The Complete Stories (64 page)
Read The Complete Stories Online
Authors: Bernard Malamud
Incisore. The cylinder, the sphere, the cone. Cézanne. The impact of an acute angle of a triangle on a circle promises an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo. Kandinsky.
Fidelman, etcher, left a single engraving of the series called A Painter’s Progress. Originally there were six copper plates, drypoint, all with their prints destroyed, how or why is not known. Only a single imperfect artist’s proof entitled “The Cave” survives. This etching represents a painter at work, resemblance to whom may easily be guessed. Each night, according to a tattered diary he had kept for a while, he entered the cave in question through a cellar he had the key to, when all the lights in the old clapboard house, several boards missing, were out, curtains thickly drawn over each narrow window. The painter in the etching worked all night, night after night, inch by slow inch covering the rough limestone surface of the voluminous cave at the end of a labyrinth under the cellar, with intricate designs of geometric figures; and he left before dawn, his coming and going unknown to his sister, who lived in the house alone. The walls and part of the roof of the huge cave that he had been decorating for years and years, and estimated at least two more to go before his labors were ended, were painted in an extraordinary tapestry of simple figures in black, salmon, gold-yellow, sea-green, and apricot, although the colors cannot of course be discerned in the three-toned engraving—a rich design of circles and triangles, discrete or interlocking, of salmon triangles encompassed within apricot circles, and sea-green circles within pale gold-yellow triangles, blown like masses of autumn leaves over the firmament of the cave.
The painter of the cave, wearing a leafy loincloth as he labored, varied the patterns of the geometric design. He was at that time of his life engaged in developing a more intricate conception of circles within circles of various hues and shades including copper red and light olive; and to extend his art further, of triangles within triangles within concentric circles. He drove himself at his work, intending when his labor was done to climb the dark stairs ascending to his sister’s first floor and tell her what he had accomplished in the cave below. Bessie, long a widow, all her children married and scattered across the continent, her oldest daughter in Montreal, lived, except for occasional visitors, mostly the doctor, alone in the old frame house she had come to as a young bride, in Newark, New Jersey. She was, at this time, ill and possibly dying. Nobody he could think of had told her artist-brother, but he figured he somehow knew. Call it intuition. It was his hope she would remain alive until he had completed his artwork of the cave and she could at last see how it had turned out.
Bessie, he would say, I did this for you and you know why. Fidelman worked by the light of a single dusty 100-watt bulb, the old-fashioned kind with a glass spicule at the bottom, dangling from a wire from the ceiling of the cave, that he had installed when he first came there to paint. For a long time he had distrusted the bulb because he had never had to replace it, and sometimes it glowed like a waning moon after he had switched it off, making him feel slightly uneasy and a little lumpy in the chest. He suspected a presence, immanent or otherwise, around; though who or why, and under what circumstances, he could not say. Nothing or nobody substantial. Anyway, he didn’t care for the bulb. He knew why when it began, one night, to speak to him. How does a bulb speak? With the sound of light. Fidelman for a while did not respond, first because he couldn’t, his throat constricted; and second, because he suspected this might be he talking to himself; yet when it spoke again, this time he answered.
Fidelman, said the voice of, or from within, the bulb, why are you here such a long time in this cave? Painting—this we know—but why do you paint so long a whole cave? What kind of business is this?
Leaving my mark is what. For the ages to see. This place will someday be crowded with visitors at a dollar a throw. Mark my words.
But why in this way if there are better?
What would you suggest, for instance?
Whatever I suggest is too late now, but why don’t you go at least upstairs and say hello to your sister who hasn’t seen you in years? Go before it is too late, because she is now dying.
Not quite just yet I can’t go, said the painter. I can’t until my work is finished because I want to show her what I’ve accomplished once it’s done.
Go up to her now, this is the last chance. Your work in this cave will take years yet. Tell her at least hello. What have you got to lose? To her it will be a wonderful thing.
No, I can’t. It’s all too complicated. I can’t go till I’ve finished the job. The truth is I hate the past. It caught me unawares. I’d rather not see her just yet. Maybe next week or so.
It’s a short trip up the stairs to say hello to her. What can you lose if it’s only fourteen steps and then you’re there?
It’s too complicated, like I said. I hate the past.
So why do you blame her for this?
I don’t blame anybody at all. I just don’t want to see her. At least not just yet.
If she dies she’s dead. You can talk all you want then but she won’t answer you.
It’s no fault of mine if people die. There’s nothing I can do about it.
Nobody is talking about fault or not fault. All we are talking about is to go upstairs.
I can’t I told you, it’s too complicated, I hate the past, it caught me unawares. If there’s anything to blame I don’t blame her. I just don’t want to see her is all, at least not just yet until my work here is done.
Don’t be so proud, my friend. Pride ain’t spinach. You can’t eat it, so it won’t make you grow. Remember what happened to the Greeks.
Praxiteles? He who first showed Aphrodite naked? Phidias, whose centaur’s head is thought to be a self-portrait? Who have you got in mind?
No, the one that he tore out his eyes. Watch out for hubris. It’s poison ivy. Trouble you got enough, you want also blisters? Also an electric bulb don’t give so often advice so listen with care. When did you hear last that an electric bulb gave advice? Did I advise Napoleon? Did I advise Van Gogh? This is like a miracle, so why don’t you take advantage and go upstairs?
Well, you’ve got a point there. There’s some truth to it, I suppose. I might at that, come to think of it. As you say, it’s not everybody who gets advice in this way. There’s something biblical about it, if I may say. Furthermore, I’m not getting any younger and I haven’t seen Bessie in years. Plus I do owe her something, after all. Be my Virgil, which way to up the stairs?
I will show you which way but I can’t go with you. Up to a point but not further if you know what I mean. A bulb is a bulb. Light I got but not feet. After all, this is the Universe, everything is laws.
Fidelman slowly climbs up the stone, then wooden, stairs, lit generously from bottom clear to top by the bulb, and opens the creaking door into a narrow corridor. He walks along it till he comes to a small room where Bessie is lying in a sagging double bed.
Hello, Bessie, I’ve been downstairs most of the time, but I came up to say hello.
Why are you so naked, Arthur? It’s winter outside.
It’s how I am nowadays.
Arthur, said Bessie, why did you stop writing for so long? Why didn’t you answer my letters?
I guess I had nothing much to write. Nothing much has happened to me. There wasn’t much to say.
Remember how Mama used to give us an apple to eat with a slice of bread?
I don’t like to remember those things anymore.
Anyway, thanks for coming up to see me, Arthur. It’s a nice thing to do when a person is so alone. At least I know what you look like and where you are nowadays.
Bessie died and rose to heaven, holding in her heart her brother’s hello.
Flights of circles, cones, triangles.
End of drypoint etching.
The ugly and plebeian face with which Rembrandt was ill-favored was accompanied by untidy and dirty clothes, since it was his custom, when working, to wipe his brushes on himself, and to do other things of a similar nature. Jakob Rosenberg.
If you’re dead how do you go on living?
Natura morta: still life. Oil on paper.
1968
F
ogel, a writer, had had another letter from Gary Simson, the wouldbe writer, a request as usual. He wrote fiction but hadn’t jelled. Fogel, out of respect, saved letters from writers but was tempted not to include Simson although he had begun to publish. I am not his mentor, though he calls himself my student. If so, what have I taught him? In the end he placed the letter in his files. I have his others, he thought.
ogel, a writer, had had another letter from Gary Simson, the wouldbe writer, a request as usual. He wrote fiction but hadn’t jelled. Fogel, out of respect, saved letters from writers but was tempted not to include Simson although he had begun to publish. I am not his mentor, though he calls himself my student. If so, what have I taught him? In the end he placed the letter in his files. I have his others, he thought.
Eli Fogel was a better than ordinary writer but not especially “successful.” He disliked the word. His productivity was limited by his pace, which, for reasons of having to breathe hard to enjoy life, was slow. Two and a half books in fifteen years, the half a paperback of undistinguished verse. My limp is symbolic, he thought. His leg had been injured in a bicycle accident as a youth, though with the built-up shoe the limp was less noticeable than when he hobbled around barefoot. He limped for his lacks. Fogel, for instance, regretted never having married, blaming this on his devotion to work. It’s not that it has to be one or the other, but for me it’s one or none. He was, mildly, a monomaniac. That simplified life but reduced it—what else? Still, he did not pity himself. It amused Fogel rather than not that the protagonists of his two published novels were married men with families, their wounds deriving from sources other than hurt members and primal loneliness. Imagination saves me, he thought.
Both his novels had received praise, though not much else; and Fogel had for the past six years labored on a third, about half completed.
Since he declined to write reviews, lecture, or teach regularly, he ran into money problems. Fortunately he had from his father a small inheritance that came to five thousand annually, a shrinking sum in an inflated world; so Fogel reluctantly accepted summer-school invitations, or taught, somewhat on the prickly side, at writers’ conferences, one or two a summer. With what he had he made do.
Since he declined to write reviews, lecture, or teach regularly, he ran into money problems. Fortunately he had from his father a small inheritance that came to five thousand annually, a shrinking sum in an inflated world; so Fogel reluctantly accepted summer-school invitations, or taught, somewhat on the prickly side, at writers’ conferences, one or two a summer. With what he had he made do.
It was at one of these conferences, in Buffalo, in June, and at another in mid-August of the same summer, on the campus of a small college in the White Mountains, that the writer had met, and later renewed a friendship with, Gary Simson, then less than half Fogel’s age; a friendship of sorts, mild, fallible, but for a while satisfying; that is to say, possessing some of the attributes and possibilities of friendship.
Gary, a slight glaze in his eyes as he listened to Fogel talk about writing, wanted, he seriously confessed with a worried brow, “more than anything,” even “desperately,” to be a writer—the desperation inciting goose bumps on Fogel’s flesh, putting him off for a full fifteen minutes. He sat in depressed silence in his office as the youth fidgeted. “What’s the rush?” the writer ultimately asked. “I’ve got to get there,” the youth replied. “Get where?” “I want to be a good writer someday, Mr. Fogel.” “It’s a long haul, my boy,” Eli Fogel said. “Make a friend of time. And steer clear of desperation. Desperate people tend to be bad writers, increasing desperation.” He laughed a little, not unkindly. Gary sat nodding as though he had learned the lesson of his life. He was twenty-two, a curly-haired senior in college, with a broad fleshy face and frame. On his appearance at the Buffalo conference he wore a full reddish mustache drooping down the sides of his thick-lipped mouth. He shaved it off on meeting Fogel and then grew it again later in the summer. He was six feet tall and his height and breadth made him look older than he was, if not wiser. For a while after his talk with Fogel he pretended to be more casual about his work, one who skirted excess and got it right. He pretended to be Fogel a bit, amusing Fogel. He had never had a disciple before and felt affection for the boy. Gary livened things up for the writer. One could see him in the distance, coming with his yellow guitar. He strummed without distinction but sang fairly well, a tenor aspiring, related to art. “Sing me ‘Ochi Chornye,’ Gary,” Fogel said, and the youth obliged as the older man became pleasantly melancholic, thinking what if he’d had a son. Touch a hand to a guitar and Fogel had a wet eye. And Gary offered services as well as devoted attention: got books Fogel needed from the library; drove him into town when he had errands to do;
could be depended on to retrieve forgotten lecture notes in his room —as if it were in compensation, though Fogel required none, for the privilege of sitting at his feet and plying him with questions about the art of fiction. Fogel, touched by his amiability, all he had yet to learn, by his own knowledge of the sadnesses of a writer’s life, invited him, usually with one or another of his friends, to his room for a drink before dinner. Gary brought along a thick notebook to jot down Fogel’s table talk. He showed him the first sentence he had copied down: “Imagination is not necessarily Id,” causing the writer when he read it to laugh uncomfortably. Gary laughed too. Fogel thought the note taking silly but didn’t object when Gary scribbled down long passages, although he doubted he had wisdom of any serious sort to offer. He was wiser in his work—one would be who revised often enough. He wished Gary would go to his books for answers to some of the questions he asked and stop treating poor Fogel like a guru.
could be depended on to retrieve forgotten lecture notes in his room —as if it were in compensation, though Fogel required none, for the privilege of sitting at his feet and plying him with questions about the art of fiction. Fogel, touched by his amiability, all he had yet to learn, by his own knowledge of the sadnesses of a writer’s life, invited him, usually with one or another of his friends, to his room for a drink before dinner. Gary brought along a thick notebook to jot down Fogel’s table talk. He showed him the first sentence he had copied down: “Imagination is not necessarily Id,” causing the writer when he read it to laugh uncomfortably. Gary laughed too. Fogel thought the note taking silly but didn’t object when Gary scribbled down long passages, although he doubted he had wisdom of any serious sort to offer. He was wiser in his work—one would be who revised often enough. He wished Gary would go to his books for answers to some of the questions he asked and stop treating poor Fogel like a guru.
“You can’t dissect a writer to learn what writing is or entails. One learns from experience, or should. I can’t teach anyone to be a writer, Gary—I’ve said that in my lectures. All I do here is talk about some things I’ve learned and hope somebody talented is listening. I always regret coming to these conferences.”
“You can give insights, can’t you?”
“Insights you can get from your mother.”
“More specifically, if I might ask, what do you think of my writing thus far, sir?”
Fogel reflected. “Promise you have—that’s all I can say now, but keep working.”
“What should I work most for?”
“Search possibility in and out and beyond the fact. I have the impression when I read your stories—the two in Buffalo and the one you’ve given me here—that you remember or research too much. Memory is an ingredient, Gary, not the whole stew; and don’t make the error some do of living life as though it were a future fiction. Invent, my boy.”
“I’ll certainly try, Mr. Fogel.” He seemed worried.
Fogel lectured four mornings a week at eight-thirty so he could spend the rest of the day at work. His large bright room in a guest house close to a pine grove, whose fragrance he breathed as he wrote on a cracked table by a curtained window, was comfortable even on hot afternoons. He worked every day, half day on Sundays, quitting as a rule around four; then soaked in a smallish stained tub, dressed leisurely, whistling through his teeth, in a white flannel suit fifteen
years in service, and waited, holding a book before his nose, for someone to come for a drink. During the last week of the White Mountain conference he saw Gary each night. Sometimes they drove to a movie in town, or walked after supper along a path by a stream, the youth stopping to jot down in his notebook sentences given off by Fogel, chaff as well as grain. They went on until the mosquitoes thickened or Fogel’s limp began to limp. He wore a Panama hat, slightly yellowed, and white shoes he whitened daily, one with a higher heel than the other. Fogel’s pouched dark eyes, even as he spoke animatedly, were contemplative, and he listened with care to Gary though he didn’t always hear. In the last year or two he had lost weight and his white suit hung on his shoulders. He looked small by Gary’s side, although he was shorter by only three inches. And once the youth, in a burst of vitality or affection, his one imaginative act of the summer, lifted Fogel at the hips and held him breathless in the air. The writer gazed into Gary’s gold-flecked eyes; that he found them doorless to the self filled him with remorse.
years in service, and waited, holding a book before his nose, for someone to come for a drink. During the last week of the White Mountain conference he saw Gary each night. Sometimes they drove to a movie in town, or walked after supper along a path by a stream, the youth stopping to jot down in his notebook sentences given off by Fogel, chaff as well as grain. They went on until the mosquitoes thickened or Fogel’s limp began to limp. He wore a Panama hat, slightly yellowed, and white shoes he whitened daily, one with a higher heel than the other. Fogel’s pouched dark eyes, even as he spoke animatedly, were contemplative, and he listened with care to Gary though he didn’t always hear. In the last year or two he had lost weight and his white suit hung on his shoulders. He looked small by Gary’s side, although he was shorter by only three inches. And once the youth, in a burst of vitality or affection, his one imaginative act of the summer, lifted Fogel at the hips and held him breathless in the air. The writer gazed into Gary’s gold-flecked eyes; that he found them doorless to the self filled him with remorse.
Or Gary drove them in his noisy Peugeot to a small piano bar by a crossroads several miles the other side of town, sometimes in the company of one or two students, occasionally a colleague but usually students; and this made it a fuller pleasure because Fogel enjoyed being with women. Gary, who had a talent for acquiring pretty girls, one night brought along one of the loveliest Fogel had ever seen. The girl, about twenty-five, with streaked dyed-blond and dark hair wore a red dress on her long-waisted body, the breasts ample, loose, her buttocks shapely, sweet. A rare find indeed; but the youth, senseless, sullen, or stoned, gave her scant attention. He glanced at her once in a while as if trying to remember where he had met her. Sad-eyed, she drank Scotch on the rocks, gnawing her lip as she watched his eyes roving over the dancers on the floor. Too bad she doesn’t know how much I appreciate her, Fogel mused.
Where does he get so many attractive girls—he had been equally effective in Buffalo—and why doesn’t he bring the same one two nights running? This blessed creature in red would last me half a lifetime. The youth’s taste in women could not be faulted—but he seemed, after a short time, unmoved by them and yawned openly, although it was rumored he enjoyed an active heterosexual life. He has so many and goes through them so quickly—where does he think one learns longing? Where does poetry come from? She’s too good for him, he thought, not knowing exactly why, unless she was good for
him
. Ah youth, ah summer. Once again he seriously considered the
possibility of marriage. After all, how old is forty-six-not, in any case,
old
. A good twenty-five or thirty years to go, enough to raise a family.
him
. Ah youth, ah summer. Once again he seriously considered the
possibility of marriage. After all, how old is forty-six-not, in any case,
old
. A good twenty-five or thirty years to go, enough to raise a family.
On what?
For his companion Fogel had asked along a schoolteacher from his class, a Miss Rudel from Manhattan, unmarried but not lacking a sense of humor; nor did she take her dabbling in fiction seriously, a pleasant change from the desperate ladies who haunted the conference. But he looked her over and found her wanting, then found himself wanting.
Perhaps because the evening had acquired a sexual tone he remembered Lucy Matthews, a desperate writer presently attending his lectures. About a week ago, after going through a shoe box full of exasperating stories she had left with him, representing the past year’s work, he had told her bluntly, “Miss Matthews, let’s not pretend that writing is a substitute for talent.” And when she quietly gasped, cracking the knuckles of one hand, then of the other, he went on: “If you are out to save your soul, there are better ways.”
The lady gazed bleakly at Fogel; a slim woman with fair figure, tense neck, and anxious eyes.
“But, Mr. Fogel, how does one go about finding out the extent of her talent? Some of my former professors told me I write capable stories, yet you seem to think I’m hopeless.” Tears brimmed in her eyes.
Fogel was about to soften his judgment but warned himself it would be less than honest to encourage her. She was from Cedar Falls and this was her fourth conference of the summer. He vowed again to give them up forever.
Lucy Matthews plucked a Kleenex out of her handbag and quietly cried, waiting for perhaps a good word, but the writer, sitting in silence, had none to offer. She got up and hurriedly left the office.
But at ten o’clock that night, dressed in a taffeta party dress, her hair brushed into a bright sheen, briskly perfumed, Lucy tapped on Fogel’s house door. Accepting his surprised invitation to enter, after three silent sips of bourbon and water, she lifted her noisy dress over her head and stood there naked.
“Mr. Fogel,” she whispered passionately, “you aren’t afraid to tell the truth. Your work represents art. I feel that if I could hold you in my arms I would be close to both—art and truth.”
“It just isn’t so,” Fogel replied as he fought off the feeling that he had stepped into a Sherwood Anderson story. “I would like to sleep
with you, frankly, but not for the reasons stated. If you had said, ‘Fogel, you may be an odd duck but you’ve aroused me tonight and I would gladly go to bed with you’—could you say that?”
with you, frankly, but not for the reasons stated. If you had said, ‘Fogel, you may be an odd duck but you’ve aroused me tonight and I would gladly go to bed with you’—could you say that?”
“If you prefer fellation—” Lucy whispered tensely.
“Thank you kindly,” he said with tenderness, “I prefer the embrace of a woman. Would you care to answer my question?”
Shivering around the shoulders, Lucy Matthews came to her finest moment at writing conferences.
“I can’t truly say so.”
“Ah, too bad,” Fogel sighed. “Anyway, I’m privileged you saw fit to undress in my presence.”
She slipped on the dress at her feet and departed. Fogel especially regretted the loss because the only woman he had slept with that summer, a young chambermaid in a Buffalo hotel he had stayed at in June, had hurt him dreadfully.
“Are you dreaming about something, Mr. Fogel?” Gary asked.
“Only vaguely,” Fogel replied.
“An idea for a story, I bet?”
“It may come to that.”
When the conference ended, Gary, waiting outside the lecture barn to take Fogel to the train, asked him, “Will I ever be a good writer, do you think, Mr. Fogel?”
“It depends on commitment. You’ll have to prove yourself.”
“I will if you have faith in me.”
“Even if I have no faith in you. Who is Eli Fogel, after all, but a man trying to make his own way through the woods.”
Fogel smiled at the youth and, though not knowing exactly why, felt he had to say, “One must grow spirit, Gary.”
The youth blinked in the strong sunlight.
“I’m glad we’re both writers, Mr. Fogel.”
The next spring, a wet springtime, Fogel, wandering in a damp hat and coat in the periodical room of the New York Public Library, without forethought plucked off the shelf a college magazine and came upon Gary Simson in the table of contents, as the author of a story called “Travails of a Writer.” He was surprised because they were in correspondence and Gary hadn’t told him he had published his first story. Maybe it wasn’t such a good one? Reading it quickly Fogel found it wasn’t; but that wasn’t why Gary hadn’t mentioned it. The reason depressed him.
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