Cast in Doubt

by Lynne Tillman

  Ultimately—and I had determined never to bring it up—I expressed my disappointment in reading Helen’s diary; I said I had not found what I was looking for. At some point in the years since I’d seen Gwen, I had been startled to recall the Gypsy’s premonitory dictum, or curse: You only look for the right things. I now related to Gwen the specifics of the Gypsy’s reading of my palm. Gwen dismissed it, actually she went “Pooh-pooh, Lulu.” with much droll humor, her conclusion was that it was just like me to suffer from a fate neurosis when that particular neurosis had largely been discredited in psychoanalytic circles. Even your psyche’s out of date, she laughed. I laughed along with her.

  Almost without thinking I returned to Helen and found these words issuing from myself: Isn’t it strange that Helen never mentioned me in her diary? Isn’t that very peculiar? There was a deliberate and mischievous air to Gwen that night. With a grin that was both insouciant and solemn, she answered, “I know what you were looking for, Lulu.” “What?” I asked sharply. “Your name.”

  I was immediately and intensely annoyed. If that is true, I went on excitedly and with exasperation, then everything I thought about Helen was about me, and if that is so, it is the most typical kind of story—I was looking for myself—the most trite. How tiresome, how conventional. I excoriated myself over and again, on and on. I insisted that we drink to my stupidity. For when I believed myself to be most special, most inventive, most filled with imagination, experiencing life anew, and behaving most uncharacteristically, I was perhaps more than ever like everyone else and, what is more, most like myself, a self of which I was unaware. With sly glee, Gwen retorted: Quel unique.

  To myself I said that I would rather believe I was under some kind of spell, an enchantment. My experience of Helen was, after all, mine. Yet experience itself—and this I had never thought before—is not pure and indifferent. I did not truly understand the Gypsies, nor did I understand Helen, I suppose, nor, more difficult to admit, even Gwen. Who was I to judge my own, let alone another’s, experience? I thought this rather idiotically, for who else would want to stand in my shoes to judge my experience but me? Still, and after all, along with, part and parcel of, having an experience, one has many other things—the circumstances of one’s birth, one’s class, sex, race and so forth. Was I a Dickens? Could I see outside myself? Am I myself?

  I gazed at Gwen’s wry face. To her I asserted: one can never fully know oneself, and this is, perhaps, and in one sense of the word only, a fate one can never escape. Gwen followed with the idea that the only thing about someone else you can always be right about is that you’re wrong. About yourself, too, I responded, returning to my predicament with a false merriment.

  Having fortified myself with food and drink, I inquired of Gwen what her paranoid letter had meant. She asked which letter. The last letter, I answered. She groaned, “Oh, that pistol”—for epistle. “I had had it. Everyone was thinking and behaving so stupidly and no one was thrilling me, there were no thrills, no frills. I want to be thrilled to death, Lulu. I had had it. I was frazzled, not dazzled, by life. I was bored, and you know I despise being bored.”

  As if I didn’t hear her, I pronounced gravely: Death is of course the one fate no one can escape. I reminded Gwen of our talk at the restaurant on the harbor that eerie night and how she had seemed to indicate that she was preparing to meet her Maker. I told her that for all this time I had worried that we may have invoked the fates, that very night. “Lulu, you’ll make me die laughing” is how she responded. She was not dying, but it was the type of thing, the kind of tragic end that often occurs and that, I hesitate to mention, I was looking for.

  Nevertheless, for whatever reason I had come, Gwen was very happy I was there. “You’re here, Lulu, and I’m not even ready to give up the ghost. Do black people,” she teased, “have white or black ghosts?” Then, more seriously, she said that she might leave New York, the States, and “give up the ghost of the music man—Lulu, you know the one.”

  What were or are the disasters you were alluding to? I asked. She enumerated several difficulties, big drags, but none had to do with drug dealers or the Mafia or cancer or whatever. Then Gwen paused. I could tell she was about to tell me a story. I ordered another bottle and poured the wine into her glass and mine.

  Gwen had visited her family for the first time in years. When she was in college, she had detested going home for holidays and walking into their apartment. But finally, recently, she had gone home again. She carried on in this uncharacteristic vein and related a story from her past, which I had never heard, though I knew her then, or was just about to meet her. She was a sophomore in college—on scholarship, she reminded me—invited for a weekend at her best friend’s house, a white girl from an old family, wealthy, of course. Everyone was wealthy. Gwen entered the friend’s home, whose door was opened by a black maid. We were Negro then, Gwen said, unsmiling. The maid was in uniform; Gwen didn’t know who was more surprised, mortified, she or the maid. The household was content, lulled, Gwen thought, by years of privilege and whiteness and money into a sleepy and unthinking acceptance of the good life. Gwen brushed past the maid, barely looking, barely able to look at her. That moment was indelible to her. She had never mentioned it to anyone. Then Gwen said, “After all these years, I can still remember it.”

  I was at a loss. What is it about that sentence, “After all these years I can still remember…” that can always bring me to tears. Whenever I hear it or come upon it, even in a newspaper article, I weep copiously. I didn’t want to embarrass Gwen. Every one of us who has years more to live, if we do—and every one of us ought to be permitted three score and ten at the very least—every one of us will have a chance to look back and remember that and not that, this and not that…To recover, I muttered words, sentences, of this ilk to her.

  Not only was this the first time in a long while, or ever, that Gwen had deliberately mentioned her family to me, it was the first time she had articulated so explicitly and plainly something of this nature, to me. With a start I realized again that Gwen was the one and only black person I was friends with and who was friends with me. That she had made such statements, with such emotion, about her history indicated a change in her, I believed, one that must have been painful to achieve, and perhaps indicated a change in me. A change in the times, too, I supposed. It was and is impossible to tell to what extent these things merged one into the other. This is the moment when, I believe, Gwen characterized us as the shrimp boats of history.

  I was not certain what I should say. Gwen had not spoken in anger. She had not spoken to point a finger at me. I understood that much, I thought.

  For a while we drank in silence, both of us musing and mulling over the many topics we had discussed. The restaurant had emptied and we were its last customers. We were closing the joint, as Gwen would put it. This was not at all unusual for us to do. In fact, over the years I have taken some pride in having helped toward that end many times. Gwen and I had tucked away several bottles of wine; I knew my morning would be ragged. But I didn’t care. I was content.

  Suddenly Gwen startled me out of my reverie. She was laughing aloud, to herself. What’s so amusing? I asked. She could not yet speak, but she had stopped laughing, as abruptly as she had begun. She seemed to be laughing inwardly. “Lulu, Lulu,” Gwen managed to whisper. “What is it?” I urged. “How do I know what she thought?” “Who, dear?” “Or if she was mortified?” “Who, dear?” I asked again. “The maid, my friend’s maid,” Gwen answered. “Oh, yes,” I said, “I see.” But I wasn’t quite sure that I did, then.

  Another surprise, though of a different order, was Gwen’s announcement that she might leave New York, even the States. I complained that she had no right, having teased me mercilessly about being an expatriate. Gwen took my hand and said that she would run away to Altoona, Pennsylvania, or become a Buddhist in Colorado, just get off the Great White Way. Broadway anyway. I urged her to move to Crete.

  Gwen couldn’t bear it
that Reagan had been elected President. I reported that Roger was over the moon about it. Not that Gwen had especially approved of the peanut farmer. She had been mildly puzzled, even somewhat disarmed, when Carter had spoken to the nation on TV, and, as she put it, had so hokily beamed himself to the American people to report on their malaise. “In French, Horace, he didn’t mean mayonnaise.” I repeated my hope that she’d move to Crete and live near me. She said she’d consider it. She has not yet decided. “You’re quaint, Lulu,” she said then. “Je t’adore.”

  Later that night, spurred on by the dialogue with Gwen, it dawned on me—dawn it was: a fulgent light streaked across the sky simultaneous with this idea, this is absolutely true!—that what Horace had written, which I, as his namesake, often quoted, was correct. That I may have figuratively lived it—even literalized it—was perhaps, I decided, not such a terrible matter. It depended upon how one thought about such things. “With the change of names, the story is told about you.” A more modern translation of the Latin goes: “Change the name and you are the subject of the story.” Undoubtedly I had absorbed Horace’s words and allowed them to penetrate, to suffuse my mind and body, to subsume and consume me. I enjoyed that interpretation better than most of the others I dallied with. The break in my thinking, which I experienced and thought had occurred when I acknowledged, for one thing, that I was not always in control of the story, as I had imagined, probably flowed from this literary, this metaphorical, if not metaphysical, transformation. (At another dinner Gwen kidded me mercilessly about Roman, once I had surrendered that tale to her. Roman’s nonappearance was all she needed for one of her transformations. She galloped on about Roman, the novel, never returning, the novel’s death, the end of authors, readers, reading, and so on.)

  One might well ask: Did Helen truly exist? Was there a Helen? And were I asked, I might answer: She existed for me. Or, there was a Helen for me. And she was not insipid at all.

  I returned to Crete, sanguine that Gwen was all right, or all right enough. Ultimately she admitted that she had wanted me to visit her, but she had not wanted to ask me. I was immensely moved by this, since Gwen is someone who cannot ever make emotional demands. Yet I was able to meet one, one that had been implicit and unspoken. I felt I was not a bad sort after all. Some could and might see me as a thief and a liar. Helen had called me a liar. And it is true, I have lied. I can admit it now. But I’d rather put it differently: I’d rather it be said of me that Horace embellished truths only to make them shine more brilliantly!

  It was in the aftermath of my visit with Gwen, and in this spirit, that I was able to look again at this journal. Also I was able to reread Helen’s diary. I did so last night, and it struck me differently. I have not looked at it, as I may have said, in years. This time I see more in it, or rather, different things in it, other meanings, which I will not bother to set out. I think I do see more because I am no longer, as Gwen explained, desperately looking for my name. I am taken particularly with Helen’s inclusion of Aesop’s fable about the jackdaw and the eagle. I recognize myself as one who thought he was an eagle. I ought to have known my limits. But how does one? Know thyself may be the question, not the answer. There may be a bit of truth in that.

  Epilogue

  It is curious. I am able to return to this journal, but I am no longer as certain of its meaning, to me, as I once might have been. I am not like Odysseus; this is not “the story of a man who was never at a loss.” I have been. I am rather insecure about what I have written—I am not sure what I mean or, worse, if it means anything at all. This fills me with horror. But I borrow from and follow Jean Genet: “To escape horror, bury yourself in it.”

  Dear Reader, if I may call you that, if you and I are at all alike, if we share even a few traits, if you are even a little the way I was for the majority of my life, you may want to look back over this book, to exact from it a logic, to discern a plan. I am not saying there isn’t one. By now you know I am somewhat cagey. Gwen sometimes calls me KGB. I myself have often finished a book and gone back over it, checking the news items, for instance, to assure myself of the time and order of the developments. I have been wary, dubious that the writer had tied up all the loose ends. You may want to do that. I encourage you to do so if you wish. But I can tell you that it will explain little. Perhaps nothing. In any case, you will not find yourself here.

  And here is where I will leave you. As Stan Green would have it: This is it, the big nothing. I’m leaving you with the big nothing. (In the intervening years I have written two more crime books, one titled The Big Nothing.)

  Someone once said of Gertrude Stein, “It was not what she gave you, but what she didn’t take away.” One cannot give anyone anything. This is what I have learned. And while I do not leave you with anything, I do not take from you, either. If I have, I hope it is not an ordinary theft. This is what I have to offer. It is my gift, my only gift, to you. How I wish it were more!

  In any case. I am working again on Household Gods, which now opens: After all these years I can still remember…I could not resist that temptation. At seventy, the only things one ought to resist are tat and salt. I have decided to cast Gwen in Household Gods; indeed, she will have a rather major role to play. I have also decided to return Helen’s diary to her. I will think of a way to do it that will not incriminate me, and that will in some way please her. Someday I will find her and I will give it to her.

  Now I will dress and walk to the market. It is a glorious day.

  ※

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank C. Carr for encouraging me to do a book set in New York; Tom Keenan for our discussions, his enthusiasm and acuity; the MacDowell Colony for giving me a wonderful place to write, and all the people who contributed jokes: David Hofstra, Joe Wood, Paul Shapiro, Bob DiBellis, Eiliot Sharp, Mark Wethli, Jane Gillooly, Rick Lyon, James Welling, John Divola. Marc Ribot, Dennis Cooper, Larry Gross, Charlotte Carter, Andrea Blum, Osvaldo Golijov, Martha Wilson, Michael Smith, Dick Connette, Charles Karubian, and many others whose jokes have become mine. I’d like especially to thank Richard Kupchinsksas, Debbie Negron, and Ginette Schenk for talking with me for this project.

  About the Author

  Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

  About the book, and a letter from the publisher

  This is a Red Lemonade book, also available in all reasonably possible formats: in limited artisan-produced editions, in trade paperback editions, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community.

  A word about this community. Over my years in publishing, I learned that a publisher is the sum of all its constituent parts: above all the writers, of course, and yes, the staff, but also all the people who read our books, talk about our books, support our authors, and those who want to be one of our authors themselves.

  So I started a company called Cursor, designed to make these constituent parts fit better together, into a proper community where, finally, we could be greater than the sum of the parts. The Red Lemonade publishing community is the first of these and there will be more to come—for the current roster of communities, see the Cursor website.

  For more on how to participate in the Red Lemonade publishing community, including the opportunity to share your thoughts about t
his book, read what others have to say about it, and share your own manuscripts with fellow writers, readers, and the Red Lemonade editors, go to the Red Lemonade website.

  Also, we want you to know that these sites aren’t just for you to find out more about what we do, they’re places where you can tell us what you do, what you want, and to tell us how we can help you. Only then can we really have a publishing community be greater than the sum of its parts.

  All the best,

  Richard Nash

  Credits

  This book was originally published by Poseidon, a Simon & Schuster imprint, in 1992. It was edited by Ann Patty.

  It was reissued in the UK by Serpent’s Tail in 1993, where Pete Ayrton was the publisher.

  Jeffrey Yozwiak, Cursor’s first intern, scanned it from the Serpent’s Tail edition and hand-coded it to an ePub file.

  Lisa Duggan, Daniel Schwartz, and Richard Nash proofread it.

  India Amos performed technical quality control.

  Further Reading

  If you enjoyed Cast in Doubt, may we recommend other books by Lynne Tillman?

  Haunted Houses

  In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In Haunted Houses, Tillman writes of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.