Kafka Was the Rage (7 page)

Sometimes he was so brilliant that he seemed almost insane to me; he seemed to see more than there actually was—he heard voices. His knowledge was so impressive as to appear occult. Because he chanted his lectures, he was like a medieval cantor or Gregorian monk.

We were so awed by him that when he said something witty, we were afraid to laugh. It was like the German translators taking the puns out of Shakespeare on the assumption that he had not written them, that they had been added by hacks. I wonder now whether Schapiro ever noticed how tense we were, how pious. Did he realize that students were dropping out all the time, to be replaced by other students?

They didn’t drop out because he was disappointing—in fact, it might have been better if he had disappointed us now and then. What drove even his admirers away was a certain remorselessness in his brilliance. It made some of us anxious to think that everything meant something; there was no escape. It was like a fate.

Perhaps the things he said have now become commonplaces
of art criticism, but at the time they were revelations to me. And of course he talked about painters like van Gogh, Cézanne, and Picasso, who are old masters today. Then, only forty years ago, they were revolutionaries; we still believed in revolutions.

I remember Schapiro telling us that before Cézanne, there had always been a place in landscape painting where the viewer could walk into the picture. There was an entrance; you could go there, like walking into a park. But this was not true of Cézanne’s landscapes, which were cut off absolutely, abstracted from their context. You could not walk into them—
you
could enter them only through art, by leaping.

Schapiro said that when van Gogh loaded his palette with pigment he couldn’t afford, he was praying in color. He put his anxiety into pigment, slapped color into its cheeks. Color was salvation. It had to be thick, and tangible.

One night I smuggled Sheri into the class. It was easy because of all the turnover and the flurry of enthusiasm. The room sloped like a theater and we sat up in the back. Schapiro was going to talk about Picasso, and the place was jammed, with people crouching on the steps in the aisle. Picasso was a perfect subject because there was so much to explain.

Schapiro spoke rapidly, rhythmically, hardly pausing for breath. When he said that with
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Picasso had fractured the picture plane, I could hear it crack, like a chiropractor cracking the bones at the base of your neck. As he went on, Schapiro’s sentences became staccato, cubistic, full of overlapping planes. I was so excited that I took Sheri’s hand in mine.

I felt myself gaining confidence. It was such a relief
to me to know that art could be explained. If I couldn’t love art for itself, I could love it, like Schapiro, for the explanations. It was better than never to have loved at all.

He was discussing an early still life of Picasso’s, an upended table covered with a white cloth, a bowl of flowers, and a bottle of wine, all paradoxically suspended in space. What we were seeing, Schapiro said, was the conversion of the horizontal plane—the plane of our ordinary daily traversal of life—into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation.

His voice rose to a cry. He honked like a wild goose. There was delirium in the room. The beam of the projector was a searchlight on the world. The students shifted in their seats and moaned. Schapiro danced to the screen and flung up his arm in a Romanesque gesture. As he spoke, the elements of the picture reassembled themselves into an intelligible scheme. A thrill of gladness ran through me and my hand sweated in Sheri’s.

And then we were hurrying down the aisle, stepping over murmuring bodies in the half-light of the screen. We were in the hallway on the second floor, running up the stairs.

On the roof of the New School, there was a deep purplish glow, a Picasso color, the swarthy light that settles on great cities at night. The wind lifted Sheri’s hair, but it was not cold for October. The world was warmed by art, like fire.

A low skylight rose up out of the roofline. It was dimmed, an empty studio. The near side was perpendicular, and then it sloped away. Sheri leaned over it, so that the upper part of her body, her head, arms, and
shoulders, sprawled down the slope and her sex pointed at the sky. I paused to take a breath and allow my heart to beat. It’s a perfect world, I thought, if you understand it. I let the wind pass over us while Sheri gleamed in the dark. When I connected myself to her, we were the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. We converted the horizontal plane into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation.

W
hen I moved in with Sheri, I assumed that now my adult sexual life would begin. Until then, my experience had been limited to what I thought of as collegiate episodes and wartime acts. Now I imagined myself plunging into sex, diving into a great density of things to do. I felt like a person who is about to go abroad for the first time.

But what actually happened was that Sheri and I began not at the beginning, as I had hoped, but at the end of sex. We arrived immediately at a point where, if we had gone any further, what we did would have had to be called by some other names—yoga, mime, chiropractic, or isometrics. We were like lovers in a sad futuristic novel where sex is subjected to a revolutionary program.

Sex has traditionally been associated with joy, which is an old-fashioned, almost Dickensian notion—but Sheri understood, as we do today, that sex belongs
to depression as much as to joy. She knew that it is a place where all sorts of expectations and illusions come to die. Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

Sometimes I thought of sex as a flight from art, a regression to instinct, but there was no escaping art when I was in bed with Sheri. She reminded me of some lines Wallace Stevens wrote about Picasso. How should you walk in that space, Stevens asked, and know nothing of the madness of space, nothing of its jocular procreations? For Sheri, sex was like space, the jocularity of space. It was a foyer to madness, a little picnic of madness. In her more benign moments, when she was feeling almost sentimental, she was Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase
. She
descended
into my arms. Like art, sex with her was a shudder of hypotheses, a debate between being and nonbeing, between affirmation and denial, optimism and pessimism, illusion and reality, coming and going.

Most people would say that lovemaking is a defense against loneliness, but with Sheri it was an investigation of loneliness, a safari into its furthest reaches. She had a trick of suspending me at a high point of solitariness, when I was in the full flow of that self-absorption that comes over you as you enter the last stages of the act. She would stall or stymie my attempts to go ahead and finish—she’d hold me there, freeze me there, as if to say, See how alone you are! And then I would float above her, and above myself, like an escaped balloon.

Sex with Sheri was full of wreckage. It was like a tenement that has been partly demolished by a wrecker’s ball, so that you can see the terrible biological colors people painted their rooms, the pitiful little
spaces they chose for themselves. You could see their lives crumbling like plaster. While Sheri and I were lovers, we were also enemies. Each of us hated and feared what the other stood for. In my heart I thought of her as weird and in her heart she saw me as ordinary. We disagreed on most things; all we had in common was desire, perhaps not even that.

She said that I was trying to destroy her.
Destroy
was one of her favorite words. She would stretch it out—destroyyy—as if it was onomatopoetic, as if it made a rending sound. When I answered that I was only trying to understand her, she said that to be understood was a false agreement, like orgasm.

She showed me just enough of herself to keep in touch. She was only physically evident—visible, palpable, audible. I could smell and taste her, although she had hardly any animal effusions. When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.

I chased her, like a man chasing his hat in a high wind, and she kept blowing away. It wasn’t love or desire I felt most clearly with her, but anxiety. She blurred my own sense of what was real, so that I had to keep checking, keep tabulating. I was like someone who, after a shock, feels himself all over. Because Sheri never said, I’m hungry, It’s cold in here, or What time is it? I was always on the verge of forgetting that there were such things as hunger, cold, and time, that life was a condition.

Being with her was like having a permanent erection: It aches after awhile. I needed to be bored now and then—boredom is a time for imagining—but she wouldn’t let me. She said that boredom was a domestic emotion.

It was as if we were in a race—a race toward some final, all-inclusive formulation. From time to time, I would think I was gaining on her, that we were talking about the same things, turning into a couple, presenting a united front to the world—but then she’d put on a burst of speed and leave me behind. It reminded me of a six-day bicycle race, with first one, then the other forging ahead. We went back and forth like this—and then she simply outdistanced me once and for all. She did this in the middle of the night, while I was asleep—it was like her to present herself as a dream.

I woke up, to find that she was not in the bed. We slept entwined, like interlocking initials, and I was so used to her lying on top of me in the narrow bed that when she wasn’t there to hold me down, I floated to the surface of sleep. It was unusual for her not to be in the bed—she never woke in the night. She slept deeply, abandoning herself to it. Sleeping was the only thing she did with abandon, the only time she was anonymous.

As I came awake, it seemed that there was something altered in the room. There was a thinness in the air, a note of sibilance or shrillness, a faint medicinal edge, like the smell of dry cleaning on clothes. Though I couldn’t identify it, it was not unpleasant; I didn’t mind it. I noticed too that the light was on in the kitchen—it spilled halfway to the bed. I thought that Sheri must be in there, and I got up to see what she was doing.

When I stood up, the smell was stronger, but it didn’t mean anything to me because novels are full of the smells of tenements. Then, as I reached the kitchen door, I saw Sheri.

She was sitting on a chair, a wooden kitchen chair. She was naked—we slept naked—and her bare feet
rested on the dirty linoleum. Her knees were together and her arms hung down on either side of the chair, which she had pulled over to the stove. She leaned a little to one side to rest her head on the top of the stove, where she had folded a towel for a pillow.

All the gas jets were open. I could hear them hissing—or not exactly hissing, but whispering, emanating. My first thought, of course, was to turn them off, but I hesitated. She had taught me not to be so enthusiastic. To turn them off right away would be to miss the point. There had to be a point to what she was doing. The chair, the towel folded on the stove, the gas—they had to mean something.

Of course it was all like a dream—it had the odd, insistent details of a dream—and I needed to assure myself that I was awake. Then I looked at Sheri to see if she was all right, if she was breathing, but it was difficult to say—everything about the scene was difficult. Her eyes were open and her expression was placid—you’d never have supposed that gas was streaming out a few inches from her face. In fact, she looked like the people in medieval paintings who held their heads on one side—impassive and abstracted. While it occurred to me that she might be in danger, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she could breathe gas.

Though I could hear it, though it seemed to be streaming into the room, I was less worried about the gas than I was about getting the point. I gathered myself up and tried to concentrate. I took a deep breath, inhaling the gas, holding it in my lungs like smoke. I took in Sheri’s naked body, too, the small breasts and heavy legs, the pallor. I felt the entire apartment thrumming in my head—the dishes in the sink, the dirt on the floor,
the paintings on the walls. I could see without looking up the stamped tin ceiling and the plain sheet of tin I had nailed over a hole where a rat had come out.

Standing in the doorway, leaning on the cold jamb, I felt a sudden wash or swoosh of sadness, as if our love was a stove and she was letting all our gas run out. She didn’t care about the waste; it didn’t touch her. The smell was very strong now and I remembered that she loved to talk about death; she was always comparing things to it, saying that this or that was like death.

She had goose pimples on her skin, and when I looked at my own naked flesh, I saw that I had them, too. Look, I said, we both have goose pimples. I wanted her to see that I was calm, that I could speak in a clear voice. Yet I felt lonely to the point of madness.

I was trying to catch her eye, to make her see me. If she saw me, perhaps she would reconsider, she would turn off the gas herself She would remember that we had an arrangement, she had invited me to come and live with her. I thought that if she saw me, she might grow nostalgic.

But that was a sentimental idea. The gas was making me sentimental—it was time to turn it off. I threw open all the windows, then I picked her up and carried her to the bed. Think how charming you could be, I said, if you chose to speak. But I knew she wouldn’t speak. She never spoke when I wanted her to, only when it didn’t matter. I composed myself to sleep because I couldn’t think of anything else to do; she tired me out. And as I was dozing off I thought that soon I would have to leave her.

W
hen I left Sheri I had nowhere to go but Brooklyn. Apartments were still hard to find. Everyone was looking for a place in the Village, like people looking for love. But the last thing I wanted was to return to Brooklyn, even for a little while. I had tasted the city, and I would never be the same. To go back home made me feel like a character in one of those novels reviewers describe as shuttling back and forth in time. I’ve always disliked those novels.