Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (11 page)

The duality of his signals perplexed me. This man, as psychotherapy would say, entered other people's bubbles. He did not respect that invisible membrane —
noli me tangere,
the circle drawn round us with consecrated chalk. The space freezes. Only a whirling tremble divides us, one that knows full well what it is doing. It admits only love and aggression. When lovers and brawlers embrace, it opens wide like a door on a sensor, letting the intruder inside. Everyone's bubble is a different size. Mine is just big enough. I can't stand claps
on the shoulder, indiscriminate familiarity, or confidences. I sit in my bubble — rather satisfied, a little hostile, and self-possessed.

Dr. M., as I called him, also seemed rather satisfied, a little hostile, and most of all self-possessed. His self-possession was as rigid as an inflated plastic bag. It was remarkably rare to see him smile. He never confided anything. I remember well his personal scent: he smelled like toothpaste. Dr. M. was always meticulously clean; the only thing disturbing the impression that he had just rolled out of a car wash was the dark pink band across his forehead, some sort of birthmark.

For one brief moment we reached the threshold of love, but it brought us no closer. We never dropped the formalities. He did not have the key to my garden.

After that first time, we began to meet sporadically and — as I would call it today — exchange brain outputs. We were two reviewers conversing. No one reading a stenographic record of our meetings would see in them a young man and woman. His indifference would have suited me perfectly (at a time when I was strangely deaf to the world of emotions, when my immature and unengaged heart felt as tough as a turnip), were it not for that violent familiarity perpetrated on my bubble.

Boundaries create plotlines. Border skirmishes and balk plowing provide the fuel of history. Limits in space and time are literary stimuli.

“Today's prose is nothing but monologue,” he was saying. “Its growing incomprehensibility springs not from any formal characteristics, but rather from a fundamental resignation to its failure to be understood. The author does not want to be understood, because he does not even understand himself. He is showing
us that comprehension is impossible. The omniscient author is passé. This century has realized that knowledge always comes too late. It resolves nothing and does not protect mankind from anything.”

As he spoke, he leaned over so close that my bubble, in a panicky defense, shot off an electrostatic charge, arced across and clung to his face like a death mask made of freezer wrap.

“We're wrong,” he said with unusual gravity. “We're not ourselves, we're not in ourselves, and we're never where we ought to be.”

I'd already ruled out the possibility that he was hard of hearing. On the contrary, he had sensitive hi-fi ears, and more than once we exchanged a noisy pub for a cocoon of quiet, for the empty corners of exceedingly vile bistros, and there conducted our lethargic, wobbly, pointless conversations, at a safe distance from anything that could touch us. What did we talk about? About “archetypal natural settings.” About “mythical elements of reality.” About “the profanization of the leitmotif of coincidence and of any defining moment.” About things that exist and do not exist, and whose pale veins teem with paper blood.

It was — it should have, would have, could have been — a happy sexless nothing. Two hermaphroditic brains floated in a solution of irresponsibility: ageless, outside reality, without a future. If only we had not been so tinglingly close to each other that our auras' furs bristled with crackling violet sparks.

He had the unmistakable imago of a bachelor: a narrow-gauge intellectual sense of humor, his screws sunk tight. He was married but never spoke of his wife, except in passing (“I'll be away, but my wife will send it to me.”). I learned somewhere that she was an anesthesiologist, substantially older than him, and apparently very
beautiful. I didn't think about her, beautiful or not.

We met more and more often, practically every day. He began to walk me home (garden, site, shed, steps), but otherwise our meetings were no different from before, except maybe for a certain facility. We skipped a step in our development. In half a year we were an aging married couple, with his indifferent faithfulness and weary sensuality. He would wait for me at the university. We would go to movies or exhibits. Everyone believed we were lovers, but we only listened to each other with half an ear and were no closer than two stuffed lizards.

Sometimes it seemed to me that everything was already behind us: sobs of passion, rampages, dragging each other by the hair. That it had happened long ago, in some other time that we had already forgotten. We were an old couple on a look-out tower. The world lay far below us; the bare, distant trees stuck up from the horizon like spikelets on a blade of wheat.

Twice in my life there have been times when the whole world of feelings, with its demonic dankness, has seemed incomprehensibly foreign to me, artificial to its very core, affected and cloying. The first time, I was ten: romance novels enticed me into an exuberant arrogance and a know-it-all cheerfulness. The second was now: without knowing why, I had escaped the force field of love for a year or two, and its vibrations did not pass through me. Maybe a third will soon be upon me, and this time it will last. Certainly our friendship, if you can call it that, was the best thing I could have wished for. It freed me from the opprobrious stigma of solitude. Concepts and phrases formed a haze around us. Thanks to them, I was at peace, and I did not have to dance the tortuous courtship dances of my age. Only I never did see how Dr. M. profited from this strange relationship.

Before Christmas we casually said our good-byes, exchanged presents (books for books, of course), and set a meeting for January. We were such strangers to each other that neither thought to ask how the other was spending the holidays. I stayed at home with my parents and then set off to Budapest for a New Year's Eve concert.

The train chugged across a flat, charmless landscape; heaps of thawing snow dotted the fields like sour cream. I dozed for part of the night, and woke to the slanted rays of the early morning sun. The train cars were divided into rows with two seats each. In the sharp, immature light of daybreak I saw a singular woman sitting across the aisle from me. I hadn't noticed her before.

She had the classic profile and indeterminate age of a beauty bred in the bone; she could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. A knot of hair, jet black, and a guarded face too carefully made up. She gave the impression she had not slept at all, but had kept watch all night, staring intently into the dark. Directors classify all female roles as blondes or brunettes. And they don't mean hair color. Everyone understands what they mean. Ophelia is blonde, like vanilla pudding. Lady Macbeth is nothing if not brunette.

I took her for a Hungarian. Not only because of her hair — it was more her air of foreignness: addressing her in Czech was out of the question. Addressing her at all was out of the question. Her bubble was like a concrete shelter.

When I spotted her, she had just begun to remove the rings on her long, pale fingers. She had advertising hands; her nails were traffic-light red. Slowly, with single-minded attentiveness, she took off ring after ring (there were seven of them, one a wedding band), carefully laid them aside on the fold-down tray, and then slowly and thoroughly began to rub an expensive, artificial-smelling cream into her hands. The procedure was an unusually long one, and the woman stared at her hands the whole time like a surgeon during an operation.

This spectacle fascinated me. By itself it was ordinary: there was nothing special about a woman putting lotion on her hands in
the morning. But there was something strange in her tenacity. She set the cream aside and put the seven rings back on. She did not look around or glance out the window. For a while she sat and stretched her fingers. Then she removed her rings again, this time in anxious haste, set them on the tray and applied another dose. She rubbed in the cream, grinding one hand against the other. Her knuckles were white. Her face remained impassive as she wrung her hands in a gesture of utmost despair.