Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (29 page)

Do you know an Elizabethan play called
A Warning for Fair Women
? Luther, I know it not. Gooood. You’ve learned to light up your areas of ignorance. Actually, one can practice being proud of not knowing some things: how to bowl, for instance. Such an attitude is very disconcerting to those who had thought themselves superior on account of their lime Jell-O salad or the size of their stamp collection. Not having read the book or seen the movie everybody is talking about. Not being natty. Not owning a car though you know how to drive. Not being there.

Anyway, in this characteristic drama a ghost comes whining and crying to be avenged.
Vindicta
, it asks. Like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, though less manfully. I’m impressed at the amount of vengeance that was hired out in former times. Not very honorable. But even the honorable thing has its mean and cheaty
side. Remember the moment when Hamlet, prompted by his father to avenge his murder, comes upon the usurper, Claudius, kneeling and praying to his no-doubt forgetful and forgiving God. Now might I do it easily, Hamlet thinks. Now. Why not now? Because then we wouldn’t have a play, I brightly say … delay, delay. Quite, Penner responds with dry politeness. The Inquisition gave a different answer. I was supposed to be confounded by this shift of venue, and I was. Hamlet would seem cowardly, I offer. Quite so, yes. But … Luther is silent until I say what? You’ve forgotten. Hamlet has a splendid excuse. If he kills the king while the king is praying, the king’s soul might take flight to heaven, and Hamlet wants to send that soul straight to perdition.
There …
there is a secret revenge indeed. The Inquisition, with an opposite intention, used to torture its heretics until they confessed and were shriven. Then it
auto da fé
’d them (as if Hell were here) before they could relapse into sin again, saving their souls in the bargain. Clever, these Jesuits. Good fellows all: by this means they had their vindictive pleasure, scared their fellow believers into even finer conformity, redeemed a whole bunch of lapsed coupons, and got in good with their God by one turn of the rack and scratch of the match.

I waited through a long silence. Then: scratch of the match, Luther repeated, as if deep in meditation. I wonder how many cases of arson … are … Easy to do. Hard to halt. Hellfire. Fun to watch. Difficult to detect.

The maddened postal clerk … The low put-upon person … Snap … but now not like a twig … a grenade … Become a gun and go off … Remember Faulkner’s annoyance when he worked as a postal clerk: being at the beck and call of any asshole with three cents for a stamp. Spray the office … shoot from a campanile … tick tock … tick tock … Luther’s gaze would cloud, voice drift away.

The whore who adores giving sailors syphilis, the guy with
AIDS who adores making whores HIV poz. Luther’s spoon draws the plus, as if on the end of his nose. Typhoid Mary, on the other hand, was an innocent carrier. Like the transmitter of bad genes. But these cases teach us—see?—to see the difference between the specific victim of some revenge such as Ippolito’s brother was, with its focus on Don Giulio’s eyes, and the generic subject of a retribution like Alcibiades’ move against Athens, or an impersonal disdain for some Universal like Swift’s dislike of Man.

These distinctions, which might have been subheaded and neatly numbered, I found drawn out in detail in Penner’s journals. There, revenges which were carried out against substitutes the way Satan tempted Eve to get back at God are carefully distinguished from hostage situations, scapegoats, and random misplacements. The measurements for appropriate requitals are taken with a tailor’s care. Symbolic revenges (burning the flag, for instance) are duly noted and evaluated. Sports and other games are rated for their revenge factor: hockey gets the highest marks. Throwing at a batter’s head is seen to be very complex, since the pitcher who is carrying out the revenge is rarely the one who was earlier hit, but is retaliating for the team, and the batter about to be hit is seldom the initial villain either.

Luther made immense lists of massacres carried out to teach towns and/or countries a lesson, and these lists were accompanied by careful evaluations of the results, usually futile. Tribal feuds, racial hatreds, ritual retributions: they were all present and accounted for.

There is the verbal vengeance of the quick-witted, who take people down from their pegs, like meat-lockered pigs, and cut them up, and the presumably acceptable revenge we call the practical joke: whoopee cushions, eh? Penner blows burbles through his lips. Drinking glasses guaranteed to spill something on your tie. Plastic turds. Rubber snakes. An industry.

Then suddenly Luther returned to Hamlet, as, I discovered, he so often did. Why didn’t the king’s ghost go fright Claudius out of his widow’s bed? throw a baleful glow on the usurper’s gonads as they incesticated the sheets? say in the ear that had his own ear poisoned: remember me … Remember me? The handle of Luther’s utensil reamed his right ear. The gesture lacked class. It resembled the thumb in the … as I’ve already reported.

I’m sure there is a reason, I say. Penner nods. You’re learning. Maybe a lawyer yet. A reason. At least a cause. Yes. Probably because the ghost can walk only at certain hours and in certain lacks of light, for when the cock crows to warn of the arrival of rosy-fingered dawn, the ghost feels summoned, and fades away as mist does. Or it is angered into absence because the crowing is a signal that Claudius’ cock is coming in the cunt of the queen, where the ghost once came, so that now it must go away in shame. The ghost wears armor like Gabriel, remember. I wonder whether he has ghostly private parts as well as ghostly shield and buckler. Penner’s look had withdrawn as if to another room. My spoon, my baton, has beat a bad tune and must be disciplined. He snapped the plastic handle from its plastic bowl and dropped them both in his nearly empty thick white china cup. So the interesting question is—beside the cock’s crowing to remind us of Peter’s denials and … yours of me—is whether Hamlet is to revenge his father’s murder because he is his father’s son, or whether he is to do it because he is the Prince and has royal obligations. In only the latter sense is his requitaling Christian according to Saint Thomas.

How so, I say, but I am in a quandary, or a daze, because I had never heard such language from Penner, nor would I hear it again. He was never a foulmouth despite his crooked, occasionally green teeth. Moreover, his violent gesture was not customary either, as far as I knew. I didn’t understand its rhetorical intent, though I knew there must be one.

A reason. Or cause. A reason.

Luther Penner was no stranger to coarseness, no more than his namesake, who used to curse the Devil in the Devil’s tongue. Yet he confined it to his journals, notes, and letters, which, as I’ve said, are frank to the point of painfulness, and to one public pronouncement—the notorious “Immodest Proposal”—a publication which led to the culminating catastrophe.

Whoever takes vengeance on the wicked, when it is done on behalf and with the sanction of the state, does so with God’s blessing, because God, busy with other things, and with his hands full of wretches who deserve whipping, delegates his sacred powers to the princes; and the princes (who are more devoted to hunting) pass it on to judges and policemen. It is really the Mighty Mikado who is doing the revenging after all. Only by remote control. From beyond a cloud. Through anointed orders.

Oops. Hamlet runs Polonius through through the curtain, the arras too, and through Polonius in consequence, but the punctures he makes in cloth, place, and Polonius he makes as a private person. It was, of course, an accident as well, and an oops of the most careless kind. On Laertes falls the burden of revenge, but it is an onus which is politically and religiously unsanctioned. Even if it is his dad. Penner poked at the plastic pieces and then rose to go. You didn’t drink your coffee, he noticed. I let it get cold. Good idea.

Throughout these after-class meetings, which were about to end, I had always been painfully aware of our surroundings, not just of the bright polished plastic interior of The Cow’s Lick Café, but of our central seating—open, unprotected, obvious—and of Penner’s not loud but penetrating voice, and certainly of his expansive gesturing and Stukka-diving spoon. Our conversation was not something others would overhear with any
understanding. On the contrary, I thought. Consequently I snuck peeks at our company while Penner’s eyes fished in the dark void which existed before the first word. There were a few regulars and one or two solitaries nearby who had obviously taken note of us, but that seemed to be it. I longed for wood paneling and low light and red vinyl banquettes, high-backed booths and a bit of privacy.

It was not to be. The last evening of class it rained rather ferociously and Penner pedaled home through the downpour tented in a dark tarp like a waning ghost himself with hardly the sort of lengthy adieu I’d hoped for. I got goodby but no address, no “it’s been good,” no “let’s get together sometime,” no number for a phone. Upon reflection, I realized I hadn’t given him my address or phone number either, or said it’s been a pleasure, let’s get together, cuddle up to a cup of java in a cozy dark place I know … no, I had ridden away in the watermelon weather, watching the ground, hunched in my slicker like someone homeless, as, in a way, I was.

I had time to ponder Penner’s incipient Manichaeanism, but I mainly wondered why anyone would be rehashing such an ancient heresy in our time. It also seemed to me easily misunderstood and mistaken for Satanism. This was a feeling which proved unhappily prophetic. If anyone had overheard him say (and it would have been easy) “God hated Lucifer’s intelligence; He always preferred faith”: what would they have thought? And I’d had hints of Penner’s growing fear of women. He simply would not talk to or look at them.

Which is perhaps why he got in such trouble with his landlady, Mrs. Ollie Sowers. Luther, at this time, was living in three attic rooms of Mrs. Sowers’ tall bluff-built house on Peak Street. When I went to visit him I had a lot of steps to climb. There was a wide wood-railed stairway which led to the front door, since
the main floor was already half a story in the air. The stairs to the second were naturally narrower but commodious enough. However, Luther was obliged to use the former servants’ staircase all the way to the attic, which he didn’t mind, privacy was important to him, although the passage was narrow and dark, the steps steep, and Mrs. Sowers had the annoying habit of stashing cleaning equipment and stacks of mags on various treads, pretty much catch-as-catch, so you couldn’t even predict where obstacles might be and prepare to avoid them. Luther pointed out to Mrs. Sowers that when he was carrying a fat package or a sack of groceries he couldn’t see his feet or spot the dangers, and that it would be better all round if she could find another place to put the mop bucket or her out-of-date
Woman’s Days
.

Luther said he spoke most politely to her about it, and I believe him, since he wasn’t a forceful sort, but Mrs. Sowers got snappish, and continued to clutter his climb with her cleaning compounds. So Luther kicked a stack of
Liberty Magazines
into a slither. Unfortunately, they simply stayed where they’d slid, making the stairway even more treacherous. “Watch where you’re going and you’ll get by,” she told him, using a haughty contemptuous tone which simply asked to be repaid. Penner, with the simplicity of solution, and the self-sacrifice characteristic of genius, fearlessly flung himself from a top step one morning, a buttered English muffin in his fist—what an inspired touch—and lay on the first floor landing in broken-legged pain an hour before his howls were heard.

It was, oddly enough, because of this feat that I saw him again, for there was a small note about the accident and the ensuing lawsuit in the neighborhood freebie sheet which mentioned the hospital where Luther was recuperating. I took myself, as they say, to his side. He was surprised and not undelighted to see me, and soon we were talking as freely as before. Penner had repeated one of his previous mistakes: failing to
consider all the consequences. He had not counted on having quite so many injuries: a cracked rib, a cracked—was it?—shin, lots of bruises, and a swollen nose. Not to worry, even though he’d been let go by his most recent employers the day before, because he had been given the customary ten days’ notice and was therefore still covered by the company’s insurance, which certainly served them right.

My area of study enabled me to counsel him on a few legal matters, and I did a bit of fact checking for his case. The Widow Sowers told me she couldn’t bear the boy, as she called him, because he was untidy and smelled bad and stood sideways to her when she talked to him. Odd as last apples, she said he was. Luther had at least one leg to stand on, and that should have been sufficient. The Widow Sowers hadn’t that much, so her insurance company paid up pretty promptly, though Penner wouldn’t tell me to the penny how much. It was still enough to install him in a building with an elevator—he had to use a cane for quite a while—though Luther did regret losing the widow’s bluffside view, which gave him a long look over the tracks to a ribbon of river he could occasionally see between the leaves of a few scrubby trees.

While on the mend, with me seated by his bed, Luther spoke bitterly about his behavior. Revenge ruled the world. That he knew. That was his creed. Alas, he had not been able to live up to his ideal, partly because it wasn’t formulated yet. Mrs. Ollie Sowers suspected something, he was sure, and he’d had to pay a price in pain and disability he shouldn’t have had to pay if he’d played his cards right.

During his hospital stay, Penner had apparently decided to let his beard grow. He sported (if I dare use so predictable a word) a small though poorly trimmed moustache and an equally modest and badly barbered goatee. These were joined to one another by a thin line of hair along the sides of his mouth, so
that it was now surrounded by a gentle growth of whisker—a den in which his teeth lay like a heap of wet stones.

After Penner had gotten installed in his new apartment, he invited me over—yes—it was for coffee. We sat in his kitchenette at a little enamel-topped table whose dropped ends he’d awkwardly lift to make room for my knees. He appeared tired, in an interior sort of way. There was so much to do, he said, every day. At the bicycle shop, where he’d taken his tires once again to be repaired, a young lad had sneered at their condition. At the Healthy Harvest store where he’d stopped to purchase some organic and unchemical’d pretzels, an elderly woman had held up the line of customers who were checking out by examining every fold in her purse with nearshot eyes, searching for those pennies which would provide her with exact change, thereby placing her nerdy little need over the patience of others. And the checkout girl (for a girl she was) had assumed he—Penner—was a vegetarian. What an unnecessary insult. And in the mail this morning he’d received a dun for a debt only one week overdue! While Luther was crossing the street, a mere moment behind the light, one of the local yokels had honked at him. He had the car’s description. Penner held up a list. It was long, I could see that much, and was written on paper taken from a roll of cash register tape. Some items had been crossed out. This is just one week’s worth of slights and requitals. The tape, it turned out, was one of the latter.