Twice Told Tales (11 page)

I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be crippled, but it might be nice to be proud. Then I got teary and felt foolish and scared for myself, too.

“Well,” I told Kim, “he can’t stop me feeling sorry for him now.”

She was packing the few special things she cared about; rolling the breakables up in newspaper; a porcelain Hindu dancer; a bud vase. I told her that because she might have seen my reaction. But she just kept carefully placing those little packages into a carton. We were sitting in the kitchen, the manuscript on the kitchen table.

Finally she said something. “Couldn’t we go back?” she said. “He wasn’t so nice to you, anyway.”

“Even if we could go back—what would I do?”

My mind was running. I’d always been good at business. If you call what I’d been doing out there business. It wasn’t exactly buying low and selling high. It was who needed what you had badly enough. Like me and Gideon. I needed what he knew—he and Mister Forster. We’d done our work, finished now. And I was spoiled for the old business, uncertain in the new.

The one thing I hadn’t done since Gideon died was to go over the pages and see what he’d scrawled. There would be somebody else to deal with at the publishers. It was so hard to figure—he went everywhere comfortable, trapped for life in a wheelchair, from which, if you allowed an ounce of pity you’d be selling pencils on a street corner, but at home in his skin. Me, my nerves scramble on my bones when I have to talk to strangers or any new people these days. Him in his chair; Mister round character. He was round all right.

I told as much of this to Kim as I could make her understand. She surprised me.

“You’ve been tossed around the world too much, Lew,” she said. “It takes a thing from you. He was stuck right in his place, in his chair. But it was his place. A chair is a place.”

Sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was the Scotch talking or if there were still things I had to learn about Kim. The oriental women I’ve known try to look like flat characters. But it’s just a way of looking, not the way they are.

I squeezed a half a lime into my Coke and went to the kitchen table to leaf through the pages on the kitchen table. In the margins Gideon had scrawled his signatures:
Weak from paragraph two on … No guts … rewrite from the gut … falls apart in the middle of the scene … No balls …

What energy the dead could muster! What aggression from the crematory fires! It should have been no surprise to me. Half of the people dragging me to a criminal trial were dead. I finished my Coke and tentatively, very slowly, Kim said to me, “You want to have a drink?”

I looked at her as if I was testing her. “You mean one of these—or a real drink?”

She turned those brownish-black eyes away; couldn’t face me. “Whatever you want,” she said.

I sat facing the open window. To look out I had to see the pile of manuscript on the kitchen table, with the black marks all along the white sides of the paper. It looked like I wasn’t finished yet. I felt the rise of the old frustration and rage: whenever you thought you were finished with Gideon he came back at you, and you had to start all over again. It was endless.

I got up and looked at the pages more closely. I stared, trance-like; everything felt mixed together, Gideon being gone along with all the other losses, Phan-Phen, my kid sister, the confusion of those years which had seemed so lively and practical, while things held together: picking up from Jeff, delivering—everybody always glad to see me arrive and then R & R until the next time—the strange isolation of my affair with Lois Wan … “It’s always oriental women with you because you think your own kind are critical of you while others are just grateful.” Wiggy’s pronouncement just before the break … an amateur psychologist before becoming an amateur prophet.

I’d never thought much about the future, never thought I could parlay the small-time stuff I was moving around into some big hit, never even thought I’d get Lois Wan to leave Jeff and marry me. In fact, I realized now, looking at a story I seemed to have written, with a beginning, a middle, and end, that I’d never made any planned connections. It had all been so heedless until Gideon. Blind alleys of days and nights, mixed motives, missed chances, a jig-saw puzzle with a few key pieces always left out.

But this was different. I began to get excited as I riffled through the pages. The comments didn’t trouble me so much now. In fact they got my adrenalin going. I would insert Wiggy’s letter there, right there, to give a stronger spine to the scene. And that remark about feeling safer with oriental women—that could be said by another character for a grittier conflict.

It was as if I saw the chaotic stream of my days and nights through the eyes of some super-Gideon; some giant cloud-face of an editor, like a special effect in a movie; a cheap, cinematic point, the great editor-in-the-sky shaping the drunken progression of dumb experiences into some sense: beginning, middle, yes even maybe an ending.

Nothing was exempt. Even the cold commercialization of it all into a would-be bestseller—I saw that Gideon insult, which had so pissed me off, as a perverse act of faith; a weird conferring of grace as only that imprisoned, imprisoning wonderful son-of-a-bitch could confer.

It extended much further than just putting an okay stamp on my haphazard career on the fringes of that war—the war which had made a lot of people sick, some mad, some dead, and some rich. It went all the way back to the sense I’d always had, but never admitted, that my kid sister had died instead of me; that it was my fault. It was a stupid car accident, so I know it’s a wild idea. I mean she was crossing the street and I was downtown in school. But you can’t know a thought is crazy until you put it in place, admit it, and hook it up to other thoughts, other places and people.

My mother calling it a judgment of God—as if it made the senseless smash-up of a little life more acceptable, if you brought God into it. I hated the idea, God judging seven-year-old kids. I knew she meant my father and his women at the factory, but that was just as sickening. Any way you took the death of my kid sister as anything but random was awful.

Strangely, it was Gideon’s surprise dying that seemed to put all of these things into some ranking. The way he’d insisted on putting the gains and losses of what happened to me in the Far East into some order—all the deaths and betrayals organized into fictional order: the events moving forward, the characters flat or round. His being dead made it possible to feel things settled. That was an unpleasant notion. My mother had my sister settled into heaven. But Gideon’s dying and poking at me and my manuscript, now that I could no longer poke back, was urgent, continuing.

In a feverish scribble I began to jot down items.

• The impossible accident of making love to Lois Wan in the American Embassy, when anyone could have walked through the doors and discovered us.
  
• Finding myself seated opposite Gideon’s wheelchair and realizing how important it was to me to please him.
  
• The very first day Jeff asked me if I would drop off a package at a bar near the harbor and would I please not ask him what was in it.
  

I was breathless in the rush of connections, of backward and forward movement. I muttered, “Gideon, Gideon …” like a prayer of gratitude.

The feeling of shape, of cause and effect, was like a thrill in my blood.

“Hey, the King died and then the Queen died of grief,” I said and laughed and felt giddy.

But Kim didn’t hear me because she was going into the living room to answer the phone.

for Muriel Shine

C
ELIA MORRIS MET ZOE
Lee her first week on campus. Zoe was tall, aggressively shy, with striking shiny black skin and cheekbones set high and angry. She was not beautiful, only large and austere; not gifted as a student, only desperately persistent. Celia was afraid of her for some reason and played with the idea of screening her out of the class. In the end she didn’t have the nerve.

Everything scared Celia, her husband’s death sitting on her so recent and so heavy. Michael Morris’s death was one of those losses which strike whole communities. It hit
me
hard and I came into his orbit late in his career and life. It hit all of us—the designers, the writers, directors, the painters, an actor—such as myself—who relied on Michael Morris for more than just professional financial advice. We received from him what I can only call grace: a humane address to the crazy, crushing world of theater and writing and art. If we were so badly struck down, how much more would Celia be wiped out. We watched and waited.

Celia couldn’t afford to wait. In his caring so eloquently and elegantly for all of us, Michael had not taken care to become rich or even mildly plush. I think that since we all assumed he would always be there for us, he picked up on the loony idea of his own immortality. It was typical of him. The security of the people who made the beautiful things he admired so much was more important than his own. So his financial wit died with him. And Celia, the wife of the attorney-at-law to the arts, inherited the fate more common to the widows of artists and scientists: she was broke. Still dazed by what had happened to her she had to go back to teaching college English at the City University.

Now all this was in the rough-and-tough days of the sixties in New York. Campuses were crowded, issues flamed on every walk and lawn; the placard and the bullhorn were as basic as books. Through the whirling chaos Celia walked, oblivious. Everyone’s personal history must intersect with the general condition. And if one is more intense, the other gives way. Before the grief of losing Michael Morris, those dramatic campus events gave way. Celia was a ghost haunted by ghosts.

Still there was registration. Nothing is as real as registration. And nothing rouses the half-dead as well as a roiling group of students raising questions about a class you’ve only half thought through. With relief Celia realized she could still do it. She talked about the need for all kinds of literature, relevant (and irrelevant? she wondered) as well as more distantly applied fictions. She seized on two Jameses, James Baldwin and Henry James.

This done, she divided the class along voluntary lines—it was the fashion of the hour—and the blacks and Puerto Ricans clustered into one group, the lower middle class and a smattering of middle-class whites in the second. When the session ended, Zoe Lee towered over her, a shadow cutting off her light. She was the first to hand in her paper. Thanks for nothing, Celia thought, staring down the sullen young woman. This is a first for me, Celia thought, hating a student. And one who’s done nothing to me. Grief makes you crazy, she decided.

It made her drunk that night in a half-hour flat. She sat on the carpet in the living room, shoes kicked off, dinner-less, glass in hand, and tried to read papers. But the room was full of echoes, distractions. In the corner the piano sang silently, sang the Schubert G Major Sonata which Paul Badura-Skoda had played twenty years earlier. (The pianist had been grateful—saved by Michael’s skill from what he’d called his financial death wish.) It became the family joke—all these gifted men and women saved from financial suicides by Michael Morris, a roly-poly British lawyer who loved the artist and the arts so deeply he could see no difference between them. And they loved him back, making his home an oasis of song, poetry, and general conversation which even that confused time recognized as extraordinary.

Celia built a fire and crowded out music, laughter; all the delicious debris of the past by reading papers. Zoe Lee’s paper jumped out at her. It was awful! The term “broken English,” usually reserved for foreigners, came to her mind. “Writing means to have a thing in which you be told what things mean in the world …”

God, she thought, this class is going to be murder. She rambled through the two Jameses and chose two stories: “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin and “Brooksmith” by Henry. She would not blaze trails. She would act out the cliché. The blacks get Baldwin, the whites get James. No illusions with either group. “Sonny’s Blues” was an elegiac tale of a gifted black man and his troubled younger brother who, finally, he could not save. “Brooksmith” was the tale of a butler at one of those Jamesian salons of the imagination, so spoiled by the quality of the discourse at his master’s evenings that he cannot survive the man’s death and all that vanishes with it.

Some sane, still sober part of Celia knew she was attracted by the echo of her life with Michael. Brooksmith, like dear, round, appreciative Michael, was an artist without an art, attending those who owned and exercised the gifts. These days any echo would do. She took it and fell asleep on the floor in a blur of books.

The next day she zombied through both sections of the class, assigning the stories and trying not to look at Zoe Lee who, in any case, turned out to be absent.

After lunch she was almost knocked down in the hallway by Zoe Lee.

“What … what is it?”

“I couldn’t get to class.” Her famous icy aplomb was gone. “What was the assignment?”

Celia told her and watched the tall ghost flee towards the exit.

C wonders what Z has on her that shakes her up so. They’re as far apart in lives as in the alphabet—though Celia knows nothing of Zoe’s life. She sleeps badly that night and doses heavily with coffee the next day. She writes the assignment briskly on the blackboard:

SONNY’S BLUES BY JAMES BALDWIN Write eight hundred words on theme, et cetera, et cetera …

A hand shoots up instantly. Celia’s fears confirmed. It is, of course, Zoe.

“What is it, Miss Lee.”

“But you say ‘Brooksmith’ by Henry James.”

“I said—what?”

“When I asked you in the hall …”

Celia is shaken. What a dumb mistake. I am going crazy, she thought. I have to get away. I started working too soon after death. Black is the color of mourning … Z is the last letter of the alphabet.

You need more time, she tells herself.

To Zoe Lee she said, “All right,” trying to sound professorially certain. “Have you read ‘Brooksmith’?”