Kafka Was the Rage (10 page)

The detective had a car and we rode in silence to the Charles Street station, where we went up a flight of stairs to a large room with wooden desks and pale gray-green walls. Except for us, the room was empty. There wasn’t so much crime in those days.

The detective, whose name was something like Scanlon, took the painting from me and stood it on the desk, leaning it against the wall. A Miss Sheri Donatti, he said, had reported the theft of a valuable painting and had named me as the probable perpetrator.

I stared at him because I didn’t want to look at the painting, which embarrassed me in that room. It was like the time I had come home to find Sheri sitting in my mother’s lap. She specialized in such juxtapositions. I didn’t steal it, I said. She gave it to me.

Scanlon shook his head, like a pitcher shaking off a catcher’s sign.

The painting is named after me, I said. It’s her idea of a joke to pretend that I stole it.

People are always joking, Scanlon said, but the law has to take them seriously.

What am I supposed to do? I said. I didn’t ask for a bill of sale when she gave it to me. Do I look like a thief?

Scanlon was wearing a gray double-breasted suit and a pale blue fedora. Detectives had to wear hats in those days as part of their uniform. Now he unbuttoned his jacket. He took off his hat and put it on the desk beside the painting. No, he said, you look like a lover. He swung his feet up onto the desk. He was a big man with big feet. There’s an easy and a hard way to do this, he said. The easy way is for you to leave the painting and let me talk to Miss Donatti.

No, I said. The painting is mine; it belongs to me. She gave it to me and whether it’s valuable or not, I’m going to keep it. At that moment it seemed that this was the only thing she had ever given me, that she had taken back everything else. It wasn’t a question of how much I wanted the painting—it was just that this seemed to be the first clear-cut issue between us, the only time our positions were defined.

Scanlon shook his head again. I think you’re being foolish, he said. Unless you give up the painting, I’ll have to charge you. And you can’t win. You must see that you can’t win. All you’ll get is a bad scene and a sore heart. It won’t be a nice way to remember Miss Donatti.

He was surprising, that Scanlon. He was like an Irishman in a book, like a failed lawyer or a defrocked priest. I wondered whether he specialized in cases like this, quarrels over paintings or books or beds or chairs, to the point where he saw it all as a comedy. I felt a great temptation to tell him the whole story—Sheri’s offer of the apartment, the printing press behind the door, the dishes in the sink.

He didn’t try to hurry me. He waited as if he had all the time in the world. He leaned back with his feet on the desk and allowed me to imagine Sheri in the police station, sitting in the same chair I sat in now, her face tight with avant-garde indignation, telling Scanlon in her odd speech that I had stolen the painting.

How could she have done it? It was between us, a lover’s quarrel, yet she had called the police. She had invited Scanlon into our bed, which was so narrow already. She had broken the rules, rules that all lovers recognized, without which love would have been impossible,
unthinkable. But that was what she enjoyed, breaking the rules. It was the only thing she enjoyed—she couldn’t forgive me for being law-abiding.

It isn’t worth it, Scanlon said. He leaned back in the chair until he was looking at me between his feet. Walk out of here, he said, and you’ll see that the streets are full of pale-faced girls.

I couldn’t think. I didn’t want to think. I was afraid to think.

Well then, Scanlon said. He swung his feet off the desk and put his hat back on. His expression changed; he became brisk and purposeful. He picked up the painting and held it out at arm’s length so that we could look at it together from our different sides of the desk. He invited me to see it for what it was—but what was it? I had been trying to decide that since I met Sheri.

He waited while I sat there like a witness on the stand who can’t remember. Then he reached out his other hand so that he was holding the painting on either side, trapping it. Watching me all the while, he rotated it, like someone turning a wheel. Then he leaned it against the wall again, wrong side up. Look, he said. Turn them upside down and you can’t tell one from another.

What? I stared at him in astonishment and a wave of disgust washed over me. He wasn’t smart after all. He was just a cop, an Irish cop.

No, I said, that’s not true. It’s not that simple. But there was no point in arguing. I wasn’t talking to Meyer Schapiro; this wasn’t the New School. Anyway, my quarrel wasn’t with Scanlon—he was only an innocent bystander, after all, like me. We were just two men puzzled by love and art.

I saw, at last, all at once, with a sadness that had been patiently waiting for me, that I would have to leave the painting. And that wasn’t all; it was more than that—I would have to leave Sheri there too, in that room, sprawled on the desk. It wasn’t, as Scanlon had said, a nice way to remember her.

T
here were lots of good talkers in the Village—that was mostly what we did—but Saul Silverman’s talk had high seriousness. This was one of our favorite phrases. It was from Matthew Arnold, whom none of us had ever read. It’s hard to explain what the expression meant to us—each of us would have given a different definition—but I suppose it meant trying to see the world as all of a piece. High seriousness meant being intimate with largeness, worrying on a grand scale. There was an evangelical element in it—Saul thought of ideas in terms of redemption. Our ideas would save us from our sins. He was a type that was fairly common at the time but that seems to have gone out of style.

Talking was such a passionate act for Saul that he had grown a bushy mustache to conceal his mouth. To see the organ of his talk, the words being formed, the working of his lips and tongue, would have been too much. Sometimes he would put his hand over his
mouth and speak through his fingers as well as his mustache. He had some kind of adenoidal impediment, so that he threw his head back when he spoke, like a rooster crowing.

Saul reminded me of a boy named Meyer who was in my class in the fourth grade at P.S. 44 in Brooklyn. Meyer was thin, with dark crinkly hair and high, perpetually shrugged shoulders. His features were so emphatically articulated that even when he wasn’t doing anything he looked hysterical. When the teacher called on him Meyer would stand up in the aisle and throw his head back and gasp for air, pulling his voice unwillingly through his throat and sinuses and forcing it out of his nose. Once he got it out, his speech was extremely precise. He bit off his consonants and spat them into the room, and I remember thinking, though not in those terms, that it was the jagged precision of the words he used that made them pass with such difficulty.

There were two or three other boys like Meyer in the school—skinny, with hawklike faces, curved noses, and strangled voices. They were all Jewish and I assumed in my mechanistic eight-year-old way that their trouble in speaking had something to do with the structure of their noses. I thought that speech was a kind of wailing for them, a cry of rage and despair. They were torn between the desire to hurl their words in our faces and a tradition of secretiveness. Their speech got as far as their noses, like a head cold, and stopped there.

Though I was a good student, I knew I could never be as smart as those Jewish boys who were strangled by their smartness. They were bred to it—their minds had the quickness of racehorses. They had another advantage too: While I was essentially cheerful, filled with a
distracting sociability, there was a brooding sadness in the most brilliant of the Jewish boys that turned them inward and made them thoughtful. I saw them as Martians, creatures from a more advanced planet. Next to them I would always be a southerner, a barbarian. They were at home in the city in a way that I wasn’t. Their racing minds were part of its teeming.

You can’t say such things now without being called anti-Semitic—yet even with all my Catholic mythologies I don’t think that I was anti-Semitic. In the 1920s in New York City everyone was ethnic—it was the first thing we noticed. It was as natural to us as our names. We accepted our ethnicity as a role and even parodied it. To us it was always Halloween. Most of our jokes were ethnic jokes—we hardly knew any other kind. We found our differences hilarious. It was part of the adventure of the street and of the school yard that everyone else had grown up among mysteries. Because we were always surprising to one another, there was an element of formality in our friendships.

I still felt some of this surprise, this formality, this mystery, when I was with Saul. He too had a face like an exclamation and a curved nose that the mustache tried to soften. He was small and slight and already balding, as if he had talked his hair off, had raised his eyebrows so many times that his hair had been pushed back once and for all.

Saul was one of the last of a line of romantic intellectuals. Not satisfied to change the way people thought, he wanted to change the way they felt, the way they were, their desires. He was a reformer at heart, but it was not people’s politics he wanted to influence; it was their sensibilities. He thought such changes could be
brought about by making distinctions. He saw everything as a making of distinctions. He amassed them the way other people amassed money or possessions. He pursued them as some men pursue women. One day, when all the distinctions had been made, we would know what beauty was, and justice.

While we were close friends, there were many things I didn’t know about Saul. The war still hovered over us; there was a sense of pushing off from it. Yet I had no idea what Saul had done during the war, whether he had been in the service or exempt for some reason. Though I didn’t care one way or the other, it was odd that I didn’t know about those three or four years of his life. He had a job after the war, but I couldn’t have said what he did. I walked him home all the time, yet I had never been in his apartment. When I picked him up there, he was always waiting for me downstairs.

Occasionally Saul referred in a convoluted, Jamesian way to a female companion, but I never met her, and I sometimes thought that she was only a theory of femininity, a sketch for a character. It was hard to picture Saul with a woman. He never talked about sex, and I wondered whether he made love or distinctions with this shadowy creature.

When he got sick Saul was working on a review for
The New Leader
. Isaac Rosenfeld, who was the book editor, sometimes gave reviews to friends, or friends of friends, even when they hadn’t published anything before. This was not as frivolous as it sounds, because the Village was full of young men like Saul who could be trusted to turn out a decent piece. Just as Negroes knew about jazz, Jews were expected to know how to write reviews.

Isaac had given Saul
The Well Wrought Urn
, by Cleanth Brooks, a collection of essays on wide-ranging subjects like romanticism, irony, and great neglected poets, and Saul was rereading all the original texts to refresh his memory. At the rate he was going it would have taken him a year to write the review, a review of one thousand words.

At first when he got sick Saul thought he had the flu, because it was going around. When the symptoms persisted, he suspected mononucleosis. He was tired all the time and we had to give up our late-afternoon walks, when we would stroll through the Village like a couple of peripatetic philosophers.

He disappeared for a while. There was no answer when I called him at home—I didn’t have his number at work—and I couldn’t imagine where he was. I thought of his invisible female companion and wondered whether he might, after all, be spending his evenings with her.

Then he phoned me from his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn. He felt exhausted, he said, and needed someone to look after him. I offered to go and see him, but he put me off. I found out later that he was having tests in the hospital.

A couple of days after that, he called again and asked me to come to Brooklyn. His illness, he said, was serious.

Serious? I said. How do you mean, serious?

He laughed. Then he said, High serious.

Saul’s mother was a widow, a small, neat woman with a bony face like his and anxious eyes. She had a painful smile, as if she had been musing on the fact that she
belonged to the first generation of Jewish mothers to be categorically discredited by their sons. In the current issue of
Partisan Review
there was a story about a Jewish mother, another widow, who had thrown herself across the door of her apartment, defying her son to return to his tenement in Manhattan without the bag of food she had prepared for him. In his desperation, driven wild by love and rage, the son had beaten her about the head and shoulders with a rolled copy of
The New York Times
. Everybody in the Village was talking about the story, which was by a writer we had never heard of. What a stroke! they were saying—to beat his mother with the
Times
.

Of course Saul’s illness, whose exact nature was still unknown to me, put a great strain on his mother. She had taken a position toward it and developed a defensive strategy. Saul would be all right, she said, if he would only let himself relax. She believed that his illness was caused by tension, or even by attention, because, like those Jewish boys in P.S. 44, Saul always paid attention. He never relaxes, she said to me. He thinks too much; he takes the world on his shoulders. She watched him constantly to see whether he was thinking. She had a plan to keep him from thinking, and it was clear that she regarded me as a threat to that plan.

I had blundered into an old debate and it was a relief when Saul suggested that we go for a walk. We hadn’t taken a walk together in what was for us a long time. His mother immediately objected that it would tire him but then she saw in his face that she tired him more. Still, as we put on our coats there was an appeal in her eyes. She was asking me not to take him on an intellectual bender, not to make him think. “You can go to
Prospect Park,” she said, grasping at the straw that there was less incentive to think in a park.