Boswell (43 page)
It was wonderful. I felt the special immunity of my elation. I was a genuinely charming man. I oozed not sophistication so much as a sort of genial novelty. Men could restore themselves in my presence. I went among them like someone bearing a gift; it was life itself I was prepared to show them. I could join any of these people. I had things to tell them all. I could speak to the point about triumphs and about times I thought the game was up; I could bring them my life as a happy lesson in persistence, turning it before them like some bright crystal to catch the sun. Perhaps Margaret even got as good as she gave. It was only a pity that I was taking her away to America before I had the opportunity to prove it. I was the incarnate American-con-artist-adventurer-rustler-Mississippi-river-boat-gambler, a sort of Medici in my own right, or what narrowly passed for right among the breed. Add to this the fact that I was an understander, going the merely compassionate one better, and Margaret came out almost ahead.
Was this what they meant by happiness? Why, it was wonderful to be happy. I would have tried it years ago had I known. Suddenly I felt I had to sit down to think about it. Very carefully I held the crease in my morning trousers and sat down beneath a tree. I placed my top hat beside me.
Margaret came up. “You’ll stain your clothes,” she said.
“Margaret,” I said, “until ten minutes ago I never felt cute. Now I feel it. I feel waves of cuteness. Am I cute, Margaret? I mean really
cute?
It’s very important.”
“Well, you’re more curious than cute,” she said. She stepped back happily to appraise me. “You know, I never noticed before, but you don’t wear clothes very well. Boswell, you’re a little slobby.”
“But am I
cute?”
“No,” she said seriously. “Your real charm is your despair. I married you for it.”
“It’s left me, Margaret,” I said. “I don’t feel it any more.”
“It will come back.”
“I hope so, Margaret.”
“It will come back,” she said. “Just think of death.” I had told Margaret about death.
I contemplated death for a while. At first it seemed difficult, far-fetched among these lovely people in this lovely garden, but by degrees it began to take on its old validity. I pretended it was two years hence. Already the garden seemed not so crowded, a little desolate even, the voices more subdued. The infirm old king was gone, and two or three of the other old people. I projected five years into the future. There was not much change. Some of the younger people had come into their prime and many of the old ones still hung on. I increased the tempo, stepping up the future by ten years, fifteen. Now you could see the difference. The place was half empty. If you didn’t know better you might have thought there had been a war. Nate Lace was gone. Penner, that old saint, had been gathered to his reward. I pushed time ahead another two years. It was child’s play now; I need only leap ahead by months, even by weeks, to empty the garden. In another year Margaret herself would be gone. And I wasn’t feeling too good either.
It was my statistic trick and it always worked. Whenever things got to looking up, whenever the sense of fate seemed to leave me, the old confidence in withering catastrophe, I would think of the future in order to restore order to my life. It’s amazing. You’re sitting in a crowded theater and you think, One of these people will die in an automobile accident this year, eleven will have heart attacks, seven will be stricken by cancer, two will be shot, one will commit suicide, four will die of blood diseases, three of wounds that will not heal. And so on. And so forth.
“You’ll really have to get up,” Margaret said.
“I was getting up,” I said.
“The Grand Master wants to see you. He sent me to look for you.”
“Why?”
“Well, to talk to you. He’s a little angry, I think.”
“Why?”
“I told him about the settlement I made on you,” Margaret said.
“It’s not his business,” I said. “He can tell the White Pope, but he can’t tell me.”
“Of course he can’t, darling, and I’m sure he won’t say very much, but he wants you to explain it.”
At the palace the Grand Master was in his study, a young priest told me. He took me to the huge double doors and knocked for me. A voice answered, and the priest nodded and left me. I pushed the heavy doors and entered a remarkable room. I had expected books, rich carpets, a fat, illuminated globe, but it was empty except for a crucifix and a very long table. The table was familiar from the movies: people drank mead at it. I expected to see it bruised from so many heavy mugs having been thumped against it. There were high casement windows all the way around the room; the effect was somehow like being in a cloister. The shutters on all but one of the windows had been pulled and fight came into the room queerly angled through this single window as though it were a gangplank fixed to a ship, or, perhaps purposefully, some oddly illuminated tunnel that led to heaven. The table had been placed along the wall opposite the door, as if it had been set there to make room for dancing. The arrangement unbalanced the huge room and I didn’t seem to walk so much as pitch forward into it. Ah, the Jesuitical intelligence, I thought.
The Grand Master had placed himself in silhouette in front of the open window at the far side of the long table. He had removed his ceremonial vestments and was dressed now in the plain suit of the ordinary priest. As I stepped toward him I felt like someone in a black and white film. The bright gardens behind him seemed part of a different world.
Despite my boasts to Nate, I had taken the Grand Master for granted. Margaret had explained the tradition of his marrying all the Medicis. It went back five centuries. Until now it hadn’t puzzled me that I had become involved with something that had gone on for five centuries. Well, so what? Nobody ever said man’s traditions were mortal.
Though he had spoken in a firm, clear voice a moment ago, the Grand Master now seemed to be asleep. He was an old man, as old as Herlitz had been. His face, as difficult to see in that dark room as if it had been in a painting in a church, seemed even in repose faintly cruel,
used to power. It was no different from the Renaissance faces I had seen in portraits in the Uffizi when I had gone with Margaret to Florence. (Margaret still had rooms there—that was part of the five centuries, too—though her family had given the palace to the state long ago.) It was a pale face with a surprising patch of red on each cheek, faintly like the high spoiled blush painted on dolls. It was undeniably handsome, though drained by its long familiarity with power, as though power were a sort of bad habit like alcohol or narcotics that ultimately ravaged the features. Its expression was what people euphemistically called “aristocratic,” and was at least one part a faint fear and two parts a boredom with the stupidity of others’ responses. Clearly, the Grand Master loved a mystery. To give myself the advantage I tried to imagine him naked, on the toilet, dead. I couldn’t; he had a tenacious dignity and I began, despite myself, to admire him.
“You are not what is called ’a good Catholic,’ are you?” the old man asked suddenly.
Surprise me no surprises, I thought. “I try to be,” I said.
“Do you?” he said. “I watched you before. You fumbled with the rituals.”
“I’m a convert, Grand Master. It’s still somewhat new to me.”
“I hope there has been no mistake in making this marriage.”
“Because I didn’t make the sign of the Cross smoothly?”
“You made it very smoothly,” he said.
Runs deep, I thought. Familiar type. Recognize him from literature. Marvelous when you meet him in life. Grand Master, Grand Inquisitor. Grand. Lee J. Cobb plays him in the picture. Good guy or bad? Hard to tell. But, I thought, that’s it. To be like that. That’s the ideal. Cryptic wisdom. Talk like a double acrostic. Never raise your voice when you shout. Spiritual politics. Run scared. Every day a new election. Move! Manipulate! Mold! Power the still center at the core of motion. That’s it. That’s it. Seen everything, been there before; nothing new under the sun. Past so long you’re already immortal. Never sick a day in your life but always in pain. Anguish in the smell of a rose. Heart, strategies, philosophy. Wisdom, the black art!
So much for you. It boils down to death, statistics. Everybody dies. Death is my argument. Leave me alone.
“My wife”—he would understand the thrust—“ My wife has told me that you are angry about the settlement. I’ll try to explain it to you.”
“The settlement is a matter of indifference to me,” the Grand Master said.
“Of course,” I said. “I understand that. She has made me a wealthy man. That part was her idea, anyway. I know you don’t object to that—you don’t care who has the wealth as long as someone has it. I think perhaps it’s The Club you’re interested in.”
I began to explain about The Club.
The truth is we haven’t caught on. We are so lonely. Margaret asks, Are we happy, and the question makes me furious and sad. I put her off with a joke. I read our bank balance. I point to the carpet and indicate its thickness with my forefinger and thumb. I bring her to the kitchen and show her our meats.
I tell Margaret that she is my war bride. The fact is she seemed actually to diminish when we went through customs. The man asked if we had anything to declare and Margaret stared at him as if she didn’t understand the question. When he asked again she looked at me and I thought she would cry.
“No, nothing,” I said. “We have nothing to declare.” You know how it is when you make a mistake.
I can’t explain it. We are out of touch. Not with each other, but mutually, with everything.
Hawthorne tells a story about a man named Wakefield who left his home one evening and didn’t return for twenty years. His act was a whim, unpremeditated, but it made no difference; if he had come back a week later it would already have been too late. One must never break the rhythm of his life. You stay in lockstep or you suffer. Every vacation is an upheaval. I have seen men at the seashore whose free time is the most grotesque of burdens. They are haunted by the idea of things going on without them, of someone at the office doing their job, opening their mail, answering their phone. It’s an intimation of death. You have to make a life, however grab-bag or eccentric; there has to be routine, pattern. I’ve failed there. Something about my life gives my life away, something improvised and sad. At my dinner parties there are mismatched dishes, chairs, plastic spoons. I was better off alone, I think. There was desperation to keep me going. It’s all what you’re used to. For me running scared is the only way to travel. Poor is what I know best, and there are times when I can almost taste the old degradation of the bones—ten minutes for a rest stop, pee, spit, and regret, talking to the driver beside the big open underbelly of the bus where the cardboard suitcase goes, the box tied up with string.
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what to tip. A grown man!
There are “executive flights” now and I am on them and there is always monogrammed linen and the best booze in my attaché case, but the truth is I was never less attaché. I have heard the stewardesses singing each to each, I do not think that they will sing to me.
Well, the grass is never greener, I always say. The course of true life never did run smooth.
When as a child I was home ill everything was fine until the others came back and I heard their voices and laughter outside. Then something would happen inside me, in my heart, and I’d have to get up and shut the window. To this day the most awful sound for me is a conversation overheard, people talking to each other in a restaurant at the next table, behind me on a bus. I swear, sometimes I feel already like a ghost.
For me envy isn’t a sin, it seems, but a fact. I need it to live, like air. Sometimes I think, If I’d lived more to the purpose… Crap! Who has lived more to the purpose than myself? No; disappointment, like rotten fruit, is always the last thing left in the larder. Things pall. The world’s appalling. A’palling. It goes like a song.
Each day the conviction grows. I’m going to die.
I’m going to die.
I’ll tell you how far it’s gone: I’ve stopped smoking; there are seatbelts in my automobiles; I will not have phosphorescent dials on my clocks; I watch my cholesterol; I am wary of air-conditioning. All that can be done I do. It means nothing.
Nothing.
For a year we lived like tourists in our own city. We went to all the shows, the movies, the museums, the public buildings. Three times we went on the boat around Manhattan island, five times to the top of the Empire State Building. For a sense of belonging we took out library cards. We joined the clubs that send you merchandise or books. Making our fastidious choices provided us with the illusion of will. Margaret learned to cook. I learned nothing.
I sent money to my son’s grandmother, enclosing with the checks long letters. I wanted my boy, I said, and outlined the advantages I could bestow upon him now. When she opposed my plans I was glad, for that allowed me to continue to compose the letters. Like the book clubs, these gave me the illusion of somehow shaping a domesticity. Something ritualistic had been absent from my life always, I recognized, was absent still. I made a conscious effort to live as others lived, but I noticed that whenever I did the things other people did, I felt strangely incognito—as if, like all orphans, I was ultimately at home only in the homes of others. It cannot be good for me to have an address, my own phone number. I have been too long bizarre. Domestic
dibbuks
have claimed me. Ah, I think, reality flattens everything, despite its being good for us. (One must come to grips, they say. If they mean I must embrace pain, that’s redundant. What the hell
isn’t
reality; who doesn’t face up to it?)
I had my ruses; they were legion. Sometimes I read the obituaries in newspapers for the opportunity they gave me of further rituals. In my files there is an example. From the
Times
of October 19, 1960:
ELWORTHAM. On October 18, 1960, peacefully, in his sleep, at his home, 143 Bell Avenue, Brooklyn, Edward J. Elwortham, aged 59. Beloved husband of Frances, dear father of Robert. Funeral service 11:30
A.M.
, Friday, October 20, 1960. Phizer’s Chapel, 71 Avenue C, Brooklyn, N.Y. No flowers.