Asa, as I Knew Him

by Susanna Kaysen

  Books by Susanna Kaysen

  Asa, As I Knew Him

  Far Afield

  Girl, Interrupted

  Susanna Kaysen

  Asa, As I Knew Him

  Susanna Kaysen is also the author of the novel

  Far Afield and Girl, Interrupted, a memoir.

  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JUNE 1994

  Copyright © 1987 by Susanna Kaysen

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  All persons and incidents described in this book are fictional.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kaysen,

  Susanna, 1948–

  Asa, as I knew him.

  (Vintage contemporaries)

  “A Vintage original”—T.P. verso.

  I. Title.

  PS3561.A893A9 1987 813′.54 86-46186

  eISBN: 978-0-307-51354-0

  Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

  v3.1

  For Ceil and Michael

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Asa Enters

  Dinah Provides Background

  The Angel of Monadnock I

  The Angel of Monadnock II

  The Discrepancies

  Asa Observed

  Asa Enters

  Asa enters a room with his arms crossed. He slides in sideways and takes a pose against the wall. He looks as though he is at a cocktail party where he would rather not be. However, if someone enters a room where he is already ensconced (against the wall with his arms crossed, or in his own office in his red chair, long feet on the second rung of his typewriter table), he becomes hospitable: he uncrosses his arms. If standing against the wall, he arches his back and presses his shoulders to the plaster. This movement opens his breast, which is wide and padded, and outlines the flange of his ribs against his shirt.

  Asa’s shirts are blue or white. Asa’s eyes match his shirts. On blue-shirt days his blue eyes beam reflected cobalt down paneled hallways; he has the smug aura of a handsome man. White shirts blank out his features so that his face is a white dish holding two dark marbles. On white-shirt days he is expressionless, a life-size photograph of himself snapped at a dull moment.

  He is a man in middle age, of middle height and breadth. His ambitions have softened over the years, but without embittering him. He feels the weight of hope sliding off him slowly, easily—perhaps he was never meant to walk uphill. His straight line is all comfort: roses he has mulched and pruned, collars he has frayed in fifteen years at his desk, answering his phone. He no longer imagines himself a twenty-two-year-old. A few years back he realized that what was in the mirror had stopped surprising him. If his jaw couldn’t put a crease in paper, what of it? He has peace of mind. He has two houses, he has three dogs, he has a red swivel chair at work, sound lungs, a slow heart, twenty-five more years with the roses.

  Public Asa number one: the happy man. He uses it on days when he can’t focus, or with people who need to be screened out. He can drop into it, slow bee-buzz of stability and contentedness insulating him from a female photographer with Boston vowels and a murky portfolio. It closes over him, the personality of a man stupider and more stolid yet kin to him—someone he could enjoy if, arms crossed, leaning against the wall, he were to chat with him at a cocktail party. “Nice fellow,” he might tell Fay. “Dull but with a good heart. Told me all about his basset-breeding business. Fucking mopey dogs.”

  Asa’s dogs are tall, springy, muddy: a speckled Airedale, and two standard poodles—one black, one brown. “Fighting dogs,” he calls them. They are an extension, or accoutrement, of the happy man. Every evening they jump him and bang him into the oak coatrack by the door. Their smells and tight, dry hair delight him. They are other—not people, but living—and he loves them for their simplicity and sturdy presence. They love him for his warm hands, his shoes smelling of elsewhere, the growls he growls in their stiff ears after dinner, the way he comes home every day at six-twenty and waits to be jumped.

  But he wonders if life could be like the life of the happy man. Life without the “slush,” his name for that environment where he has not solitude, which he worships, but isolation. It isn’t sharp, it’s like mud, like February forever. He is slightly beyond the reach of life there. And life—the twilight crackling down on winter days, the book that kept him crouched on his elbow by the bedroom lamp till two last night—is visible, but nonsense.

  To counteract this, and as a preventive measure to keep it at bay, he drinks more than he knows is good.

  That’s not why. It’s a habit. His habit, after being jumped by dogs and kissed by Fay, is to drink some scotch, two glassfuls to be exact. One quickly and one slowly, while dinner takes shape behind a door. And on the nights when he makes dinner (public Asa number two: the aesthete), one quickly, one while making dinner, one while waiting for dinner to cook. One after dinner. And a refill. Maybe one more before bed. And a little to go to bed with?

  He’s thirsty. He thirsts.

  He knows the names of all plants that have blue blossoms. He can sing, in a naïve and true baritone, the first movement of twenty Mozart symphonies and all the hymns he learned on snowy mornings in Connecticut more than thirty years ago. He can poach fish, bone chicken, make good coffee. He can splint a dog’s injured leg, build a table, survive a night in the deep, booming woods. He enjoys calves’ brains. He reads books that are of no professional use to him. He is capable of being moved (this means some escalation of his slow heartbeat, accompanied by near tears and a sense of loss, which is sweet) by the music he hears every other week in his hard season seat at Symphony. He likes to be alone.

  When he is alone, he is not the happy man, not the aesthete, not, anymore, the well-bred young Cantabrigian, fresh and blond and sure of right and wrong—that person who no longer inhabits the mirror. He is tired. He is a tired man with less hair and energy than before. He daydreams. He puts his feet up and points his beaky nose toward whatever view is beyond the window. Then he signs off.

  “What are you thinking?” asks Fay.

  “Hm? Nothing.”

  Has he let go of life too early? He thinks of his father, a man with a similar nose and dissimilar mien—hard, rocky, dense and unknowable as his native New Hampshire. His father died at sixty-three. Asa remembers his father in middle age, when he, Asa, was solidifying the aesthete at Harvard. His father’s presence was undimmedly strong; but probably, he decides, fathers can never lose that in their sons’ eyes. And he was never sick, he just dropped. If he’d weakened—but he was over sixty and he didn’t falter. Asa looks at the stretch of his legs from chair to windowsill, half in the sun. He is screened, he is cocooned in his disappointment, which lives below his every action and protects him. It’s not a major sorrow, it’s just the normal wear and tear of life on living things.

  Some portion of beauty is in the possessor’s knowledge of having it, and this Asa lacks. Still, he is beautiful; women warm up near him because he is fair and rosy and has an expansive chest where dream images of their heads lie, content. From behind he could be twenty-five, his back still a triangle racing straight to his haunches, tapered legs easy to imagine beneath the twill of his pants. He lopes, head forward, brown hands heavy at his sides; he moves as a cat moves in the morning, stalking small prey—no tension or excitement in it, only an impulse to move. He has the proud, large-featu
red head of an actor, but lacks an actor’s poise. He doesn’t know which profile is his better one. His face is full of flesh—wide mouth, heavy-lidded eyes, cheeks streaming florid to the softening under his ears. At the edge of his face age shows. In the middle, where his eyes tilt Eastern, exotic almonds of New Hampshire–lake blue, he is ageless—a sunburnt, scotch-ruddied Yankee with a blond beard poking through by 11:00 A.M. His head seems more ponderous than the body it lives on; when he slides down and tilts his red chair, half closing his eyes, it falls quickly to rest on the padded back. Thump. His chin points to the ceiling.

  If there is a flaw in his appearance it is a lack of vitality. He has some sort of softness, not of musculature but of intention. This has its good aspect; he can, when comfortable, emit sensuousness. But he is so rarely at ease that the impression he usually gives is of sluggishness. There is something reptilian in his diffident, infrequent movements and tendency to bask in whatever sunshine makes its way into his office. That sharp-voiced, untalented photographer was sure he had slept through their interview. He knows he didn’t, but he knows that people have found him intractably unexcitable. He has come to accept himself as such without wondering if the behavior is symbolic. “I’m just an average guy,” he’s said to friends of Fay’s late at night. He hasn’t got friends of his own. He says it with longing, but he doesn’t hear the longing.

  So, Asa Thayer. Do you see him? Can you hear the crackle of his shirt sleeve in the morning as he hangs his umbrella on the edge of the bookshelf? Could you have a pleasant conversation with him at dinner; do you know enough to know you don’t want to?

  I have always known what was essentially wrong with him; I saw it when I met him. It may even have challenged me. Now, I see the element of challenge; then, as we rose into that atmosphere of pure longing, which was as buoyant as Cape Cod Bay at high tide, and where we bobbed effortless and bathed in anticipation, everything was inevitable. Love as destiny. The problem is, he has no soul.

  What makes him interesting is that he knows it. He doesn’t know it’s that, because he has no concept of the soul. But he knows he lacks connective tissue in a fundamental way. In terms of spiritual development, he is at the mollusk stage: everything is backwards. There is the framework of his life—Fay, flowers, his magazine, all those shirts stacked in the drawer—which is only an external hardness of experience. The inner experience, of slush and diffidence and self-deceit, is gray, gelatinous, amorphous. But Yankees—they think this hardness, these predictable concrete events that compose their days, are the reality. It’s a Protestant misconception. They have no notion of symbol or duality or, most important, passion.

  I grew up with boys who were to become men of the sort he is. They were blond and well formed, they came from the large, ungainly families rich people have in periods of national prosperity, they were beautifully educated and beautifully mannered. And they were upright; the old, stern morality still obtained in them. There were careers they would not pursue—not so much out of snobbism as from an obligation to “contribute,” to give their ease and insight to society. Now they are publishers and middle-level diplomats and heads of progressive schools. I’m out of touch with them. Their first names are Asa’s middle name, or Fay’s maiden name, and I have been reminded of them, seeing Asa’s checkbook open on his desk with all those names: Higginson, Thayer, Bowdoin. Old, stern Yankee names, on streets and buildings and checkbooks from Long Island Sound to the Kennebec River, names that sound like granite falling, like the ghosts of the Wampanoag treading the pine-needle floor, like the coals moving, settling down red in December, silver and hiss of ash—Asa, Asa.

  But for all the hardness and clarity of these names and these values, their possessors are translucent, misty, soulless. There is no blood in them. They are not connected to the past—the human past—but to their heritage. They have great-grandfathers buried beside earth reserved for their own dead bodies and they have pewter utensils that are also soulless. They have forgotten the cave and the long night by the dying bonfire and the difficulty of chipping flint. They think their great-great-grandfathers sprang fully evolved on these shores, products of the Mayflower’s timber and New Hamphire rock. They’ve forgotten how to grunt—they’ve dismissed the possibility that anyone connected with them ever did grunt. They make love graciously, as if fencing.

  Maybe I can’t explain it. When I fell in love with Asa, I forgot he had no soul. No, not that: I believed he had a rudimentary one that lived in his perception of lacking it, and which I would nurture into a mythological beast, the Yankee with Blood. I wanted to give him this gift, passion. I wanted to make him alive. But he fought me; he even, for a while, transformed me into himself. All lovers experience this, the stronger absorbing the weaker and spewing him or her out remade, but I had thought I was the stronger. I am now. He is still bloodless; I survived him. I survived becoming him. Writing this is my last effort at transubstantiation. From his long, pale limbs I will make, by words, the body and blood of a human. If I fail, it can’t be done. He sits across town in his red chair dismissing me; I am his happy memories. But isn’t there yet in him something hot, some smoldering twig I left, which these pages can fan to fire?

  As a story it’s old and boring, probably the oldest, most boring one around. We worked together, we loved each other. He didn’t leave his wife, I left my job. Living that story is living in a hurricane; that’s why it is repeated until the listening population can no longer bear to hear it. As an experience it is beyond the norm, and those who experience want to tell … I’m not going to tell the story. At least, I’m not telling that story, but another, the skeleton, the essence within the story. But perhaps that isn’t enticing either. After all, it’s just a romance. We moved through rooms I could describe, talked with friends whose names you might want to know. Sometimes we took taxis—I think of kissing Asa in a taxi as we rode to the printer’s, the pretense of a public embrace, the second-rate Boston skyline a backdrop for our little passions. Not little: They were a skyline all their own, the only view my eyes could see for years.

  Now I have another landscape, which is life without him. He is not in the Chinese restaurant where we ate lunch on view weekly; he is not walking down the street when I am walking down the street, although he might be, and I hope he will be; he is not on the beach where I turn over and over in the sun, tanning my body for him to admire, but he never will admire it again; he is not on the sofa, in the chair, on his knees beside the bed kissing my wrists. I have a hole in my vision, and it’s his absence.

  But I know where he is. He is in his office at the end of a long dark hall. On his desk is a water glass gone cloudy from standing for an hour. From his tall, mahogany-framed windows he sees the same weather I see. Today, at ten-thirty, it is overcast, threatening August weather. The telephone with its bank of buttons is in front of him. My telephone is in front of me. We don’t call each other. For me, not calling him is an activity. I know it isn’t one for him. Once I would have convinced myself it was. My friends are glad that I know better now. My friends have hated Asa, first for monopolizing my mind, then for the endless discussions of him they were subjected to, finally, for making me unhappy. But they didn’t understand what was at stake. The awakening of a soul is not a small matter; neither is the concomitant justification of my soul, my efforts. It’s time to begin.

  Dinah Provides Background

  My name is Dinah, which means “judgment.” My parents, Adelaide and Frank Sachs, returned to the traditional names for their children. I have a sister named Leah and a brother named Seth. Now these names are fashionable; my married friends have children called Joshua, Jonah, even Obadiah. Thirty years ago our names set us apart and gave us an Orthodox aura that was at odds with our parents’ determined atheism. But there we were, marginal, victims in grade school of the fascination certain kinds of Jews hold for Yankees. I learned early that I was to them some finer self, some more focused version of what they tried to be. They yearned for my historica
l sadness and intelligence. I yearned for their self-control and the inherited lawns where they had parties. I went to the parties—there wasn’t anything that could be called anti-Semitism. It was more like the tension between the sexes; I was other, mysterious and full of power. Leah felt it too. She’s married to a Swede, so it kept ahold of her. Rocked in that cradle of uniqueness by those blue-eyed boys, what protection could I have against Asa when, twenty years later, I looked up from my desk to find his huge head blocking my view?

  Childhood was pleasant enough, judging from what my friends have told me of theirs. If my father preferred looking through his microscope to playing with us, I didn’t blame him. He would park me, the eldest, in the reading room of Widener on Saturdays, with a stack of books on black magic (at eleven, my ambition was to be a witch), while he roamed the periodicals for the latest cellular breakthroughs. He must have made the journals himself occasionally—how else does one get tenure at Harvard?—but he was, and is, a small and dusty man, slightly vacant in his social interactions. He had none of the luminosity of his more famous colleagues who sometimes turned up for dinner. My mother was secretive. She had a room where she withdrew and did unknown things. Leah and I turned the furniture upside down and played Queen of the Castle while Seth burbled in his bassinet. My mother was probably tired of children and just sat in her room quietly reading Jane Austen. We didn’t miss her. We were safe—we had enough to eat, each of us had a room with dire threats against trespassers posted on the door, we had bicycles, we had each other.

  When I was thirteen I turned against witchcraft, having had a series of nightmares based on the activities of a wolf society in London that claimed membership of more than two hundred English werewolves (I had read about it in a book published only two years before, hence the nightmares), and took up the opposite sex. I dropped library research in favor of field work. I have been studying my subject for decades now, but it remains mysterious. Maybe, as my mother suggested when I was nineteen and my career had become clear to her, it isn’t a topic worth devoting your life to.