The Puttermesser Papers (17 page)

Puttermesser heard all this with a formidable sharpness—he was charging her with the will to take hold of him. It was as if he had given her a razor to cut him out with: the whole figuration of his history. He wanted her to know precisely what he added up to. He discharged everything he had done—he had done a lot—in a shower of color and anecdote; he was against elusiveness. Stories, worn through retelling, shot out from him: she felt the knots and burrs of reused thread. And portraits: his curly-haired sisters, their husbands (a couple of doctors, one a gastroenterologist, the other a pediatrician), their children, the strangers their children had married; but he was lost to all of them now. He had left his family behind. He spoke of the curiously perfected reflections of the bridges over the Seine, so that you couldn't tell which was the true world, the one in the air or the one in the river; and of the part-time job he had at eighteen, in a grimy record-pressing plant, listening over and over again for flaws in the grooves; and of how he had once been hired to teach English in a loft on West Fifteenth Street to fearful pathetic newcomers up from the Caribbean, under a half-mad “principal” who required every pupil to trace over the principal's model sentences in green ink; and of how the shoe store, always dark and unpopulated, like an empty movie theater with its double row of chairs back-to-back, had all at
once surprisingly begun to flourish and bustle, fevered, it seemed, by his stepmother's quick run over the old brown carpeting—so that the two of them, his near-sighted father and his rubicund second mother, could dare to open a second store in the next town, called, like the first,
THE PAIR FAIR
.

It was almost too much. Puttermesser would not have minded a bit more mystery, the trail of something shielded, a secret stowed in a crevice. A spot, here and there, of opacity. He told her, with a compulsive comic vividness that shook her, of his clandestine night wedding, at twenty-three, to Cecilia Almendra, a little Argentine cabaret singer, who turned out to be a runaway. Señor and Señora Almendra found them and took the bride back to Buenos Aires—“before the consummation,” he said. Señor Almendra (born Mandel, a refugee from the European cataclysm) raged; Señora Almendra sobbed. The girl had been registered at NYU and was supposed to be studying psychology; she never went to classes and wrote lying letters home. Her hours in the “carabet”—a filthy bar on Avenue A—lasted until five in the morning. A bedroom farce with an unrumpled bed.

In the decade or so since, Rupert had lived without romance—not that kind, anyhow. Paris, and then London, and then Pittsburgh. He was sick of being a seedy wanderer bartering the baubles of trick and knack. In granite Pittsburgh he worked for a provincial satrap, the monarch of an intrastate railroad, and for half a dozen years threw himself into designing billboards. His grand noisy posters, in riotous orange and purple and drumming red,
jumped out at every station like oversized postage stamps connecting town with town. All the commuter lines that led to Pittsburgh were stitched together by Rupert's posters—he thought of them as brilliant beads strung on wire tracks. And he thought of himself as a polychromatic jack-in-the box, ambushing the public. After the billboards, he switched to decorating cereal boxes. It pleased him that the selfsame jug, yellow and two-handled, overflowing with banana flakes, cropped up on tables from Tokyo to Tel Aviv; repetition wasn't far from continuity, and continuity not far from eternity. But in the end he didn't care for assignments and projects and campaigns. He disliked art directors and company bosses. Granite Pittsburgh crumbled for him; it was no better than a heap of sand draining through an hourglass. He missed being sovereign over himself.

Rupert Rabeeno was glutted with his own life—who isn't, and why not? He liked to tell it over and over, as if in the telling he could keep it from shrinking away into the smallness of the nearly forgotten. He let go of nothing he had ever known or seen or felt. Or not felt. Whatever had happened once he meant to make happen again. Reprise invigorated him. And Puttermesser was the same. It came to her in a rush of deliverance as wild as cognition, wilder than consternation—she was the same, the very same, no different! Whatever had happened once, she conspired, through a density of purposefulness, to redraw, redo, replay; to translate into the language of her own respiration. A resurrection of sorts. Wasn't her dream of having George Lewes again—a simulacrum of George Lewes—exactly the same as Rupert Rabeeno's wanting to
make things happen again? Wasn't she, all on her own, a mistress of reënactment?

On a snowy afternoon in early January—Rupert Rabeeno was just back from delivering one of his great flat parcels upstairs at 6-C—Puttermesser decided to tell her idea about George Lewes. It was less an idea than an instinct; it was a burning; it made her shy. She suffered—he might mock her; she would be humiliated. And the awful discrepancy, the moat of age. The first George Lewes (would Rupert Rabeeno consent to be the second?) was born in 1817. George Eliot was born in 1819. A match altogether on the mark, generationally intelligent, so to speak; two years between them, she nearly thirty-five, he thirty-seven, as decently appropriate as could be. Puttermesser's shame stung. A hag. A crone. Estrogen dwindling in her cells. Rupert Rabeeno was too young—he was two decades too young—to be a candidate for a simulacrum of George Lewes. A gap like that is a foolishness in whatever century.

She watched him rummage in her clogged inch of pantry. He plucked up a can of tomato-and-vegetable soup and emptied it into a pot. Then he poured in some water from Puttermesser's blue teakettle and began to stir. She was used to this: he loved soup. He brought two or three cans every time he turned up.

She had calculated just how to get it said. An announcement. “October 23, 1854,” she started off. And read: “‘I have been long enough with Mr. Lewes to judge of his character on adequate grounds, and there is therefore no absurdity in offering my opinion as evidence that he is worthy of high respect.'” The moist smell of onions
heating in the soup curled around them. “Written,” she explained, “right after George Eliot and George Lewes went off to Weimar together.”

The soup splashed into two of Puttermesser's china bowls. “Why Weimar?”

“Goethe's city. Lewes was working on a book about Goethe. He was always working on
some
thing.”

“Sit down and eat your veggies,” Rupert Rabeeno commanded. “That woman's a prig. Too damn solemn.”

Puttermesser said, “It's Lewes I'm thinking of.” George Lewes, light-hearted, airy, a talker!

“He's on your mind a whole lot. So is she.”

A clot of embarrassment coarsened her throat. “It's only a feeling,” Puttermesser said. “A sort of . . . you know, a conceit. A literary conceit.” She put her head down. It was unseemly. She was too old, by twenty years. “It's about ideal friendship.”

He said, “I still don't see the point of Weimar. Going off somewhere. There's no point to it. We can stay right here.”

So he understood her to the marrow. He was all quicksilver; he was ready. She saw how, once she had yielded up her little burning, he could better it, he could complicate it, he could shake the ash of theory from it and fire it into life. They drove through the rest of
Middlemarch
without interruption; or almost. Often she followed him out into the wintry town—after “The Death of Socrates” he had moved over to the Frick. In his own place, on West Fifty-ninth, a studio with a Castro convertible, he boiled up a can of mushroom-and-barley. It seemed to Puttermesser that all the singles who had ever lived in this solitary room
before him were roiling like phantoms in the steam. His suitcase was tidy and waiting—fresh shirts and turtlenecks, his shoe polish and his own toothpaste. His clothes were orderly, well brushed. She asked him where he kept his valet. He laughed; he was exhilarated. “No room for Jeeves! I hide him in my sleeves!” He showed her his favorite lamp—indispensable, he said, for snugness. He carried the lamp and the suitcase, she carried the shade. Laughing, they left shoe holes in the snow; at the curb the new snow was folding itself over last week's old black humps.

Rupert Rabeeno's lampshade was as wide as a bat's wing and cast phosphorescent reflections on the walls. At night under that greenish fishy light—3-C was now spookily undersea—they finished
The Mill on the Floss
. Rupert asked what next.

Puttermesser considered. “Not
Romola
. George Eliot said that book was what made her into an old woman.”

“Let's do the life,” Rupert said.

They tramped in the New York slush to the Society Library and took out all the George Eliot biographies there were, including the one Puttermesser had returned not long before. Rupert wanted to see how they matched up, whether someone writing about George Eliot in, say, the nineteen-eighties was going to turn up the same George Eliot as someone writing in the nineteen-forties, or in the eighteen-nineties. It was like reënacting a landscape a hundred years later, he said. The same grove of trees under the same sky, but different. What altered it was whoever was looking at it. Puttermesser almost followed the argument but was indifferent to it anyhow. Copyist's talk. She didn't
care about any of that. She rejoiced, she was anointed. The germ of her secret seeing had breathed itself alive. Here they were, side by side, reading aloud, an indoor January pastoral; she had passed through the sacred gate, she had entered ideal friendship. Rupert's reading voice was dark, with now and then a sharp scratchy click in it, the call of some imaginary bird—it was a chirp she could not hear in ordinary conversation. It meant he was seized. Snared. Sometimes a tic convulsed his eyelid; he was agitated, he was engulfed. He surpassed her in her little burning, he urged her on.

In her cube of a kitchen she told him her convoluted work history, and admitted to sour Rappoport, with his wife at home in Toronto. Rupert, concentrating, beat at the soup—it was lumpy—and shook the eggs in their pan. After supper he cut her hair. The wisps fell from her nape and forehead, all over her shoulders and the floor. She watched in the mirror as he snipped, evening out the sides: it struck her that she was not yet a hag. Tiny hyphens of hair-cuttings fuzzed her neck; he blew them down inside her blouse and over her back. Her mouth in the mirror was content. Her tongue slipped out like a shining lizard. He never thought of her as too old. Nothing grotesque lay between them. She believed that now. They were friends, ideal friends. She saw how he had become more zealous than she.

When he went upstairs to Harvey Morgenbluth's she stayed behind. It was all business up there. She didn't care for Rupert's business; it opened into discord and combat. His business was postcards. He copied the masters. Harvey Morgenbluth photographed Rupert's doubles, in
full color, and reduced them; then the photos were sent off to the printer and after that to a jobber for distribution. This was Rupert's living. “The Death of Socrates,” for instance, with Socrates' face filled in, reappeared in packets of a hundred, sealed in transparent plastic. One hundred identically lifted Socratic fingers. One hundred identical youths bearing one hundred identical bowls of hemlock. There was a Rubens—“Venus and Adonis”—with a Cupid and a pair of dogs; there was van Gogh's “Irises” and Manet's “Woman with a Parrot.” There was Turner's “Grand Canal, Venice,” all ship and sky and water and misty distance. She thought him a genius—a genius ventriloquist; he could penetrate any style and any form, from a petal to an earlobe. He was at home in minuteness or in vista. The names of both painting and painter were printed on the back of each card—and also, in minuscule letters:
RUPERT RABEENO, REËNACTMENTS OF THE MASTERS
.

This was the subject of their small war. “If all it comes down to is postcards,” Puttermesser said, “you might just as well send Harvey Morgenbluth into the Met with a camera.”

“In the first place he wouldn't be allowed. Which,” Rupert said, “is beside the point anyhow.”

“No it's not. Every museum in the world sells postcards of its paintings.”

“Exactly,” Rupert said. “These are postcards of
my
paintings.”

“It's a fraud.”

This made him jolly. “Counselor!”

“I didn't say it's illegal. I'm not talking about copyright laws. There aren't any copyright laws for French Neoclassicals. That leaves you with your conscience.”

“My conscience!” He reared back as if she had smacked him, and let out a scratchy laugh. It reminded her of the snap, as of an unearthly pod bursting, of his reading voice.

“People are going to look at
your
Grand Canal and think it's Turner's.”

“I made it,” he said, with so much clarity that Puttermesser felt she could stare right through the unpainted circles of his eyes into whatever murmured behind them.

This murmur swept her. She brought his whole head into her arms. “Rupert, Rupert,” she said. A fabricator of doubles, but he had no duplicity. She nearly believed in his case: that these weren't doubles he fabricated. It wasn't a manner or mannerisms he took from his prototypes. It was—could it be true?—their power.

She recited: “‘To see Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.'”

“What's that?”

“Coleridge said it about some famous actor.”

And so their skirmish ended. She could not keep it up. If he didn't invent the work of his hands, he had, anyhow, invented himself. He wasn't a swindler, he wasn't an impostor. The postcards were his very own. She came on them in bookshops, and realized she had often seen them there before. A rack of his cards stood near the door when she went into a stationer's for a packet of envelopes. There on the top tier was Picasso's “Gertrude Stein”—that autonomous skull, tile forehead, mouse's chin. But Rupert had made it.