False Entry (20 page)

His face turned damp and pale again as he labored, and the sweat stood out on it in viscous beads. I had time to notice again the square patch of wrinkles in the center of his forehead, oddly autonomous in the wide, smooth expanse, as if the Lord had at the last moment ceded this much complexity to a child. Once he reached for the drawer by rote, hesitated and closed it again. When he came to the last page of the three to be recopied, he stopped, and remained for some seconds with his eyes half shut, head sunk on his chest. I had seen sick animals remain like that, motionless, harboring their illness. Twice he stayed his right wrist, that had begun to shake again, with his left hand. Then he took out a large handkerchief, folded it into a narrow sling, looped it around the trembling member, and held the two ends of the handkerchief tightly, creating a torsion, in his other hand. He did this with dispassion, like a man bandaging his own wound. And managing himself so, typing with the one hand in the sling, he finished the page. When he had done so, he looked up, the patch working in his forehead. “Hurry,” he said, as if he had been running. “Now give me the name.”

I gave it to him almost absently, in the way that, thinking of other things—a pinprick that did or did not occur a long time back—one gives one’s own. The sound of my own voice startled me. He was still looking at me. I repeated it. “Pierre.”

Still he waited. I stared back at him. His face was exhausted but clear. And the petition, what I could see of it in the machine, was perfect copy, typed for a brother.

When he spoke again, at first I did not understand him. “What’s—what’s rest of it?” he said. And there was my logic, exposed.

A last name. I had simply not thought of it. As for the second name of that other uncle, the distaff uncle, the stepbrother—I had never even known what it was. I cannot explain now, looking back down the long groove of more than time, of qualitative change, how this was—how it could be that I had not considered it at all. It is easier for the rich man to enter heaven than for any man to stand again inside the frame of those pristine days before he was conscripted to the practical world.

A curious blankness took possession of me, a whiteness of the mind. In after years, I have often since had a dream in which I find myself being examined in a language I have not learned, yet recall. I look down on an examination paper couched in words that are warped, yet familiar, algebraic symbols braiding almost to sense, musical notation that just evades a tune. And always there is an unfilterable whiteness interposed between the paper and me. Yet in my student life I never feared examinations. I think now that in those dreams I look down again on my lost logic, to which I can no more return than a ray of light, once chromatic, can go back again through the prism, to the single beam on the other side.

“Hurry!” whispered Fourchette. Even he, absurd in his patch and his tourniquet, had been able to show me the flaw. Even he, poor accomplice, was on the other side of that complicitous fog.

I reached out for the shell, and held it to my face. Its cheek was warm against mine. Turning it over, I listened to its endless respiring. Help me, I prayed. For I am still innocent. Give me a sign out of the current that prevails.

My own voice answered me. It came cracked but human, the sound of feeling gurgled up from a heart that did not pause to know it had it.

“Goodman,” I said. It came up like a gout of salt blood, the secret I had not known I had. “Put down—Goodman.”

S
O THE MEMOIR AND
my life come together, only much sooner than I had planned. “Pierre.” Said by me over twenty years ago in the Fourchette office, and written down here. But before I had done so, the voice had already come to me over the telephone, saying “Pierre.” I had meant to keep her—life external—stationary, until I had completed the most difficult entry of all—into myself. Difficult because, as becomes increasingly clearer, the whole gradual process of my life has been one of using the truth falsely, meanwhile never lying to myself along the way. In memory I have always been painfully honest, indeed more honest than others need be. For if I should once lose the line of demarcation, then I should go down in confusion. Not to lose it, but to keep it, to be both true and false and to keep within myself the distinction—that has been the triumph until now. And when I sat down here, how many nights ago—fifteen—it was to be for the purpose, dangerously new to me, of using that honesty no longer as a mere bookkeeper to memory but as its surgeon, going one by one through the tissues accreted over some piece of truth that had been unaccountably lost but never, I could swear it, willfully perverted, and which now I myself, unaided, would lay bare. Then my outer life might start up again; I should know then which door to open, even if it should be disclosed to be mine.

But the present, moving to its own rough theorem, does not keep in strict equilibration with the past, as in the calculable old algebraic lunacies of Smith and Brown, who in the primers used so comfortably to navigate the world. “If Smith” (who is the present) “starts at a given point, traveling at the rate the earth goes round the sun, and Brown” (who is the past) “goes from the same point, at the same rate, in the opposite direction, the circumference of the earth being known, at what point are they likely to meet, or is Smith standing still in relation to Brown?” And what is the answer if a man, who is
x
, is in himself both Smith and Brown?

The answer is—that the phone rings. The answer is that bit by bit the arrogance of memory is being taken from me, the safety crumb by crumb. Up to now I have told myself that at least I am the taker, and that this is in its way a triumph. That no one can bear too long the bleat of his childhood, the blind, glaucous voice of his youth, without shame. And that I must get on to the trial, where, if the perversion began, so did the man.

But the phone rang, and I chose to listen. I will listen, I thought, long enough to find out why, of all the many there might have been to fear, I chose her.

“Pierre,” she said again, but this time there was no question in her voice, and I, who had said “Yes,” said nothing. The silence fell between us like a rest in music; we plumbed it and rested there. Then my inner dialogue began again, its shorn fugue mending. If I let the present in now, I shall never be sure where safety lies. But is that what I fear? Meanwhile I said to her, “Yes. This is Pierre.”

“I know,” she said, scarcely forming the words. I heard her breathing, hard but slowing, the
râles
of a child run a long way to fling itself inside a door and lean back, pressed against it, to breathe. I remembered how, long ago, claw-fingers clutching my mother’s the long way out on the Underground, my breath would go faster and faster with the wheels until it seemed as if the suction of my love would draw out of me the necessary air—until I was inside that door again, the terrible angina of absence was over, and I could breathe. And I thought how odd it was that this, on which I had never allowed myself to dwell in tenderness for myself, I remembered now in pity for her.

Before I spoke—I do not know what I would have said—she spoke.

“I am not ashamed,” she said. So she told me again what she had already said in a hundred pleading, oblique acts of submission, of favor, and what, in that one night’s grappling, she had shown me in all its nuances, shrinking and bold—but had never said in so many words. There are women from whose lips, true as any, the three simple words—the declaration—break continuously, like three golden bubbles, as if they had a fountain of such constantly forming, springing golden from inside. And there are others, like her, who can do everything but speak them, who have tongues witty and easy for all but this. Who send instead mute gifts selected with the perfect stroke of adoration, letters built in the careful, flat planes of friendship, as cunningly as a house of cards which the breeze from that one triplet of words would make fall. And who, when they give someone the strange, mute gift of themselves, do so with lovely simplicity, feeding him with their fingers, opening their nudity to him with quiet laughter, pressing their faces against his secret flesh, his against theirs, in a streaming abandonment of mouths and hands and hair. But for whom, as for some men, as for me, nothing of the flesh is as bare as the certain nudity of words.

“I am not ashamed,” she said to me, with the sadness of declaration. Not, she was saying to me, of that night either because it had been or had been only one, nor of letting me see what all the nights between had been, nor of coming to me, along the filament, here. And I thought that her face, if I could see it, would have the
triste
dignity of a woman who lets a last garment slip to the ground.

“I am the one to be ashamed,” I said, thinking that even if she had come, not across the wire, but taking up her blanket instead, barefoot through the four-o’clock streets, even the street-corner churls must have bowed their heads to her trouble, turning their eyes, shamed for me or themselves, aside.

“That’s all right,” she said brusquely. And as quickly, she was clothed. No, I thought to tell her, stay as you were. Else you will never approach me. And is that what I fear?

“And you?” she said. “I didn’t wake you?”

“No. I was awake.”

“I had a feeling you were. And—I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing the boats.”

Their house, my flat, are ten blocks apart north-south, and almost the same short distance west of the East River. At times, as old houses will, they vibrate like decks to the river traffic’s gliding calls. And now and then, in the foolish telephone interchange bred between incipient lovers, she and I had stopped to hear one of those long, humid blue notes simultaneously, entranced at the viability of sound, that made it possible for us to squabble metaphysically over who heard it first, and by what blended aural image of ear on phone, on phone.

“I’ve been working here nights.” I did not know how to begin. Nor, for the first time, how to leave.

“Oh. Then you aren’t … at the office these days?” Her voice was timid. Then she had not called there. Or pretends she has not, I thought, but could not persuade myself that she lied. I knew the spoor of honesty too well. If it were I, I would have called and concealed it. If she were more like me, I thought, I should have nothing to fear.

“No. I’d arranged for time off.” The next day, not before. But my tongue had already twisted the tense, reminding me how well it knew how to give nothing away. “If you called—they think I’m out of the city.”

“I—did not call.” Her words came after a pause, and I imagined her mouth as she said them, its frank lines that always expected the same of others, even of me—and I could not bear not to be honorable with it too. In the small things, I thought. That do not matter.

“I arranged for it the next day,” I said. “I’ve been doing something of my own. Something I’ve had to be alone for. I tried writing you a letter—but I couldn’t explain.” I waited for her protest but none came.

“It had nothing to do with you,” I said. Lies breed lies, I thought. But for me, the truth does it as well. Which part of me will she believe, the truth or the lie? That is part of the fear. Which.

“Then I was wrong. I thought it had. That’s why—I could call.” Her words came in a rush. “I thought—I think now I have for a long time … there’s … some part of your life you have to keep to yourself. And because we’d made love, I thought I could trespass. But I was going to tell you now … that I could … that I would—manage not to.”

The phone trembled in my hand, at my lips.

“But if I was wrong, then—” Her voice altered, retreated to the promised distance. “Then I should not have called. Then I am ashamed.”

“No. Never.” I was grateful to the mask of the phone, that let me say it, that kept her from me, from the helpless cycle of touch that would have begun again had she been here. And again there was a rest, a silence.

“Listen!” she said suddenly. And I thought—now the thread will break. And I can leave.

“Yes?” I answered. I should warn you. Only for myself.

“Not to me,” she said, as if she had heard me. “The boats. They’re beginning.”

They had begun all around us, pushing the city up toward morning, the island voices. We listened on our peculiar electronic island, on which, from a safe distance, we could breathe in unison, almost as in love. Heard by each of us through our separate windows, and doubled again through phone on phone, the chorale of the river pierced and tremored, until it seemed as if all around us sleepers must awake and join us, or must be held by the island breath of the water in a legend that endlessly lulled.

“It’s getting light here,” she said, and from a depth almost of sleep I answered, “Here too.” My head bowed against my hand, and I must have dreamed off a little, into a legend where the two of us listened neither for ourselves nor for the other, but, acutely together, to the rich current as it came.

Then I awoke, but still in the spell, like someone started up from a dream of drowning, who leans back, before he opens his eyes, on his deep urge to be drowned. Perhaps, I thought, in my sleep I told her everything. From the beginning.

“Have you gone?” I said.

“No. But I can sleep now. Keep—keep well.”

The light was paling, reassembling the room. In a moment I should have to wake to it. The boats were still.

“I lied,” I said. “I was avoiding you.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve watched you. I know how you are.”

Of course she watches. How easily I forget that others do.

“How?” I said. “What do you know?” That I never knew your brother. That I was not always Pierre, and now am never wholly who I say I am. That I, who meant to be so undispersed, so single, have played for so long with the protean gap between what is and what might be that I am almost no one at all. “What do you think I am?”

This was the longest silence. Her answer prolonged it. “Honest.”

Innocence, I thought. Beyond belief, this innocence. Can one believe it? From far below in myself, from farther off than it had ever come before, I felt a flicker of mine.