Look at the Harlequins! (15 page)

The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing, in a charming New York apartment (it was leant to Annette and me by a generous relative of mine and faced the sunset flaming beyond Central Park). The neuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid black headache that no pill could pierce. Annette rang up James Lodge, and he, out of the misdirected kindness of his heart, had an old little physician of Russian extraction examine me. The poor fellow drove me even crazier than I was by not only insisting on discussing
my symptoms in an execrable version of the language I was trying to shed, but on translating into it various irrelevant terms used by the Viennese Quack and his apostles (
simbolizirovanie, mortidnik
). Yet his visit, I must confess, strikes me in retrospect as a most artistic coda.

Neither
Slaughter in the Sun
(as the English translation of
Camera Lucida
got retitled while I lay helplessly hospitalized in New York) nor
The Red Topper
sold well. My ambitious, beautiful, strange
See under Real
shone for a breathless instant on the lowest rung of the bestseller list in a West Coast paper, and vanished for good. In those circumstances I could not refuse the lectureship offered me in 1940 by Quirn University on the strength of my European reputation. I was to develop a plump tenure there and expand into a Full Professor by 1950 or 1955: I can’t find the exact date in my old notes.

Although I was adequately remunerated for my two weekly lectures on European Masterpieces and one Thursday seminar on Joyce’s
Ulysses
(from a yearly 5000 dollars in the beginning to 15,000 in the Fifties) and had furthermore several splendidly paid stories accepted by
The Beau and the Butterfly
, the kindest magazine in the world, I was not really comfortable until my
Kingdom by the Sea
(1962) atoned for a fraction of the loss of my Russian fortune (1917) and bundled away all financial worries till the end of worrisome time. I do not usually preserve cuttings of adverse criticism and envious abuse; but I do treasure the following definition: “This is the only known case
in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle [
amerikanskiy dyadyushka, oncle d’Amérique
],” so phrased by my faithful Zoilus, Demian Basilevski; he was one of the very few larger saurians in the
émigré
marshes who followed me in 1939 to the hospitable and altogether admirable U.S.A., where with egg-laying promptness he founded a Russian-language quarterly which he is still directing today, thirty-five years later, in his heroic dotage.

The furnished apartment we finally rented on the upper floor of a handsome house (10 Buffalo St.) was much to my liking because of an exceptionally comfortable study with a great bookcase full of works on American lore including an encyclopedia in twenty volumes. Annette would have preferred one of the
dacha-like
structures which the Administration also showed us; but she gave in when I pointed out to her that what looked snug and quaint in summer was bound to be chilly and weird the rest of the year.

Annette’s emotional health caused me anxiety: her graceful neck seemed even longer and thinner. An expression of mild melancholy lent a new, unwelcome, beauty to her Botticellian face: its hollowed outline below the zygoma was accentuated by her increasing habit of sucking in her cheeks when hesitative or pensive. All her cold petals remained closed in our infrequent lovemaking. Her abstraction grew perilous: stray cats at night knew that the same erratic deity that had not shut the kitchen window would leave ajar the door of the fridge; her bath regularly overflowed while she telephoned, knitting her innocent brows (what on earth did she care for
my
pains,
my
welling insanity!), to find out how the first-floor person’s migraine or menopause was faring; and that vagueness of hers in relation to me was also responsible for her omitting a precaution she was supposed to take, so that by the autumn, which followed our moving into the accursed Langley
house, she informed me that the doctor she had just consulted looked the very image of Oksman and that she was two-months pregnant.

An angel is now waiting under my restless heels. Doomful despair would invade my poor Annette when she tried to cope with the intricacies of an American household. Our landlady, who occupied the first floor, resolved her perplexities in a jiffy. Two ravishing wiggly-bottomed Bermudian coeds, wearing their national costume, flannel shorts and open shirts, and practically twins in appearance, who took the celebrated “Hotel” course at Quirn, came to cook and char for her, and she offered to share with us their services.

“She’s a veritable angel,” confided Annette to me in her touchingly phony English.

I recognized in the woman the Assistant Professor of Russian whom I had met in a brick building on the campus when the head of her remarkably dreary department, meek myopic old Noteboke, invited me to attend an Advanced Group Class (
My govorim po-russki. Vy govorite? Pogo-vorimte togda
—that kind of awful stuff). Happily I had no connection whatever with Russian grammar at Quirn—except that my wife was eventually saved from utter boredom by being engaged to help beginners under Mrs. Langley’s direction.

Ninel Ilinishna Langley, a displaced person in more senses than one, had recently left her husband, the “great” Langley, author of
A Marxist History of America
, the bible (now out of print) of a whole generation of morons. I do not know the reason of their separation (after one year of American Sex, as the woman told Annette, who relayed the information to me in a tone of idiotic condolence); but I did have the occasion of seeing and disliking Professor Langley at an official dinner on the eve of his departure for Oxford. I disliked him for his daring to question my teaching
Ulysses
my way—in a purely textual
light, without organic allegories and quasi-Greek myths and that sort of tripe; his “Marxism,” on the other hand, was a pleasantly comic and very mild affair (too mild, perhaps, for his wife’s taste) compared to the general attitude of ignorant admiration which American intellectuals had toward Soviet Russia. I remember the sudden hush, and furtive exchange of incredulous grimaces, when at a party, given for me by the most eminent member of our English department, I described the Bolshevist state as Philistine in repose and bestial in action; internationally vying in rapacious deceit with the praying mantis; doctoring the mediocrity of its literature by first sparing a few talents left over from a previous period and then blotting them out with their own blood. One professor, a left-wing moralist and dedicated muralist (he was experimenting that year with automobile paint), stalked out of the house. He wrote me next day, however, a really magnificent, larger-than-nature letter of apology saying that he could not be really cross with the author of
Esmeralda and Her Parandrus
(1941), which despite its “motley style and baroque imagery” was a masterpiece “pinching strings of personal poignancy which he, a committed artist, never knew could vibrate in him.” Reviewers of my books took the same line, chiding me formally for underestimating the “greatness” of Lenin, yet paying me compliments of a kind that could not fail to touch, in the long run, even me, a scornful and austere author, whose homework in Paris had never received its due. Even the President of Quirn, who timorously sympathized with the fashionable Sovietizers, was really on my side: he told me when he called on us (while Ninel crept up to grow an ear on our landing) that he was proud, etc., and had found my “last (?) book very interesting” though he could not help regretting that I took every opportunity of criticizing “our Great Ally” in my classes. I answered, laughing, that this criticism was a child’s caress when set alongside the public lecture on
“The Tractor in Soviet Literature” that I planned to deliver at the end of the term. He laughed, too, and asked Annette what it was like to live with a genius (she only shrugged her pretty shoulders). All this was
très américain
and thawed a whole auricle in my icy heart.

But to return to good Ninel.

She had been christened Nonna at birth (1902) and renamed twenty years later Ninel (or Ninella), as petitioned by her father, a Hero of Toil and a toady. She wrote it Ninella in English but her friends called her Ninette or Nelly just as my wife’s Christian name Anna (as Nonna liked to observe) turned into Annette and Netty.

Ninella Langley was a stocky, heavily built creature with a ruddy and rosy face (the two tints unevenly distributed), short hair dyed a mother-in-law ginger, brown eyes even madder than mine, very thin lips, a fat Russian nose, and three or four hairs on her chin. Before the young reader heads for Lesbos, I wish to say that as far as I could discover (and I am a peerless spy) there was nothing sexual in her ludicrous and unlimited affection for my wife. I had not yet acquired the white Desert Lynx that Annette did not live to see, so it was Ninella who took her shopping in a dilapidated jalopy while the resourceful lodger, sparing the copies of his own novels, would autograph for the grateful twins old mystery paperbacks and unreadable pamphlets from the Langley collection in the attic whose dormer looked out obligingly on the road to, and from, the Shopping Center. It was Ninella who kept her adored “Netty” well supplied with white knitting wool. It was Ninella who twice daily invited her for a cup of coffee or tea in her rooms; but the woman made a point of avoiding our flat, at least when we were at home, under the pretext that it still reeked of her husband’s tobacco: I rejoined that it was my own pipe—and later, on the same day, Annette told me I really ought not to smoke so much, especially indoors; and she also upheld another absurd complaint
coming from downstairs, namely, that I walked back and forth too late and too long, right over Ninella’s forehead. Yes—and a third grievance: why didn’t I put back the encyclopedia volumes in alphabetic order as her husband had always been careful to do, for (he said) “a misplaced book is a lost book”—quite an aphorism.

Dear Mrs. Langley was not particularly happy about her job. She owned a lakeside bungalow (“Rustic Roses”) thirty miles north of Quirn, not very far from Honeywell College, where she taught summer school and with which she intended to be even more closely associated, if a “reactionary” atmosphere persisted at Quirn. Actually, her only grudge was against decrepit Mme. de Korchakov, who had accused her, in public, of having a
sdobnyy
(“mellow”) Soviet accent and a provincial vocabulary—all of which could not be denied, although Annette maintained I was a heartless bourgeois to say so.

The infant Isabel’s first four years of life are so firmly separated in my consciousness by a blank of seven years from Bel’s girlhood that I seem to have had two different children, one a cheerful red-cheeked little thing, and the other her pale and morose elder sister.

I had laid in a stock of ear plugs; they proved superfluous: no crying came from the nursery to interfere with my work—
Dr. Olga Repnin
, the story of an invented Russian professor in America, which was to be published (after a bothersome spell of serialization entailing endless proofreading) by Lodge in 1946, the year Annette left me, and acclaimed as “a blend of humor and humanism” by alliteration-prone reviewers, comfortably unaware of what I was to prepare some fifteen years later for their horrified delectation.

I enjoyed watching Annette as she took color snapshots of the baby and me in the garden. I loved perambulating a fascinated Isabel through the groves of larches and beeches along Quirn Cascade River, with every loop of light, every eyespot of shade escorted, or so it seemed, by the baby’s gay approbation. I even agreed to spend most of the summer of 1945 at Rustic Roses. There, one day, as I was returning with Mrs. Langley from the nearest liquor
store or newspaper stand, something she said, some intonation or gesture, released in me the passing shudder, the awful surmise, that it was not with my wife but with me that the wretched creature had been in love from the very start.

The torturous tenderness I had always felt for Annette gained new poignancy from my feelings for our little child (I “trembled” over her as Ninella put it in her coarse Russian, complaining it might be bad for the baby, even if one “subtracted the overacting”). That was the human side of our marriage. The sexual side disintegrated altogether.

For quite a time after her return from the maternity ward, echoes of her pangs in the darkest corridors of my brain and a frightening stained window at every turn—the afterimage of a wounded orifice—pursued me and deprived me of all my vigor. When everything in me healed, and my lust for her pale enchantments rekindled, its volume and violence put an end to the brave but essentially inept efforts she had been making to reestablish some sort of amorous harmony between us without departing one jot from the puritanical norm. She now had the gall—the pitiful girlish gall—to insist I see a psychiatrist (recommended by Mrs. Langley) who would help me to think “softening” thoughts at moments of excessive engorgement. I said her friend was a monster and she a goose, and we had our worst marital quarrel in years.

The creamy-thighed twins had long since returned with their bicycles to the island of their birth. Plainer young ladies came to help with the housekeeping. By the end of 1945 I had virtually ceased visiting my wife in her cold bedroom.

Sometime in mid-May, 1946, I traveled to New York—a five-hour train trip—to lunch with a publisher who was offering me better terms for a collection of stories (
Exile from Mayda
) than good Lodge. After a pleasant meal, in the sunny haze of that banal day, I walked over to the
Public Library, and by a banal miracle of synchronization she came dancing down those very steps, Dolly von Borg, now twenty-four, as I trudged up toward her, a fat famous writer in his powerful forties. Except for a gleam of gray in the abundant fair mane that I had cultivated for my readings in Paris, more than a decade ago, I do not believe I could have changed sufficiently to warrant her saying, as she began doing, that she would never have recognized me had she not been so fond of the picture of meditation on the back of
See under
. I recognized her because I had never lost track of her image, readjusting it once in a while: the last time I had notched the score was when her grandmother, in response to my wife’s Christmas greetings, in 1939, sent us from London a postcard-size photo of a bare-shouldered flapper with a fluffy fan and false eyelashes in some high-school play, terribly chi-chi. In the two minutes we had on those steps—she pressing with both hands a book to her breast, I at a lower level, standing with my right foot placed on the next step, her step, and slapping my knee with a glove (many a tenor’s only known gesture)—in those two minutes we managed to exchange quite a lot of plain information.