Cast in Doubt (15 page)

Did I look stricken? I wonder. How I hate being given away by my eyes, by myself. I offer her some cheese and bread—the bread is a bit stale, like that metaphor she offered about her group. She eats a bit and complains that I am in no way a Jewish mother. Perhaps I’m a Greek mother, I say. Does that mean I am a father? We laugh together and some of the tension passes. Then I announce, with no little anxiety, that John, a handsome young musician, an ex-beau of Helen’s from New York, will be here tomorrow to see about building bookshelves. Gwen and he will certainly meet, and in anticipation of that meeting, I must explain his presence beforehand, I believe. I don’t want any more unruly surprises. Gwen shoots a knowing we’ve-been-here-before look at me. I expected this. I can keep nothing from her, at least nothing that is about love or lust. To deflect her curiosity, I remark, rather more loudly than I want, You’re making quite a name for yourself, dear. John knew who you were. Gwen grimaces, inhales deeply and sips her wine. She asks rhetorically, because how would I, out-of-touch Horace, know if she ever slept with him. You know how forgetful I am, she says; then inquires disinterestedly, he’s staying with Alicia? Such a woman. She emphasizes woman. Clearly Gwen remembers that she doesn’t like Alicia, but I don’t remind Gwen that that aspect of her supposedly bad memory has not suffered injury. Also I don’t repeat that John referred to Gwen as old. I have no desire to hurt her.

Perhaps Gwen grimaces because she is nearsighted. She refuses to wear glasses. I have learned to accept the fact that she subscribes to Parker’s “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” As I said, I do believe she is very much like Parker. Gwen is vain. Often she cannot recognize friends on the street or at a party unless they are right in front of her. She uses this to her advantage—she can shun people and seem not to and can always say, I didn’t see you. I’m as blind as a bat. Then she might wink. The literary line which divides her face cryptically, or critically—it is doing so now—allows her the liberty of ambiguity, or rather the solace of ambiguity.

I’m throwing a party for you, dear. I’ll invite everyone.
Tout le monde
. Gwen smiles and grimaces. She hopes that I serve food, so that people don’t retch all night and the next day, as they did in Cambridge that time, our last and most infamous New Year’s Eve party, which ended in a near-riot. Recalling it makes me laugh uproariously. I twist or roll in the chair and hold my sides, then lose my breath and begin to hiccup. Gwen watches me steadily, with some concern. You don’t laugh enough, Lulu, you’re out of shape. When the hiccups stop and I catch my breath, I explain that memories have come flooding in. Of our friends vomiting? she asks, deadpan. I shake my head and start to laugh again. I was also thinking of much more pleasant things. Remember Peter collapsing into his lover’s arms? Pleasant, Gwen retorts. I ignore her. Remember George, absolutely blotto, collapsing, after much Scotch and many pills, remember how he crashed upon the table like a giant redwood cut at the stem? Timber, we shouted. Timbers we called him afterward, for a long time. He’s gone, Gwen notes cryptically.

Perhaps it is the mention of death itself that is cryptic. Or those times at that café, I go on, I forget the name of it now—and our arguments about New Criticism with the social realists. This in turn reminds me of a recent argument I had with Roger. He believes that a work of art’s greatness can be measured by the difficulty with which it can be copied. Gwen finds this viewpoint hilarious, as do I. Roger claimed, repeatedly, as if speaking to a dead man, that a Vermeer couldn’t be copied. But I won the argument by insisting that a Jackson Pollock would be much harder to copy, as it was executed not by the careful application of paint but by employing randomness. How, I said to him, my voice mounting in vehemence, just how would you copy, exactly and precisely, a splat? A three-dimensional splat at that? Gwen salutes me.

I prefer Picasso to Pollock, though Gwen doesn’t. Quel stupid is your Roger, says she. How do you stay here, she asks again, if you have to engage in boring arguments like that? Please, Gwen, I answer, with more annoyance than I mean to show, let us decide that this subject is off season, shall we? I am here, that is all. You are in New York and from what you report, it is not so marvelous there either, and we will not have a pleasant time together if you keep harping on this place and its obvious inadequacies. I enjoy these inadequacies. And why not, I think to myself, enjoy them. All right, Lulu, Gwen nods, and studies me in her inimitable way. All right, Lulu, you win. You witness the demise of a scold. She suggests that we drink to our inadequacies, which we do. The matter is as much as resolved. An understanding has been reached on the subject.

The rest of the night speeds away. Somehow, attempting to envision it now, I see an image, myself lying on the floor absolutely still—I am pretending to be a log. This may have had to do with Gwen’s wordplay about letting sleeping logs lie, and so forth. I seem to recall something like that. Or it may have had to do with another mention of our dead friend Timbers. Or it may have been produced when I was laughing and rolling like a log.

In the morning Gwen’s pumps are still on the floor under the chaise longue. She is nowhere in sight and Yannis too has disappeared. With her shoes there, it’s as if she’d melted into thin air, like the city of Oz or, more ominously, like the Wicked Witch. Melting has a mysterious and fluid quality to it that attaches itself to Gwen, who has a wonderful plasticity to her. She can fit herself into so many scenes, as John might put it. But Gwen is not magical in the way that Helen is, I mean, not as mysterious to me. Mystery might have its roots in magic. Gwen has her feet on the ground, even if she abandons her shoes. As for Yannis’ absence, about this I experience some trepidation. On the other hand, John will come soon, and would I really care to have Yannis hanging about being surly?

* *
*

It occurs to me that part of this story transpired before certain revelations, before some events occurred which disturbed my peace and the pace of this narrative, such as it is, which I was in no way able to predict or even to imagine. Looking back on it, the life I lived and am recording had been orderly and relatively contained. But at the time I lived it, I sensed myself, inarticulately, to be not quite in it, holding on rather tentatively, threatened by something, a presence or other who might be waiting in the wings, and who might make me lose my way, lose my grip. I was always at the brink of that, staving it off. Dante expresses it so elegantly:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / chè la diritta via era smarrita
. Yes, “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to my senses in a dark forest, for I had lost the straight path.”

I did not see Helen as an impediment, but took her for a miracle, my Beatrice, if you will. She existed outside my world, and so was a delicacy, an entity delicious in it, drawn into it but separate from it. I embraced her without reservation. To me she was unaccountable and yet, within limits, delightfully unmanageable. Now I see that my habits were designed precisely to control my world. And that I deigned to do so was typical of my approach to life before a certain dramatic break in my thinking, perhaps not dramatic, but one of import to me, and one which necessarily affected my daily routines. And surely one might—I will—call that dramatic.

John is due to arrive at noon. Yannis is nowhere to be found. I have already spent most of the morning writing, which included invitations to the soirée for Gwen. Yannis has not been home for several hours, not counting the evening hours. Yet this is not terribly unusual. He must have gone home to visit his mother, a widow. I believe he shares with her some of the money I give him, and that is perfectly all right with me, though he never tells me precisely what he does with his allowance. Nor do I ask. I assume he thinks I would not like it, were I to know, but in fact I do, very much, as I feel my largesse supports those who need it. This in turn supports me in feeling worthy and virtuous. After all, I am the scion of Calvinists and Puritans, an upbringing that still adheres, in some respects. In addition I have heard that Beauvoir and Sartre support the people around them, their adopted family, and I admire that greatly.

John appears. He is late but he looks beautiful. I would say as usual, but this afternoon he has a glow on. That is how my English friend Duncan might put it. Duncan would sleep with him right off, without so much as a by-your-leave. He would know just how to seduce a supposedly non-homosexual lad into his bed and into imagining that just this once made no difference whatsoever, that, no matter what, he was as good as new, still a man, that life goes on, and in fact it may not make a difference and life does go on. Duncan with his lime-green eyes and catlike cunning—Duncan would simply charm and charm and then pounce. But Duncan is younger than I, and even when I was younger, I never pounced. I am not the pouncing type. I am cautious, unless I am drunk, and then I don’t care, and no one else does either, I should think.

John glances about my rooms with no hint of self-consciousness. He takes them in and I drink him in, a rich brew, a heady tonic. Some such idea wafts playfully in my mind. He is quite playful too; I am sure he is flirting with me in earnest. He measures the wall against which I want to place two bookcases. He moves gracefully and with assurance. He is a lissome lad, I think contentedly. And he seems to know what he is doing. He is even direct when it comes down to it—the nuts and bolts of daily life, the practicalities. We discuss the size of the shelves and whether I would want them all to be of equal height. I decide to have the top ones built for oversized books. John even appears interested when I explain how my library will be ordered and how it will differ in plan from that of the Dewey decimal system. Libraries reflect their collectors, and each library, I tell John, has a life and mind of its own.

Naturally talk evolves from shelves to books and to other subjects and at one moment to Helen, which is not a surprise. I am prepared for this. We are sitting on my couch, having tea. John discovers that I have not seen her for a while. I reveal the whole truth—that she and I may be on the outs—because now my subterfuge would be almost callous and surely unnecessary. John becomes alarmed, which surprises me pleasantly; his entire demeanor had excluded the possibility of his being shockable. He could not be just “a liar,” as Helen had said, but a delicate young man, more complex and sensitive than she allowed. I keep reflecting upon how odd it is, how peculiar, that someone as hip, probably as groovy as John, in his colorful terms, should manifest alarm. His rationalizations for it are feeble, to the effect that it has nothing to do with him, but everything to do with her. Though I have my own doubts, I attempt to calm him, assuring him that no harm will come to Helen, who is willful and remarkably resilient. He now exhibits a grave scrupulosity, but says nothing. His expression, easily called up in my mind’s eye, is full of meaning, yet ambiguous, even opaque.

I am still extremely curious about Helen’s sister, and whether she was a suicide as I had surmised, and whether they were twins, which I have less belief in of late, especially now that Gwen is in town. With Gwen around I am more aware of my feelings toward her, twinnish feelings. In fact, I was in the process of writing something to that effect when John knocked at my door.

Long ago, I imagined Gwen and I were fraternal twins—man, woman, heterosexual, homosexual, black, white. But in a way these supposed oppositions meant nothing to me except as qualities that added to our specialness. The point was we were originals, that was what was most important. Nothing could really separate us. Gwen and I were two sides of the same precious coin. As Alicia might put it, we were each other’s anima and animus. But I really don’t subscribe to Jungian theory. It was true, though, that I idealized us, and perhaps I will always. From other sides of the tracks but on the same track, we were, and are, our own club. Gwen has often commented upon how discriminating we were in those days, how exclusive, no one was good enough for us. She was a greater snob than I in many ways.

She must have acclimated quickly to being the only black person in our group, and often the only female. She never let on what her feelings were, if any, about being singular in those ways. I knew then, and know now, very little about her other, earlier life, with her family, and little in regard to her attitudes toward or even her experience of race. In New York there was a black piano player she liked, but he too spent most of his time in white society. On one occasion I attempted to ask her. She uttered something rather abstract about being more about sex than race and disallowed, through her laconicism and gestures, I recall, any further questions, direct questions of that nature, anyway. It was a less strange remark then—to be about sex, not race, in a way—than now, although maybe not, since it was at the beginning of the sixties. I accepted her answer, as it neatly coincided with my conception of her. But in any case, I was not and am not one to press, even though I am unusually curious—this is often said of me. I have the urge to pry. Can this truly mean, as Freud suggested, that I am always seeking to discover my parents in flagrante delicto?

Gwen never wanted to talk about her family; it was as if anything said about families at all was childish or beneath contempt. She seemed to hold them in contempt. But all of us did then. She seemed, and still seems, not to think about herself in any of the ways one might imagine. This may be true of original people generally. But while she never made pronouncements about race, as if it didn’t occur to her, and therefore ought not to others, I have now more than a sneaking suspicion that nothing escaped Gwen, that she always knew where she was and where she had come from. Very little escaped from her that she didn’t want others to know, no matter how close one was. But this never occurred to me then. Gwen must have suffered the way one does when one lives a crucial aspect of one’s life in secrecy, in the closet. She must have suffered in silence. Perhaps she still does, even in these more open times. I felt a chill and shivered involuntarily. I walked to the open window and shut it decisively. The cold air had blown in from some distant, terribly remote place outside me, outside us. Actually, I felt a bit like Rebecca in Daphne du Maurier’s novel, which Hitchcock most successfully brought to the screen.