Boswell (33 page)

“We didn’t get along. Finally I had to leave his house.

“Some of you probably knew him better than I did.

“I remember one thing. He belonged to a lot of clubs. Now maybe you think that was a defense against his loneliness, but I don’t think so. He took pleasure… Look, this is a little ridiculous, I hardly knew the man—” Suddenly I felt myself coming close to my theme. I had broken off to address the minister, warning him. He smiled and waited for me to go on. It was out of both our hands now.

“Well, he seemed to get pleasure out of certain things even if he couldn’t have them himself. It was okay with him just as long as
somebody
had them, just as long as they existed to be had. I don’t understand that.”

I looked again at the minister and he was still smiling. Even if he weren’t, it was too late; he’d had his chance. Now the power was on me. Hallelujah! I turned back to the small crowd around the grave.

“He lived a lousy life. His life was shit. Let’s understand that. But he made allowances and he had his defenses, his way of dealing with it. He should have been on the other side. He was sick, even when he was a young man. He had the shakes. He stuttered. He was always poor. He should have been on the other side! His resentments should have been against the well and the strong and the rich. But they weren’t—they never were. My uncle thought like a banker. His sympathies were all with influence, with prestige, and he hated men of hard luck as though they had sinned against God, as though misery were illegal.

“Jesus, he was a snob! I went to a class breakfast once, given by one of the rich girls in my high school. She lived on an estate. She was very rich. There were footmen, butlers. My uncle never tired of hearing abut it, of having me tell about it. He was proud that some people still lived like that. He was proud of me for being so clever as to be invited there. It was crazy…

“Well, it was a comical thing, to live like that, in the ballrooms of the mind. In the heart’s formal gardens…

“He took taxis. Sometimes he’d have the driver drop him off in front of some bank downtown. He didn’t even have an account there. You know?

“But you know what was wrong with my uncle? He was a coward. All of that respectable crap, that was just fear. He didn’t even have a dream—he had an outline for a dream. And all the things he did, all the notions he had, they didn’t help at all. He was the sort of Peeping Tom that Power needs to have outside its windows. But what the hell, he’s inside his box now. See him? So what he was a snob? I write it off. I forgive him. His death takes care of that. He just didn’t go far enough.” I pointed to the coffin. “Ah, sap! Ah, jerk!
CORPSE!”

The minister cleared his throat as though he meant to interfere, but I raised my hand, silencing him. When I had started I had been speaking haltingly. Now the words poured out; I said them without having to think about them. Something was clear.

“Some of you may know about me. About my lousy life. Anyway, that’s the way my uncle would tell it. I’m on the make for the great. Well, you know something? He was crazy not to understand that.
We were on the same side. We were on the same goddamn side. He should have had my anger!”
I was crying.

Something was clear. I wanted to wail, to let it out, to moan and scream, to stand there and never leave, to hold this moment of my clear, strident grief, to make it my life, grow old with it and die when it began to wane. I felt a deep relief. It was like the climax of some fierce and mounting anger, when for a moment one is freed of all thought of consequence, when for a fraction of a second one is the equal of the world and the will soars like a bird in some passionate whirling flight. It was a moment of hard and infinite ruthlessness, of triumph, in which any end at all was justified by any means at all. I floated deliriously buoyant in a sea of self, with some blank check of forgiveness, forever beyond guilt or crime or folly or reality, having all future like a gift, like a prince, all choice underwritten.

Suddenly men, intruders, were holding my arms and pulling me away from my uncle’s grave.

Something has happened. Something is clear. People do not change. I am no believer in epiphanies. What we are is what we come to. Lear dies passionate still. We are stuck with ourselves. Rehabilitation is when you move to a new neighborhood, but some furniture travels always with us, the familiar old sofa of self, the will’s ancient wardrobe, the old old knives and spoons of the personality. Yet something has happened.

Just when I was breaking through! Recently I have had successes. Such successes! Last week I had lunch with Ezra Pound at St. Albans and with Jackson Pollack in New York. Two weeks ago I was in Albany at the governor’s mansion. There have been invitations. Gams. Something is clear, something has happened. Uncle Myles has raised me. He
raises
me. I learn from death. Grist. Grist and Truth.

To hell with successes. Something is clear. Something has happened. Something is changed.
They’re not enough!
I have let the great off too easily. Dinners, conversations, two hours in a bar—what is that? What am I, my uncle the corpse? I have let them off too easily. They have taken me into their parlors instead of their lives.

Something has happened. Something has changed. Something is clear.

November 29, 1957. New York City.

In Lazaar’s apartment—on the desk, on the piano, on the coffee and end tables, on every surface—there are picture frames from the dime stores. Inside, behind the glass, the figures lean away from the eye, angled to the upright world like any other shadows. The thin tins of the frames are gold or silver; each has the integrity of its cheapness, like some product of our youth freshly seen. I look at one, a somewhat larger frame with wide, mirrored margins down which run extravagant, impossible flowers, lush, red, fantastic as a beanstalk in a fairy story. The pictures are of movie stars in pale, colored tints which resemble the hand-tinting of those years before color photography. The lips are pungent with pastel blood, the skin a kind of grayish pink, like the skins of people with heart disease. The faces are familiar, of course, but strike me somehow as preposterous. Suddenly I understand why. There are Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, William Powell, Deanna Durbin, Wallace Beery and Humphrey Bogart as they appeared twenty years ago. Paul Muni is a young man. Beneath each photograph is a stamped signature, a flamboyant, meaningless greeting: “Best Wishes from Hollywood, Robert Taylor”; “Musically Yours, Deanna Durbin.” I am oddly moved by the pictures. They might be pictures of
things.
I ask Lazaar about it.

“The photographs came with the frames. My mother never understood that you were supposed to remove them and put in your own,” he says.

He leads me into the kitchen, and makes tea while I sit on a white wooden chair beside a metal kitchen table. When he opens a cabinet and takes down a cup I catch a glimpse of a strange assortment of patterns. The dishes are familiar, too, the geometry of their designs like something remembered, known always, like a landmark or some permanent combination of old things, its impression stored on the lids of the eyes.

On the kitchen table is a glass sugar bell. Its sides are ridged; it has a chrome lid that screws on. I used to see them in restaurants.

Lazaar puts my tea in a cup and his in a glass. He takes half a shriveled lemon from the icebox and holds it above my cup and squeezes. A few cloudy drops fall into the tea. “Excuse me,” he says. “I didn’t even ask if you take lemon.” He puts the hull in his glass.

There is an open box of Jack Frost sugar cubes on the table. Lazaar takes a cube in his fingers and puts it between his teeth. Like everything Lazaar does, this act seems foreign, faintly unhygienic. I have a vision of Lazaar as a young boy. He is on the toilet. When he finishes, his mother stands over the bowl and stares down into the bowel movement he has made, examining the turds. She wipes him.

I sip my tea. Lazaar makes a slushing sound as he sucks his through the sugar. The heat and the wetness and the sweet taste are palpable for him, tactile, sensual. If I were not there he would grunt in pleasure. It comes to me again how well I understand Lazaar. For all the difference in our experience, for all our difference as persons, we might be
Doppelgängers.
Even when I am not with him I sometimes see him in some particular situation. I know how it is for Lazaar.

“Do you want more tea?” Lazaar asks. He smiles, his corrupt teeth stained, chipped, like the teeth of some careless animal.

Sweets, I think. I have a sense of all the candy, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of it, that Lazaar has eaten in his life.

“Yes,” I say, “the tea is very good.”

“There’s no more lemon.”

“I’m indifferent to lemon,” I say.

Lazaar laughs. “You’re indifferent to tea,” he says.

It has been so pleasant in Lazaar’s apartment, I have been so content just to sit with him, that I have almost forgotten why I am there. I see that Lazaar prefers me to leave. He knows there will be trouble for me, that I will be drawn in, if he kills himself in my presence. Lazaar is considerate. He is the kindest person I have ever known. Putting the lemon in my tea without first asking if I wanted it was, for him, an almost violent breach of conduct.

“Please,” I say, “I’d like some more tea. I really would.”

I drink four cups, five; Lazaar prepares another pot. I have to urinate but don’t dare leave him alone. Life is absurd.

“Another cup?” Lazaar asks.

“No.”

He sits down across from me and stares at me. I make him uncomfortable. I am rude to be there. Good— good I make him uncomfortable; good I am rude.

“Well, then,” Lazaar says finally, “let’s talk, then. Let’s have one of our conversations.”

“Why? Why, Lazaar? Why?”

“The trouble with you is that you think only in terms of life or death,” Lazaar says.

“What else is there?”

“Please. You’re involved or you’re not involved. I’m not involved.”

“Terrific.”

“Why are you angry? What do you think I ought to want?”

“Age.”

“Well, that,” he says mildly. “That’s easy. Live in a sealed room. Eat what the dietician says. Do moderate exercise. Take all the shots.”

“Sure.”

“Please,” he says patiently, “you’re still caught up in it. Of course you don’t understand.”

“You need a psychiatrist.”

He seems to consider this. “If I wanted to be cured,” he says. “I don’t need a psychiatrist any more than an arsonist needs the fire department.”

“I don’t understand suicide,” I say.

Lazaar looks at me. For a moment he seems genuinely interested, as though I have offered some fresh philosophical position. “That’s because you want to live forever,” he says quietly. I am startled to see the tears in his eyes. I have ruined it; I have ruined his death. He understands that it will bring me pain, that I will not forgive him. “Boswell,” he says, “please. I take no pleasure in my life. It gives me pain. If I could kill my feelings without harming myself I would settle for that. But that’s impossible. To continue to live would be a disloyalty to my needs.”

“I should have called the police,” I say.

“That wouldn’t make any difference. By the time they got to me I would have killed myself. I don’t mean to turn on the gas, to wait for the sink to fill with warm water. You must be made to understand there is nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Then why did you tell me about it? You must want me to do something.”

“That was a mistake,” Lazaar says sadly. “I meant to do you a favor.”

“Some favor.”

“Why? You’ve always wanted me to share a secret with you. This is my only secret.”

“That’s crazy. Nobody’s killing himself for me.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m not to blame.”

“No. Of course not,” Lazaar says.

“Then don’t give me that stuff.”

“I thought you’d be able to use it, to share it.”

“What the hell do I want with your death? I can’t use it. It’s off the record—not for publication.”

“I’m sorry,” he says gently.

There is a knife in his hand. It is ridiculously small, the one he uses to cut his lemons, perhaps. It glints dully in the warm kitchen. Like the dishes and the photographs, it seems familiar. Everything in my friend’s life is an old story to me.

“Maybe you’d better leave me alone now, Boswell. If something should happen, if someone were to see you, you could be accused of my murder.”

I lean across the table almost lazily and strike the knife from his hands. It is as if it has never occurred to him that I would be capable of hitting him. The knife skids on the metal surface of the table. It lands against the sugar bell, clattering faintly, harmlessly. He looks at me, startled, confused; shaking his head as if to clear some false vision from it, he reaches for the knife. I slap his wrist sharply and he pulls it back as if it has been burned. His eyes go dark and suddenly he seems stupid, incapable of any perception. Again he reaches for the knife. I punch him in the stomach and he doubles over foolishly in a classic, almost comic posture. I expect him to say “ooph.” I take up the knife and snap it in two. I drop the pieces on the floor. I have pulled up my chair beside him. He looks at me as if to protest; he has never been hit before. He slides off the chair onto the floor and on his knees grovels for the broken knife. I kick it from him, grazing his chin with my shoe. He falls and turns over on his back slowly. Now he has been hit and kicked for the first time in his life. He seems puzzled by it; violence is a strange food he is judiciously turning over in his mouth for the texture, the taste.

I pick up Lazaar and carry him to the telephone, and call the police.

November 30, 1957. New York City.

Lazaar is in Bellevue. They are observing him.

December 1, 1957. New York City.

Lazaar has told the doctors that he does not mean to kill himself, that he never meant to kill himself. They will give him psychiatric tests.

December 2, 1957. New York City.