Testimony and Demeanor (7 page)

“I’m surprised that you still want to know the mechanics of things,” he said. “I mean for yourself. You would be bored. Truthfully. The mechanics of things are a bad novel you read when you cannot sleep. You do not want to remember them and you spend time thinking about them anyway. That is really all you should know about that. Now let me tell you something else.”

I didn’t know about all that. I said that if he were to tell me anything he didn’t want me to talk about, he could be sure I would keep a promise to him just as well as any promises I made to institutions. I said I just wanted to know about him.

“It would give me great satisfaction to build a city,” he said, ignoring what I had just said. “Or to grow a forest. But I will not. Nor you. We are enmeshed. The most exalted feelings we will have will be on the day of marriage, of the birth of a child, of a peaceful time. That small fraction of our lives will be the only time our bodies will be full of blood and alive. The rest of the time is for mechanics—and bad jokes about how dull we are. We are not artists or leaders. When I was young I wanted to be as triumphant and right as Lenin. Then—a little older—I wanted every moment of my life to be as full and right, in another way, as when I first began to see paintings in
museums. I thought I could feel life at all times as though it were painted by Cranach, Rembrandt, Matisse. But afterward I saw that of my life, that is the smallest fraction of all. Triumph and rightness—whether of Lenin or Matisse—are not possible. They are not my possibility. And that is why I am content to cultivate these small fractions of life that mean something to me. It is not possible to find the whole. Why? I will tell you. Ever since men learned to throw stones, most of us have been at a distance from the rest of life. There are very few who can do anything but keep backing away with their stones. That is why I am content with the fractions of time when that is not so. For example, the day at your farm was a fraction about which I am very satisfied. And yet
you
still wish to know everything, because you still believe that life is not fractions, that people are not fractions to each other. I will tell you—no matter what I would explain to you, you will not know more than a fraction. Isn’t that right? You know that I am right.”

I said I didn’t know.

“Well, it isn’t something to complain about,” he said. “I am not complaining. I just came to say goodbye. One would-be mandarin to another.”

We left the restaurant and walked until he found a cab.

“Maybe I’ll be able to come see you in Paris,” I said.

“That would be nice, of course,” he said.

He went off in the cab, and I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue past the Justice Department. It was true that I had been sure, in a prosaic way, that knowing more about anything or anyone, I would be able to embrace more, unite more in myself, and blend my virtues and accomplishments into a whole that was in turn part of a larger whole of everyone’s virtues and accomplishments. I had assumed that the proper arranging of things in the world was something that I could become a part of to the point where everything that went right, that was brought into its place, would give me satisfaction.

That is what I thought it was to be a mandarin. That was
not what Pavel meant. What he meant was resignation to fractions—resignation to having to maneuver his life through what was unavoidably being done; resignation to rationing his pleasures, to restricting them to such bland and inert sharers as me; to admitting that, of the part of life that could still go on, these fractions were all he would ever loose his natural feelings toward.

As for myself, in several ways I had divided the world into compatible, even mutually attractive, halves. Theirs and ours, to name just one set. Or the urge to be spontaneous and disruptive and free (without personal consequences) and the satisfaction of being an agent of benefit (without inflicting anything that anyone could say was not good).

I’d always had a balanced view. I’d always felt I could be within reach of both halves of everything.

But by the time I got to the horses on the Capitol side of the Federal Trade Commission I was giving in. I think I had been planning to walk by them because I’d run into Pavel there, and also because they stood for all the convergences I’d expected in my own life or in the way the world was meant to go. I had even worked out such elaborate similes as the likeness of the way I’d hoped to see with how a horse sees, an eye on each side. But when I got there, all this conscious and optimistic symbolism gave way. It was all in pieces. I remembered thinking that, as a last comfort, as a last justification, I had always been able to think of myself as a federal workhorse. That had been sweetly imaginary.

I’d thought my ambitions were safe because they were so orthodox and modest. But those notions of duty, labor, and what couldn’t be called anything but good weren’t really the ambitions of a person. And as for personal ambitions, I really hadn’t even hoped for as much as Pavel had. And there we were, both settled in. Not even as workhorses. We were less like horses than like the flies that follow them. Bottle-green mandarin flies following the federal horses, who aren’t people,
after all. And we could stare with flies’ multiple-prism eyes at all that might be going on or not, but what we ended up seeing for ourselves was fractions, repeated and repeated, from which we could subtract the few that made up our small personal lives.

M
ISS
H
OGENTOGLER WAS A WAITRESS
at the Huddle, where I ate a late breakfast after composition class, before I went to my drama class at noon. We had a half hour alone three days a week.

At first I told Miss Hogentogler all the clever things I’d heard when I was in college. She was enchanted by the East—by the East she meant Boston and New York. She wished to be thin, beautiful, and wicked. Later that year she did become beautiful.

She had fine brown hair, a high broad forehead, a large mouth, but with enough bone in her chin and cheeks to carry it off. But it was wishing that changed her. Or perhaps she was always beautiful and I finally saw it.

During the fall I thought she was foolish and cute. She loved to have long talks. She prepared for them—but not in order to dominate them. Toward the end she would droop with submissive yearning: “Oh, Mr. Hendricks, I had no idea it was so complicated.”

Miss Hogentogler loved to hear stories of elegant meanness, stories in which people’s feelings were crushed by a single word. I quickly ran through the famous lines: Whistler to Oscar Wilde; George Bernard Shaw about his American publisher; John Wilkes’s famous zeugma (Mr. Interlocutor to Mr. Wilkes: You, sir, will die either on the gallows or of a horrible venereal disease. Mr. Wilkes: That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your political principles—or your mistress). I think I remembered some Rochefoucauld and some Voltaire.

I tried a few jokes of my own. She laughed politely. She had a beautiful polite laugh—as she sensed a punch line coming she would store up her polite laugh behind her large white teeth and then slowly unbite it.

I told her that on a poem of mine that I had submitted to a poet-teacher I admired, she had written, “A gracefully minted coin—of small denomination.”

Honorée opened her teeth. “Oh, that’s
wonderful!
”

I tried to think of
bons mots
of which I had not been the butt. A friend of mine—at least someone I knew—said of Mary McCarthy’s oeuvre, “All her
romans
have feet of
clé
.” I had to explain this to Honorée, while she wrote it down on a napkin.

I told her that I’d heard someone say (I knew someone who’d heard someone say)
à propos
of a philosophy grad student who stayed married to a shrew because she was typing his thesis, “That’s putting Descartes before divorce.”

“Oh, Mr. Hendricks,” Honorée said, “did you really hear that?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Well, tell me, Mr. Hendricks, was this because—I mean, tell me honestly—is this because it was just men talking to each other? Are men wittier than women?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Was the person who said this in college or graduate school? I mean, did they get that way by trying? Can you get that way by trying?”

I cleared my throat. I said, “Don’t you think, Miss Hogentogler, that the phrase ‘natural sophistication’ is suspect? And in any event this sort of thing isn’t of the essence. Why are you so concerned about …”

“Oh, Mr. Hendricks, I don’t
know
why.”

It was a silly question on my part. An unfair question. I knew she had a crush on me. I was lonely. I was still finishing my thesis and worked long hours—not hard, but long. Something about me irritated my new colleagues. I had the coiled shyness of an only child who had gone to a large boarding school and a large university and who had learned to observe critically at a very early age. If others observed me as I observed them, I had every reason to be wary.

I was born of handsome parents who lived a careful—or do
I mean carefree?—life and who didn’t discover I was very little trouble until I was thirteen. At that point—during vacations—there came a sudden vault into grown-up worlds. My mother said to her cousin Josie (a woman I adored), “You know, Oliver’s manners are so good I can take him anywhere.”

When I was fourteen this cousin took me out to lunch. She was a beautiful woman—or at least glamorous in the style that was then just passing: large shiny lips framed in rouged cheeks and a massive set of hair, broad shoulders swaggering with fur. She was as impressive as a ship entering a small harbor.

I choose that simile for a reason. My first effort to entertain this magnificent woman was this: Why is the
Queen Mary
coming into dock like a woman getting into her girdle? Answer: Because it takes a lot of little tugs.

Cousin Josie laughed politely. She said, “Well, I certainly hope you didn’t have me in mind.”

I blushed. It was a childish joke. I struggled to get to the surface of my feelings. I often had the sensation of drowning in a turbulent river of my feelings in her presence. In fact, her presence and my feelings were one fast-flowing confusion.

I said I didn’t imagine she wore a girdle.

She laughed. I sensed her small ripple of pleasure. It engulfed me.

I popped back up to say that there was something she could tell me that I was curious about: what did it really
feel
like to be a beautiful woman?

She laughed again, but she was pleased on a larger scale. I was ready and dog-paddled to the crest of this wave.

She said, “Well, that’s awfully sweet … but it’s a hard question. It reminds me—a friend of mine asked me once what it was like to kiss a man with a mustache.”

The thought of cousin Josie kissing a man with or without a mustache submerged me again.

She said, “I told her it was like eating an oyster with a toothbrush. Oh, dear—I shouldn’t have said that. Oh, well.”

I didn’t get it. Kissing was still a mystery to me. I thought, for some reason, that you sucked your lips dry before applying them.

Later on during lunch I told Josie she reminded me of Fabrizio’s aunt in
The Charterhouse of Parma
. She hadn’t read it, so I had the pleasure of telling her the plot. I turned it to fit what I took to be the facts of our case even more snugly.

Although cousin Josie was considered by my parents to be racy (she was divorced and talked about men and women a lot), she was in fact a conventional woman. She remarried when I was sixteen, after the fever of my affections had peaked. I had carried a torch for her for more than a year and a half. During that time I wrote poems to her, one of which I finally mailed. By that time I had learned a complete version of the facts of life—second-hand, to be sure, but I think they struck a richer chord than any possible first-hand encounter might have. But what I had learned at fifteen and a half was enough to push some of the poems I wrote from the ethereal to the erotic.

At Thanksgiving, cousin Josie took me aside for a talk. We went to the library and she closed the door. She half sat on my father’s desk. She asked how I liked school. I felt that for the first time I might have the upper hand. It was a wonderful nervous sensation. Josie finally took the poem out of her pocketbook. The plot was not entirely original—a young man falls in love with the statue of a goddess, who comes to life and loves him for his love which brought her to life.

Josie put on her glasses to read. Watching the stems slither under her hair, finding their way between the top of her ear and her scalp, was a light sea I took well.

Josie looked up and said, “You know, I showed this to a friend of mine who knows a lot about poetry and he said that you have a lot of talent—he was amazed when I told him you’re only fifteen.”

I said, “I didn’t think you’d show it to your friends.”

She said, “Well, I was a little worried about it. You see, I
may have been a little dumb. I’m afraid I may not have understood. This may sound awfully silly … you see, I’ve always been just as fond of you as I could be.”

I turned away and paced impatiently. It was a gesture only; I still didn’t know what was bound to come.

Josie said, “I may be wrong, but it seems to me now you may be trying out your feelings—I remember very well how strong and confusing these growing-up feelings can be—and I certainly don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I don’t want you to be hurt by your own feelings either. And I’m afraid that they may have been getting …” She squeezed her lips together and turned the palm of one hand up.

I interrupted. “I’m not ‘trying out’ feelings. I’m writing about—”

Josie said, “Well, yes. But when you write this—it’s really very good, you know—when you write this: