The Puttermesser Papers (16 page)

Assuredly [Puttermesser read in the
Letters
] if there be any one subject on which I feel no levity it is that of my marriage and the relation of the sexes—if there is any one action or relation of my life which is and has always been profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr. Lewes.

. . .

I do not wish to take the ground of ignoring what is unconventional in my position. I have counted the cost of the step I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or
bitterness, renunciation by all my friends. I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself. He is worthy of the sacrifice I have incurred, and my only anxiety is that he should be rightly judged.

. . .

We work hard in the morning till our heads are hot, then walk out, dine at three and, if we don't go out, read diligently aloud in the evening. I think it is impossible for two human beings to be more happy in each other.

Impossible for two human beings to be more happy in each other!

A rush of movement along the far wall: a knot of starers had assembled just below “The Death of Socrates.” They stared up, and then away, still staring; then up again. They were fixed on the lifted finger. Inexplicably it was directing them to look somewhere else. The knot grew into a little circling pack. Something was being surrounded over there, under Socrates' feet. The chips, the salt, the love adventures of the famous dead. Out of the blue Puttermesser fell into a wild thirst—George Eliot and George Lewes were traveling on the Continent, illicitly declaring themselves husband and wife. At home in England they were scorned and condemned, but in the enlightened Europe of the eighteen-fifties the best salons welcomed them without criticism, they were introduced to poets, artists, celebrated intellectuals; Franz Liszt played for them at breakfast, smiling in rapture with his head thrown back.

That fuss around Socrates. Puttermesser got up to see—anyhow she was in need of a water fountain. Some fellow had set up an easel. She inched her way into the starers and stared. The canvas on the easel was almost entirely covered: here were the mourning disciples, here was that prison staircase through a darkened archway, here were the visitors departing, here on the stone floor under Socrates' couch were the chain and manacle. That suffering youth hiding his eyes as he proffers the hemlock. All of it minutely identical to the painting on the wall: it was only that on the easel Socrates still had no face—the fellow in front of the easel was stippling out the strawberry-blond beard where it starts to curl over Socrates' clavicle. Puttermesser stared up at the painting and back down at the copy. One was the same as the other. You could not tell the difference. She stood at the rim of the crowd and through a kind of porthole watched the shadow of the lower lip gradually bloom into being; she had a better view of the easel than of the copyist. A bit of shoulder, a sleeve pushed up, a narrow hand manipulating the brush—that was all. The hand was horrifically meticulous; patient; slow; horrifically precise. It worked like some unearthly twinning machine. A machine for uncanny displacement. The brush licked and drew back, licked and drew back. The ancient strokes reappeared purely. Puttermesser took in the legend on the brass plate—1787, Jacques-Louis David—and saw how after two centuries Socrates' nose was freshly forming, lick by lick, all over again. She licked her own lip; she had never been thirstier.

The drinking fountain was on another floor. She was gone ten minutes and came back to disappointment: the show was over. The room was nearly deserted. The fellow with the easel was dropping things into a satchel—he had already loaded his canvas onto some sort of dolly. He stopped to wipe a brush with a rag; then he rolled down his shirtsleeves and buttoned them. His shoes were beautifully polished.

Puttermesser's old neglected worldliness woke. She had not always been a loafer. Until only a little while ago she had moved among power-brokers, deputies, opportunists, spoliators, the puffed-up. Commissioners and chiefs. She had not always felt so meek. It is enervating to contemplate your fate too steadily, over too protracted a time: the uses of inquisitiveness begin to be forgotten. She thought of what she would ask the copyist—something about the mysteries of replication: what the point of it was. Plainly it wasn't a student exercise—not only because, though he was fairly young, he could hardly have been a student. He was well into the thirties, unless that modest orderly mustache was meant to deceive. And anyhow the will to repetition—Puttermesser knew she had glimpsed absolute will—was too big, too indecently ambitious, for a simple exercise. It looked to be a kind of passion. The drive to reproduce what was already there, what did it hint, what could hang from it?

She asked instead, “Did you get to finish the face?”

The young man held up an index finger in the direction of “The Death of Socrates.” On the wall Socrates mimicked him. “It's finished, see for yourself.”

“I mean in your version.”

“What I do isn't a version. It's a different thing altogether.”

An elbow-poke of enchantment—aha, metaphysics! “I saw you
do
it. It comes out exactly the same. It's the same thing exactly. It's amazingly the same,” Puttermesser said.

“It only looks the same.”

“But you're copying!”

“I don't copy. That's not what I do.”

Now he was being too metaphysical; she was confused. She was confused by delight. He stood there folding things up—first the rag, then the easel. Above the mustache his nostrils gaped in a doubling victory of their own: George Eliot's observation of Liszt—when the music was triumphant the nostrils dilated. “If you don't want to call it copying,” Puttermesser almost began—it was going to be an argument—but instantly quit. The syllables stopped in her mouth. Thin cheeks. Those bright hairs under such a tidy nose. Without his hat it was hard to be sure. Nevertheless she was sure. The Victorian gentleman in the vestibule of 6-C. The dandy who had snubbed her because a young man is incapable of noticing a woman of fifty-plus. He was noticing her now. She felt how she had coerced it. She had made him look right at her.

“Aren't you a friend of Harvey Morgenbluth's? We met at his door,” Puttermesser said. “In the middle of that party.”

“I don't go to Harvey's parties. I go on business.”

“Well, I live right under him. Three floors down.” Fraudulent. It would be right to admit that she had never
set eyes on Harvey Morgenbluth. “Was that a painting you had with you? In that big package?”

Clearly he did not remember her at all.

“Harvey photographs my things,” he said.

“He copies your copies.”

“They're not copies. I've explained that.”

“But the result is just the same,” Puttermesser insisted.

“I can't help the result. It's the act I care about. I don't copy. I reënact. And I do it my own way. I start from scratch and
do
it. How do I know if Socrates' face got finished first or last? You think I care about that? You think I care about what some dead painter feels? Or what anyone with a brush in his hand thought about a couple of hundred years ago? I do it my way.”

Puttermesser's terrible thirst all at once rushed back; she believed it might be the turning of her actual heart. Her organs were drinking her up and leaving her dry. She had abandoned all her acquaintance for the sake of the arrival of intellectual surprise. Mama, she called back to her mother through the dried-up marshes of so many lost decades, look, Mama, the brain is the seat of the emotions, I always told you so!

In her mother's voice Puttermesser said, “It's used goods, isn't it? Shouldn't you begin with a new idea? With your own idea?”

“This
is
my idea. It's always my own idea. Nobody tells me what to do.”

“But you don't make anything
up
—some new combination, something that never existed before,” she urged.

“Whatever I do is original. Until I've done them my things don't exist.”

“You can't say it's original to duplicate somebody else!”

“I don't duplicate.” He was hitching his satchel onto his shoulder by its strap. “I reproduce. Can't you understand that? Babies get born all the time, don't they? And every baby's new and never existed before.”

“No baby looks like any other,” she protested.

“Unless they're twins.” The canvas went onto the dolly. “And then they lead separate lives from the first breath.”

“A painting isn't alive,” she nearly shouted.

“Well,
I
am—that's the point. Whatever I do is happening for the first time. Anything I make was never made before.” He gave her a suddenly speculative look; she was startled to catch a shade of jubilation in it. Did he talk like this every day of his life? She saw straight into the black zeroes of his pupils, bright islands washed round by faint ink. He poked one end of the folded easel toward her—it was all contraption, with wing-nuts everywhere. “What would you think,” he said, “of helping me with some of this stuff?”

They walked with the contraption between them. The
Letters
were squeezed under Puttermesser's arm. Again immensity opened into immensity, hall into hall. They passed through majesties of civilizations, maneuvering around columns like a pair of workmen, drilling aisles through clusters of mooners and gapers. Precariously they wobbled down the great staircase. It was evident he could have managed all that equipment on his own; he was used to it. She was an attachment trailing along—an impediment—but it seemed to Puttermesser there was another purpose in this clumsy caravan. A kind of mental heat ran through the rod that linked them. He had decided
to clip the two of them together for a little time. She understood that she had happened on an original. A mimic with a philosophy! A philosophy that denied mimicry! And he wasn't mistaken, he wasn't a lunatic. He was, just as he said, someone with a new idea. He had a claim on legitimacy. He was guilty with an explanation; or he wasn't guilty at all. The thing jerking and bobbing between them, with its sticks and screws, was an excitement—it made her keep her distance, but it led her. It was a sort of leash. She followed him, like an aging dog, sidelong.

Puddles on the pavement; she had missed the rain altogether. The street was silted with afternoon light. Puttermesser surrendered her end of the easel—she hated to give it up. Found! George Lewes, George Lewes in New York! He had a kind of thesis, a life's argument. He had nerve. “I'll come by,” he said. “I'll drop in. The next time I have to be at Harvey's place. Here, take one of these. It tells all.”

He set easel, satchel, dolly down on the sidewalk. Then he pulled out a little red case and drew from it a white card. There was a telephone number accompanied by two lines in red type:

Puttermesser, who had not laughed in a month, laughed: she was ready to be happy. “Do people know what this means when you hand it out?”

“It's self-explanatory.”

She was still laughing; it made her as bold as an old politician. “Why would you drop in?”

“To explain the card.” He bent to pick up easel, satchel, dolly. “Don't you want me to? Would you rather I didn't?”

“Come right now,” she said. “I'm dying of thirst. I'll make some tea.”

II. THE NIGHT READERS

P
UTTERMESSER
'
S FAVORITE TEA WAS
Celestial Seasonings Swiss Mint—each tea bag had attached to it an instructive or uplifting quotation. Henry Ward Beecher: “Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.” Victor Hugo: “Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.”

The box too was imprinted with wisdom. Rupert Rabeeno read aloud, “‘I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.' John Locke,” and twisted the box around. “This next one's Nietzsche. ‘He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.' ”

Reading from the tea bag tags was only a joke, a diversion. What they were really reading from was
Middlemarch
. This was the beginning of a project: they were going to do all of George Eliot's novels—out loud, taking turns. The early chapters galloped, but after a while talk always seemed to intervene; they forgot what had happened at the start of a chapter, and had to repeat it. Sometimes they skipped the reading altogether. Rupert Rabeeno was not one of those people who allow their lives to be obscured by the vapor of the merely inferential. He was amazingly explicit: he made Puttermesser
see
things. In a month or so she had been led
through all the particulars of his childhood. She knew the contents of his mother's dusty jewel tray—her high-school class ring, four pairs of screw-on celluloid earrings, one necklace of five-and-dime pearls, one broken watch in the shape of a violin—and exactly where his father used to keep the key to the store safe (in the toe of an out-of-style Buster Brown Mary Jane). His father had run a shoe store in a town outside of Atlanta. Rupert's two married sisters, much older, grandmothers several times over, were settled in Tampa and Dallas. He claimed, besides, two mothers. The first had died when he was only nine: it became his habit to dream over the sad remnants of her few poor trinkets. He thought he could catch a reminiscent sniff of her dress fuming out of the tray in her old chifforobe. His father had put it down in the cellar of the shoe store. His father's second wife—strong and rosy—worked in the shoe store just as Rupert's mother had, and to woo his affection rushed home to give him milk and chocolate graham crackers after school, just as his mother had. But he threw over his milk glass on purpose, and his stepmother watched him drag a spiteful finger through the spill, pulling the wet lines of it into a marvel of a cat with a lifted tail. After that he was sent for art lessons on Tuesday afternoons to a little local academy, where his classmates were mostly girls. Tap dancing was in progress just across the corridor, accompanied by a quaking piano; it was a humiliating place altogether. He didn't
sound
very Southern, Puttermesser noticed: he had left the South a long time ago, and had traveled everywhere. Some years back, he said, he had fallen into a “subject,” his first, at the Louvre: it was the
“Officier de Chasseurs à Cheval de la Garde Impériale Chargeant,” by Théodore Géricault. And before that he had done some translating from the Catalan; and a stint, before that, in “The Changeling,” on the London fringe, playing De Flores.