Cast in Doubt (31 page)

I was at a loss. What is it about that sentence, “After all these years I can still remember…” that can always bring me to tears. Whenever I hear it or come upon it, even in a newspaper article, I weep copiously. I didn’t want to embarrass Gwen. Every one of us who has years more to live, if we do—and every one of us ought to be permitted three score and ten at the very least—every one of us will have a chance to look back and remember that and not that, this and not that…To recover, I muttered words, sentences, of this ilk to her.

Not only was this the first time in a long while, or ever, that Gwen had deliberately mentioned her family to me, it was the first time she had articulated so explicitly and plainly something of this nature, to me. With a start I realized again that Gwen was the one and only black person I was friends with and who was friends with me. That she had made such statements, with such emotion, about her history indicated a change in her, I believed, one that must have been painful to achieve, and perhaps indicated a change in me. A change in the times, too, I supposed. It was and is impossible to tell to what extent these things merged one into the other. This is the moment when, I believe, Gwen characterized us as the shrimp boats of history.

I was not certain what I should say. Gwen had not spoken in anger. She had not spoken to point a finger at me. I understood that much, I thought.

For a while we drank in silence, both of us musing and mulling over the many topics we had discussed. The restaurant had emptied and we were its last customers. We were closing the joint, as Gwen would put it. This was not at all unusual for us to do. In fact, over the years I have taken some pride in having helped toward that end many times. Gwen and I had tucked away several bottles of wine; I knew my morning would be ragged. But I didn’t care. I was content.

Suddenly Gwen startled me out of my reverie. She was laughing aloud, to herself. What’s so amusing? I asked. She could not yet speak, but she had stopped laughing, as abruptly as she had begun. She seemed to be laughing inwardly. “Lulu, Lulu,” Gwen managed to whisper. “What is it?” I urged. “How do I know what she thought?” “Who, dear?” “Or if she was mortified?” “Who, dear?” I asked again. “The maid, my friend’s maid,” Gwen answered. “Oh, yes,” I said, “I see.” But I wasn’t quite sure that I did, then.

Another surprise, though of a different order, was Gwen’s announcement that she might leave New York, even the States. I complained that she had no right, having teased me mercilessly about being an expatriate. Gwen took my hand and said that she would run away to Altoona, Pennsylvania, or become a Buddhist in Colorado, just get off the Great White Way. Broadway anyway. I urged her to move to Crete.

Gwen couldn’t bear it that Reagan had been elected President. I reported that Roger was over the moon about it. Not that Gwen had especially approved of the peanut farmer. She had been mildly puzzled, even somewhat disarmed, when Carter had spoken to the nation on TV, and, as she put it, had so hokily beamed himself to the American people to report on their malaise. “In French, Horace, he didn’t mean mayonnaise.” I repeated my hope that she’d move to Crete and live near me. She said she’d consider it. She has not yet decided. “You’re quaint, Lulu,” she said then. “Je t’adore.”

Later that night, spurred on by the dialogue with Gwen, it dawned on me—dawn it was: a fulgent light streaked across the sky simultaneous with this idea, this is absolutely true!—that what Horace had written, which I, as his namesake, often quoted, was correct. That I may have figuratively lived it—even literalized it—was perhaps, I decided, not such a terrible matter. It depended upon how one thought about such things. “With the change of names, the story is told about you.” A more modern translation of the Latin goes: “Change the name and you are the subject of the story.” Undoubtedly I had absorbed Horace’s words and allowed them to penetrate, to suffuse my mind and body, to subsume and consume me. I enjoyed that interpretation better than most of the others I dallied with. The break in my thinking, which I experienced and thought had occurred when I acknowledged, for one thing, that I was not always in control of the story, as I had imagined, probably flowed from this literary, this metaphorical, if not metaphysical, transformation. (At another dinner Gwen kidded me mercilessly about Roman, once I had surrendered that tale to her. Roman’s nonappearance was all she needed for one of her transformations. She galloped on about Roman, the novel, never returning, the novel’s death, the end of authors, readers, reading, and so on.)

One might well ask: Did Helen truly exist? Was there a Helen? And were I asked, I might answer: She existed for me. Or, there was a Helen for me. And she was not insipid at all.

I returned to Crete, sanguine that Gwen was all right, or all right enough. Ultimately she admitted that she had wanted me to visit her, but she had not wanted to ask me. I was immensely moved by this, since Gwen is someone who cannot ever make emotional demands. Yet I was able to meet one, one that had been implicit and unspoken. I felt I was not a bad sort after all. Some could and might see me as a thief and a liar. Helen had called me a liar. And it is true, I have lied. I can admit it now. But I’d rather put it differently: I’d rather it be said of me that Horace embellished truths only to make them shine more brilliantly!

It was in the aftermath of my visit with Gwen, and in this spirit, that I was able to look again at this journal. Also I was able to reread Helen’s diary. I did so last night, and it struck me differently. I have not looked at it, as I may have said, in years. This time I see more in it, or rather, different things in it, other meanings, which I will not bother to set out. I think I do see more because I am no longer, as Gwen explained, desperately looking for my name. I am taken particularly with Helen’s inclusion of Aesop’s fable about the jackdaw and the eagle. I recognize myself as one who thought he was an eagle. I ought to have known my limits. But how does one? Know thyself may be the question, not the answer. There may be a bit of truth in that.

It is curious. I am able to return to this journal, but I am no longer as certain of its meaning, to me, as I once might have been. I am not like Odysseus; this is not “the story of a man who was never at a loss.” I have been. I am rather insecure about what I have written—I am not sure what I mean or, worse, if it means anything at all. This fills me with horror. But I borrow from and follow Jean Genet: “To escape horror, bury yourself in it.”

Dear Reader, if I may call you that, if you and I are at all alike, if we share even a few traits, if you are even a little the way I was for the majority of my life, you may want to look back over this book, to exact from it a logic, to discern a plan. I am not saying there isn’t one. By now you know I am somewhat cagey. Gwen sometimes calls me KGB. I myself have often finished a book and gone back over it, checking the news items, for instance, to assure myself of the time and order of the developments. I have been wary, dubious that the writer had tied up all the loose ends. You may want to do that. I encourage you to do so if you wish. But I can tell you that it will explain little. Perhaps nothing. In any case, you will not find yourself here.

And here is where I will leave you. As Stan Green would have it: This is it, the big nothing. I’m leaving you with the big nothing. (In the intervening years I have written two more crime books, one titled
The Big Nothing
.)

Someone once said of Gertrude Stein, “It was not what she gave you, but what she didn’t take away.” One cannot give anyone anything. This is what I have learned. And while I do not leave you with anything, I do not take from you, either. If I have, I hope it is not an ordinary theft. This is what I have to offer. It is my gift, my only gift, to you. How I wish it were more!

In any case. I am working again on Household Gods, which now opens: After all these years I can still remember…I could not resist that temptation. At seventy, the only things one ought to resist are tat and salt. I have decided to cast Gwen in Household Gods; indeed, she will have a rather major role to play. I have also decided to return Helen’s diary to her. I will think of a way to do it that will not incriminate me, and that will in some way please her. Someday I will find her and I will give it to her.

Now I will dress and walk to the market. It is a glorious day.

※

I’d like to thank C. Carr for encouraging me to do a book set in New York; Tom Keenan for our discussions, his enthusiasm and acuity; the MacDowell Colony for giving me a wonderful place to write, and all the people who contributed jokes: David Hofstra, Joe Wood, Paul Shapiro, Bob DiBellis, Eiliot Sharp, Mark Wethli, Jane Gillooly, Rick Lyon, James Welling, John Divola. Marc Ribot, Dennis Cooper, Larry Gross, Charlotte Carter, Andrea Blum, Osvaldo Golijov, Martha Wilson, Michael Smith, Dick Connette, Charles Karubian, and many others whose jokes have become mine. I’d like especially to thank Richard Kupchinsksas, Debbie Negron, and Ginette Schenk for talking with me for this project.

Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include
American Genius, A Comedy
(2006),
No Lease on Life
(1998) which was a
New York Times
Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award,
Cast in Doubt
(1992),
Motion Sickness
(1991), and
Haunted Houses
(1987).
The Broad Picture
(1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at
Fence
Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

This is a
Red Lemonade
book, also available in all reasonably possible formats: in limited artisan-produced editions, in trade paperback editions, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community.

A word about this community. Over my years in publishing, I learned that a publisher is the sum of all its constituent parts: above all the writers, of course, and yes, the staff, but also all the people who read our books, talk about our books, support our authors, and those who want to be one of our authors themselves.

So I started a company called
Cursor
, designed to make these constituent parts fit better together, into a proper community where, finally, we could be greater than the sum of the parts. The Red Lemonade publishing community is the first of these and there will be more to come—for the current roster of communities, see the Cursor
website
.

For more on how to participate in the
Red Lemonade
publishing community, including the opportunity to share your thoughts about this book, read what others have to say about it, and share your own manuscripts with fellow writers, readers, and the Red Lemonade editors, go to the Red Lemonade
website
.

Also, we want you to know that these sites aren’t just for you to find out more about what we do, they’re places where you can tell us what you do, what you want, and to tell us how we can help you. Only then can we really have a publishing community be greater than the sum of its parts.

All the best,
Richard Nash

This book was originally published by Poseidon, a Simon & Schuster imprint, in 1992. It was edited by Ann Patty.

It was reissued in the UK by Serpent’s Tail in 1993, where Pete Ayrton was the publisher.

Jeffrey Yozwiak, Cursor’s first intern, scanned it from the Serpent’s Tail edition and hand-coded it to an ePub file.

Lisa Duggan, Daniel Schwartz, and Richard Nash proofread it.

India Amos performed technical quality control.

If you enjoyed
Cast in Doubt
, may we recommend other books by Lynne Tillman?

In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In
Haunted Houses
, Tillman writes of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.

“In
Haunted Houses
, Lynne Tillman chronicles the loneliness of childhood and incipient womanhood, the salvation of friendship, and the neurotic chain that binds perpetually needy daughters to their perpetually self-absorbed parents… Her style is spare and compelling, the effect of clinical authenticity.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Ms. Tillman’s characters are rigorously drawn, with a scrupulous regard for the truth of their inner lives… this is one of the most interesting works of fiction in recent times… Fans of both truth and fancy should find nourishment here.”

—
LA Weekly

“Lynne Tillman’s protagonists are so lifelike, engaging and accessible, one could overlook, though hardly remain unaffected by, the quality of her prose, with its unique balancing of character interrogation and headlong entertainment. Haunted Houses achieves that hardest of things: a fresh involvement of overheard life with the charisma of intelligent fiction. Its pleasures pull their weight.”