An Honest Ghost (9 page)

Oh, dear, I am so tired of feeling spiteful, but how else is one to feel? The measure of your loyalty is the reluctance you feel to give up an attachment for an attraction. But, dear David, enough of this is enough. “You wicked boy!” I said.

Some time was spent looking for a subject of conversation. “His wife is in France.” My eyes fill with tears as I think of her. While his soul had passed from ecstasy to languor where had she been? Even now, after years of marriage, they foundered on the same gloomy psychological shoals every time they made love. “He’s living with a young Japanese girl.” So I think he must have felt quite an acute sense of discomfort in France. Perhaps.

And homesick is where, when you go home, they make you sick.

It was interesting to see the concentration in David’s face. What was his purpose in doing this? He seemed to be considering having a heart attack. I remember everything right down to the last detail. I found his drunkenness scary and appealing since he wasn’t quite himself.

“What do I have to do to make you want to live with me again?” I asked. There should have been background music. “I’m not recommending it, I’m just asking.”

“I couldn’t do that, I just couldn’t,” he said with a feckless sigh.

“You are sleeping with me to-night, you know, David,” I said. “I love you.” When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation. But not David’s. “Well, I mean, it’s Christmas…” I segue into the vanity of human attachment. Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. This estrangement is a recent phenomena [sic]. “I’ll give you just ten seconds to wipe that stupid grin off of your face.”

“Now, just wait a second, sonny,” he said. David beams, showing me a photo of a hillbilly trucker with a giant dick. “I’m sure you can find plenty of other people to talk to.” But there he was probably wrong. What better way of assuring oneself, on the point on which one is mistaken, than to persuade the other of the truth of what one says! “I wish you’d learn to leave the goddam party when it’s over,” he said. He was happiest and most truly himself when he was alone in the quiet countryside.

I watched them for as long as I could, until they disappeared, two shrinking forms, around a corner. Like lightning they were gone. But what do they have in common?

“Every son loves his father,” I said, getting into bed. One is inclined to say so. “Joe needs you to look after him.” He could not be entirely alone.

I thought of my garden. We used to have picnics. To the east there was a belt of trees, warped and stunted by the wind from the sea.

But soon I fell smack into sleep and did not dream any more. Why not?

30.

I have returned to reality! It’s expensive, but it’s wonderful therapy. It has a certain reckless glory, such as the Greeks loved.

The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact.

But nothing is ever quite the same the second time around. Everywhere I turned, a cruel and lurid world surged around me. Twenty-first century America is in a state of decline.

I refuse to be entirely absent. There, I always thought, is a major hole in my character.

This clearer view of things lent a gelatinous cast to my morning questions about an “inner life” that I might comfortably do without.

“It’s all very fine talking,” muttered Joe, who had been fidgeting in his chair with divers uneasy gestures. “Aren’t you bored?” He is rarely petulant or fretful, even with his boredom. The older I grow, and the better I get to know him, the more I love him.

Love for a woman or girl is not to be compared to a man’s love for an adolescent boy.

A curious sea side feeling in the air today. An atmosphere of unusual relaxation had spread over the house. If I had books here I’d read. A “feel bad” book always makes me feel good.

Reading is like entering a hall of mirrors.

It was the severe presence of the sea which made the rather ugly house romantic. Climatically speaking, we have every reason to expect the worst.

Years ago I asked the critic Elizabeth Hardwick if her divorce from poet Robert Lowell had been in any way difficult. You must admit, I said to her, that it would be hard to concoct a more instructive tale: two bewildered profligates condemned to nauseating one another. “Ha ha ha,” she said. She drained her vodka. “I liked him,” she said. “People can say what they like but breeding will tell. Adversity has its advantages.” The notion of happiness no longer seems to be in fashion.

I am not wandering at random, I have a goal, but I pass it by, often and on purpose. In other words, it’s all a question of technique. Mental confusion is not always chaos.

Human communication, it sometimes seems to me, involves an exaggerated amount of time. It’s always late.

“Want to guess what I heard about Roy?”

“What?” Joe said, looking over at me. He lay back relaxed in his favorite chair. What does it look like, he wonders, when you kiss someone, as the other’s face comes towards your own, until it dissolves into an unfocused blur, and your experience of it necessarily shifts, becomes one of touch and taste rather than of sight?

“Her father,” I said, “is a Polish Jew.” We only laugh at those with whom we feel we have an affinity that we must repudiate, that we feel threatened by.

The youth became serious; his triangular face assumed an unexpectedly manly look. “I met him for the first time yesterday. Unbearable. He kept asking me if I wanted a ride on his motorcycle. He says a boy ought to know how to do things like that. I acted bored so as not to show how excited I was. To face up to death is to see your life as a finite project, something that can and will be finished. Funny, I’m not particularly happy about it. What I need is criticism— savage criticism.” It is a fundamentally insane notion, he continues, that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies. And yet here he was, his father’s son in the only way that really mattered.

We are drinking iced mint tea slightly flavored with absinthe. Intellectually we were unprepared—and I was perhaps less prepared than anyone—to come to grips with the tasks that confronted us. The tasks would be too complex.

How to avoid suicide? Opting out of the system may have been one solution, like a brilliant friend of mine who’d suddenly decided, after a motorbike accident, to give up his social life, as though his head had cleared during his convalescence and he’d suddenly, joyfully, been set free, veering away from people forever, just as he’d skidded euphorically off the road, and he never looked back. Desire is the enemy of the ego, not its expression. It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. “Forget it, Joe. Let’s discuss you.” But that didn’t happen.

“Efen if zey offered me millions, I voult not say von vort! Adultery’s more fun,” he said with attempted lightness. “So David tells me. May we now be permitted to enter slightly into this difficult and dark region?” Joe was not given to subtle maneuvering such as this, but who knows? This the way to the museyroom. It was already midnight. Full moon sends rapid clouds dashing past a cold sky. I wanted to go to sleep for ever. I groaned and closed my eyes to try to shut out my tormentor, but Joe was never one to give up easily. “I’ve got something to tell you, Dad. Love amazes, but it does not surprise. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”

“Not for long,” I said.

Joe listed one reason. A dissatisfied mind, whatever else it may miss, is rarely in want of reasons; they bloom as thick as buttercups in June. He wished he had never learned who his father was. “So is this really Christmas?” he thought.

“I’ve had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to see the worst side of it reproduced in you.” I don’t know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. “No, freedom is better! I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I took my last ride on a motorcycle, believe me. Finally, in all your preparations, begin as you mean to go on.”

“Oui, oui, c’est ça, c’est magnifique!” He chewed, and said: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious.”

Nothing is easy until you do it every day.

“Quietly, my son,” I whisper.

At eighteen minutes to four we heard the rustle of David’s wings. “I am leaving you,” he said. “You must find someone else.”

Nonsense. Non c’è peggior sordo di chi non vuol sentire. No one is so deaf as he who will not hear.

I laughed in a certain way, because I could not speak. He was gone. There remains only the one consolation that nobody knows where he is.

Will our shame never end?

It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all.

31.

But after all, the winter did end. The city and its parks became leafy, billowing green even while morning frost clung to the windows. On one of the handful of nights I’ve ventured out and away from the typewriter in the weeks of writing this book, I strolled through my favorite haunts in Central Park and met up with a fine, sensitive man who was into talking, as I was. The mating of minds is, surely, quite as fascinating a relationship as the mating of the sexes, yet how little attention novelists have paid to it. With fallen branches, as dry and brittle as chalk, and some dead leaves gathered from the crevices, I made us a bedding, where we half reclined and talked. The chords geese behind us honked tingled like seltzer. Of all the heavenly bodies only the moon, hanging almost full above the Hilton Hotel, was visible.

“I believe Tarkovsky expressed his intent very well on the screen,” I said. He looked at me, perplexed. I felt for the first time I was speaking for myself. “My mother was a Freudian. It was cooler than anything else. I was never raped— except nearly—once. Some three years ago,” I recounted, “I happened to be bathing beside a young man, blessed at the time with an astounding beauty. Since then I’ve had a terrible fondness for asses. It was a strange coincidence,” I said. Encountering a stranger brings one into contact with the unconscious. “Which reminds me of a story from those years that may be worth telling. Any congruence with reality is delightful. On the high school track team, I often stopped to walk. Competition is a sublimation of warfare.” This was disingenuous. “And I’m speaking of a twelve-year-old boy, not some grownup who has had the time to ripen a naturally evil disposition. Nevertheless, not everyone was amused. Though I would not wish to return to that lost innocence if I could—to live impaled, who needs it? To this day I cannot understand myself, and it has all floated by like a dream—even my passion—it was violent and sincere, but … what has become of it now? In all my childhood only one perception ever seemed to me now, in hindsight, as having been, to use that beautiful word, lucid: the sense that struck me once at day camp, that the people and places all around me, everything in short, was just an elaborate hoax, made up of actors and sets—I didn’t know whether to be more surprised by the scope of the thing (no doubt serving some secret purpose that was, unfortunately, beyond me) or by its low budget (which would explain the bad architecture and the extras’ general lack of talent), and even if I understood this wasn’t literally true, still it was a striking and conclusive glimpse of the fraudulence that surrounded me. And is the truth less meaningless than lies? Human sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.”

“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” Nothing but disdain. The man with the cruel look in his eyes who is interrogating me suddenly starts coughing. As a boy he was abandoned by his mother and raised by peasants in an impoverished part of France. Clearly the story meant much to him. He had a beautiful voice with a Bronx accent. He has enormous pectoral breasts, which must further endear him to the gay community. But he never got to fuck anybody. He squeezes me tight for a few endless seconds. The slow pressing of flesh against flesh was more intimate to me than a passionate kiss would have been. You can feel him saying, My god, how lucky I am, and alas, how old I am. It occurred to me that I might be making a mistake. What is going to happen? We’re deep into the night. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to see your son. I am, as you may observe, no longer young, and what I haven’t seen of life isn’t worth seeing. You should have become either a tough villain or a tough angel, one or the other.” God approved his every thought. “Yes, I know you don’t like me, but I’ll go with you all the same.” No matter how fantastic or excited his speech, he never changed his expression.

The man had no idea of what he wanted, and I made him aware of this in the most forceful way; I said that what he was doing was morbid, that his whole life was a morbid life, his existence a morbid existence, and consequently everything he was doing was irrational, if not utterly senseless. “No. Your Highness, I find to my amazement that this highly informative discussion has exceeded the time we had allowed for it.” The white American regards his darker brother through the distorting screen created by a lifetime of conditioning. “You have beautiful hair,” I said.