An Honest Ghost (8 page)

At this moment David appeared as if by magic. “Darling, is there any Perrier in the fridge?” he said, removing a pill from his little box. To this crucial question I answer with a resounding yes. “Oh God,” he said, “I’m late again.” Every time he raised his eyes and saw the beauty of the country in the failing light he wanted to do something he had never done before, shout or scream or hit his wife with his fists or something equally unexpected and terrifying.

He is ill-mannered, self-preoccupied, austere—the modern psychologists would probably diagnose him as introverted, narcissistic and manic depressive. Seen from a more sympathetic angle, the picture is quite different. He tops, for one thing, and sometimes when he gets frisky he gets rough.

I consider my thoughts, my frail fucked-up memory. It is made of details. Just a few years ago I learned from my mother that my father always suspected, with reason, that I was another man’s offspring. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. How was it that I did not know? You’re always hearing about these kinds of kinks in royal families. Such are the phantoms we create out of each other.

There are moments when we find it astonishing, this life.

In the real world things were going along about as well as could be expected, that is, not quite satisfactorily. I remember that the days and nights passed like bars of white and black, opening and shutting. But, in all, so vibrant.

To be is a verb.

David, at the kitchen door, caught his breath chokingly. “Do you want to hear something funny? I came here to quit drinking,” he said, and tears began to run down his cheeks. Funny is almost certainly not the right word. David was one of those men of intense feeling who thrust their sufferings deep down and hide them from those who are dear to them, so that when grief overflows, as his did now, they have reached the limit of endurance. “Is it naïve of me in my antiquated way to think that people should do what they say they’re going to do?” He kissed my neck, and sniffed my hair. “I cannot tell to what level I may sink.”

Indeed, I thought to myself, the spirit can’t go wrong if there’s no spirit to begin with.

He began to giggle through his tears. But in a special way. “I was once a man,” he said, “but now I’m not.” This had never happened before. Is he just spouting 12-step truisms he’s picked up God knows where? “I was not joking, my dear; so tell me why you did not come last night.” David was radically incapable of ill-humour for more than a few seconds at a time, and grinned in a less awful manner.

“David, you are being contrary and disingenuous, and just a little hostile, and I’m really not sure why.”

“I’m beginning to hate myself.”

Is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen?

David smiles, shyly showing me a photo of a very handsome tough guy who so personifies David’s type. How well I’m getting to know these characters! David had been a “model” himself.

“Fertilize your inner life,” I said.

“Shall we speak in everyday language? Who wrote this dialogue?”

Dinner was not a success. Far from it. To put it in two words: disaster struck. He suffered tortures of humiliation and self-consciousness. From there on it got worse. I left him sitting there wishing he was dead. The end of everything was at hand; it seemed to him he could stretch out his arm and touch the goal. Something must be wrong with us.

He selected a pair of blue pajamas and put them on with care, smoothing the wide collar and sticking a dainty blue silk handkerchief in the little patch pocket over his left breast. “I know how much you idolize the rich.”

And so the lovely music glided to its glowing close.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning.

But the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of star-dust as of yore. That is the truly devastating message of this book. That is how the past exists, phantasmagoric weskits, stray words, random things recorded. It is too late to be yourself. Writing is no longer possible.

Too late.

Of all the vices there are, there is one we cannot permit ourselves, and that is patience.

The light that reveals us to ourselves is always inconvenient.

No man knows what dangers he should avoid from one hour to another.

26.

All my life I have been what is traditionally regarded as an amusing person, and this capacity to be amusing was often the label I displayed to the world or the flag I sailed under. It called for strength, courage, and physical élan, all things that I lacked. The psychologists know all about this. But I’m very peaceful, momentarily, this evening. I don’t want fanfare.

One thing is undeniable. Given how our mouths tend to fill up with other people’s speech, the struggle not to become a mere ventriloquist’s dummy is not only a concern for mediocre writers.

A friend of mine, an English teacher at a local university, says he feels an obligation to point out to his students that the cigars in the canister on the mantelpiece in an Edith Wharton story are phallic symbols. The fairies broke into animated discussion.

Life mirrors art.

This tickles Joe to pieces. “He must have been pontificating like crazy.”

What other point of view could there be? Life in New York was pleasant in those days. “And I want to live a quiet life there,” I said, the blunt tone of my own voice ringing in my ears. My conscience pricked me. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And I can never really forget that voluptuousness and volition share the same etymological origin.

27.

I must have slept for a long time. David was sitting up, and he immediately fixed his eyes on me. Had they remained still for any length of time his eyes would have been kind; as it was he looked kind of anxious. As he had nothing to do, his idleness intensified his melancholy.

“I suffer every night,” I said, “from amorous dreams which wear me out.” It takes ages.

To which David: “Is that why you are so kind to me?” I think that follows, Socrates. He is tortured by future anguish.

My real type, these days, is a blue-collar closet queen— they’re the best.

Meaning is never monogamous. But in the realm of sex, more than in any other area of human life, shame rules. It hurts.

I don’t know how much more pathetic I can become.

David sighs. “Turn over here and let me look at you,” he ordered softly. He puts on a queer smile. “Maybe you’re ready to ease up on the Demerol.” He lay on a cot next to the open window, and he was naked except for a pink brassiere and a pair of yellow panties. He’s a man who won’t stop talking.

“Go to hell,” I said. This is the punishment, I thought, now you have your reckoning.

To me the most astonishing phenomenon is not the power-man’s desire to dominate but the human craving to believe— if not in Man—in a man. We never release ourselves from him, his voice, his sense—from one moment to the next—of living a life bruised, embittered, ironic, superior, passive, aggressive, punitive, erotic, whimpering.

At any rate, it was definitely thumbs down. I had to get out of there and have sex as quickly as possible.

28.

The cocks are getting ready to say good morning to the sun. It is like the beginning of a beautiful day. Christmas was approaching.

Joe slept on our living-room couch. He hears nothing of what you shout and overhears everything you whisper. This was a habit that exasperated his mother; he knew it and she knew he knew it. Like many people who are thought antisocial, he was not aloof because he was indifferent or antipathetic, but because he was so profoundly affected by others that he could not easily locate the boundaries between their expectations and his own.

“You don’t know him,” David exclaimed. He had his grand manner on. “I wish we could sometimes hear some positive praise of our little boy.” This, he insisted, would be solace. “Poor boy! he’s got to live,” David asserted with the humility of an employer who feels that he himself is to blame. “You won’t believe what he’s got me doing.”

At the risk of unwarranted ghoulishness, I cannot suppress a final irony. David drank slowly but steadily whenever possible. He was a man doomed to suffer. It had brought out the worst in him, and no one saw this more clearly than Eleanor. The Romantic is nearly always a rebel. Etc., etc., etc. I suppose it is easy to understand how this topic can become such a volatile one. The sex with him was pure sorcery as always, but there was a new element in it of savagery and despair, and more than once I got a sharp disturbing whiff of awful finality in his actions. Desire was his crime, he saw.

Seeing Dick Cheney looming up on the television screen with that weird lust in his eyes and bits of brain matter in the cracks of his teeth might accidentally be diagnosed as dementia. Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another. Television is a mystery. The vivid rhetoric of terror was a first step in the slow process toward American Democracy. “Don’t lose your temper,” said Joe. “He should have come out of the closet years ago like everybody else, and then he wouldn’t have to do all that compensating.” You took the words out of my mouth. I’m getting so I can’t bear the sight of newspapers. Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. History makes me numb.

I thought: “My son will be hurt.” I am all emptiness and futility. There is no such thing as inner peace.

Must be the war news.

It’s right before Christmas, and I’m feeling very anxious.

“Dad,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

“O.K., O.K.” I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you.

My dear child, your father will need you.

29.

David introduced me to a man named Roy Hardeman. He was not good-looking, but his policeman’s uniform, and the idea that he was a policeman, excited me. It was a new, glamorous world. In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting. Or was I wrong about that?

I stared at him, holding my breath. He was tall and strongly built, his face rather pale. He had a huge hairless head. In his left ear he wore a gold earring: a snake swallowing its tail. He’s a former pro boxer, and once had a fight in Mississippi where he kicked his opponent in the scrotum when he couldn’t conquer him with his fists, then wept tears of frustration.

For all I know he may be a prince in disguise; he rather looks like one, by the way—like a prince who has abdicated in a fit of fastidiousness and has been in a state of disgust ever since. Perhaps the man was the less handsome for the deep lines in his face, the irritable tension of his brow, which gave him the look of a man who fights with life. He also struck me as a rather cruel man, although it would have been difficult for me to say why. The handshake of some people makes you think of accident and sudden death. There are some people who invariably make a favorable first impression.

A single insight at the start is worth more than ever so many somewhere in the middle.

As a child, he had been raised by his grandparents, and been allowed to run wild. And so on. He was one of those young men whose age is difficult to determine. His bald head sits solemnly on the brown plinth of his neck. He stared at me with such interest that I could only feel flattered.

The signs of some incurable gastric disorder were written all over his sour face. There was a very definite smell of fish and chips.

“I suppose I’m a little disturbed. I was just brushing my teeth and about to go to bed,” I explained, nervously. A bitch, of course….

David said he was sorry. Dandruff dusted the lapels of his Jacket.

“David, what is Tofrinal, that I see it in the medicine chest, a big bottle full?”

The young man said something wonderful in response. “David told me how hard you work in the garden you made, and the way you love all the flowers.” His voice was like his look: dull and proud. He uses a language, has a way of speaking, that instantly made me think: inimical to civilization.

“Ah, they’re part of the comedy.” Sometimes not so comic. “It’s regrettable, but that’s the way it is. Oh, honey, don’t let me commence.” So alone, in this galaxy of fairies.

“We met on a plane,” David said.

Ridiculous. He went from going to bed with handsome people to going to bed with ordinary people, and finally ugly men; with Jews, Italians, Slavs and Brazilians, Dutchmen, Germans, Greeks and Arabs. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. But the fear of going too far, and that of not going far enough, robbed him of all power of judgment. Being full of lust and hatred, envy and deceit, his desires are insatiable. I don’t pretend to be a judge of these things, but I thought the effect exaggerated and not in the best of taste. There is no bad taste—only taste and no taste. He has become a wolf. Drinking, unfortunately, can make the symptoms worse. It is a horrible thing to feel that all that we possess is draining away.