose face is covered by a beard. I squint and squint. It’s Stephen the Hermit. This is quite extraordinary, I exclaim to Helen, that man hasn’t been out in years—not in company. He was once exquisitely beautiful, so beautiful. A great beauty. How did they manage to capture him?

  Helen turns to look at him and giggles, as she should. It’s as if I were describing Tarzan. Tarzan was English, wasn’t he? Stephen is English, a scion of colonialists; I would bet on that, were I a gambling man like Rhett Butler. She probably hasn’t read Gone with the Wind. She must have seen the movie. I am effervescent, giddy, and at the sight of Stephen, light-headed if not light-hearted. Words almost dance off one’s tongue when one’s mind is addled by drink.

  They’re coming our way. It’s been ages since I’ve seen Stephen. Roger is coming over too. It’s a feast. I feel festive, ebullient. More drink. I call out, Wine for everyone, Christos.

  Stephen sits down beside Helen. It is hard to believe that he was once a child movie star. His mother was Hungarian, I believe, his father terribly English and rich, but for some reason or other, Stephen was raised primarily in Rome. There a director cast him in a role and he quickly became a child actor, whose adorable looks were beloved by a nation that worships its bambini. The early attention did little good for Stephen, as he grew up surrounded either by doting nannies, a narcissistic mother, or film crews paid to pander to him. And what does a child know, father to the man.

  My word, Stephen now—a sight to behold, a sorry sight. I can’t quite believe my eyes. How low a man can sink. Roger and Wallace are arguing about politics, so I needn’t join in. I can observe the scene.

  Helen is rapt. Weird Stephen, in good form, is talking to her in a respectable way. He flails his arms every now and again, but is in most ways well behaved. English eccentrics are wonderfully odd. Even though he is completely mad, he still retains some of the manners of a gentleman. I hear bits of his monologue; it follows in a seemingly logical order. Perhaps he does make sense much of the time, but as I never see him, how would I know. He makes sense in the forest, with no one to hear him out, and we all judge him so harshly. I am ashamed of myself and turn to face Helen and him. They are blurry shapes. They are good people, I know this in my heart.

  I listen wholeheartedly to Stephen, moving my chair closer to his to catch his every word. He has no money, as he has been cut off by his family, almost entirely; naturally they disapprove of the way he lives. He pushes his hair back—long, unruly hair—which exposes more of his face, though there’s nothing to be done with his beard. Helen takes my hand, she must know I’m drifting in and out of this world, and squeezes it every once in a while. Sweet Helen. Sad Stephen. The authorities cut off his electricity some months ago, and he lives in a house without light except from that of candles which he’s set about his place in tin cans. He’ll die by fire. I know it. I feel it. The house will go up in a second, and he will be destroyed, burned to death. No, asphyxiated. It seems inevitable.

  An impish smile plays on Stephen’s lips. He is exuberant. He declares to Helen, as if exposing a great truth, his great truth, that he has discovered electricity, how important it is, how electricity is magic. He ecstatically enthuses on the power of Light and God, that electricity running through thin wires and cables is the lifeblood of our society. He’d never realized before the way that God was a part of everything, but seeing dots of electric light in houses around the world was proof of God’s power. His mother and father had tried to control him through the telephone, but that was not the fault of God or electricity. His daily life was once absorbed in switching lights on and off, and he rues the day he complained of that activity as simple repetition when in fact it was central to his life and all life. Now, without this routine, it’s as if he were doing penance. Lighting candles makes him wish he were Catholic but still he misses the radio, the voices that spoke to him and the world. The BBC, the BBC World Service, he can’t live without it. He bellows: I love electricity. I love electricity.

  Roger, Wallace and the Dutchwoman laugh, first in horror, and then raucously, in morbid delight. Stephen looks about only to discover them laughing at him, staring at him, as at a comedian or worse. He grabs his book bag and shuffles off from the restaurant, walking in long angry strides around the harbor until he is well out of sight. The mirth dies a self-conscious death. Wallace explains that he wooed Stephen out of his ramshackle debacle of a house with the promise of a good dinner. Roger, ever the one to know more than anyone else, Roger insists that Stephen cribbed all of that from Nijinsky, and that he’s not mad at all. Just playing possum. Like Pound? Wallace goes on again. Roger notes sarcastically that even madness is unoriginal. I simply won’t hear any more of this, I think.

  Wallace says that Stephen eats scraps these days. Roger harrumphs caustically. Poor Stephen, I declaim, and, in Roger’s direction, ask, have you no pity? I reach for my glass but can barely lift the drink to my mouth. And to think that, by comparison with Stephen, Wallace now seems sane. Roger bothers to respond only with, You’re drunk, Horace. Then he turns his chair around so that his back is to me. But where is Helen? She has disappeared. Has she run after our Nijinsky, our Stephen?

  Yannis as usual has managed to appear from nowhere, like one of the Furies. He is begrudgingly at my side, but where has everyone else gone. Have I been talking aloud again or thinking to myself? Where is Helen? Yannis grabs my hand and pulls me out of the chair. He walks ahead of me, leaving me to putter along after him. A great rage wells in me. I want to strike him, to hurt him. I mutter something. He looks at me as a wounded animal might, but what have I done? I am infuriated by his reproach. I throw down some money, I throw it down on the ground in front of him. He turns again. There is on his face an expression of disgust so great that I must avert my gaze. Surely he cannot hate me that much. This is a dream, a poisoned vision.


  Chapter 8

  A yacht named Viridiana docked in the harbor the other day, a sleek white sailing vessel off of which my friend Gwen alighted, sleepily. She met the owner in Iráklion and took up his offer to sail here with him—a French-Greek millionaire—and his wife, who’s just French, and assorted guests. Gwen tells me the vessel sleeps twelve, all in one bed, and I can’t decide whether or not she is joking. She remarks that I’ve been away from the States too long if I don’t know.

  Gwen is in fine shape, thin and energetic, yet she somehow exudes, at the same time, a soigné world-weariness. while here, she announces, she will work only on her tan, and me. Then she laughs. Gwen hugs me, not too tightly, and mentions being beat but not a Beat, not ever, and later, something about missing the beat or the boat. I’m not sure. She talks very fast, she always, has. I’d almost forgotten that.

  It’s a tonic to see her, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, running her tongue over her lips, patting her knee impatiently. Lulu—she calls me Lulu—you’re looking well for a beaten man. She is capable of using one word or metaphor all day long, in as many different ways as one could. Gwen views Yannis through her jaded eyes, and it is as if I can see him through them. I know she is suspicious of him and our arrangement, as she is naturally suspicious about everything, and certainly exaggeratedly so about affairs of the heart. Gwen has often remarked she has no heart for the heart, that hers just ticked over and died, stopped beating ages ago, that she goes through the motions. Her heart’s wound up, ready to spring, like a dog on a bone, but really it’s only the motions, the emotions. Statements of this kind often issue from her, but in fact she continues to fall in love over and over again, even if heartlessly. She has carried on an affair with a friend’s husband for years. I’ve nearly given up men, she confesses. But I’ll never quit smoking.