Private Novelist (13 page)

He dreamed that Mary was begging outside the Port
Authority Bus Terminal. She looked at least six months pregnant and she pleaded with Yigal to return to her. As she spoke she curled up smaller and smaller, until she looked like an old woman or a crippled child. Yigal woke up grimacing and remarked cynically to himself that the dream was an obvious wish fulfillment and that he wished to punish her, but in the dream he had picked her up on his outstretched hands like a pillow, and taken her to a small, round swimming pool. There, in the water, she relaxed and grew back to normal size. The swimming pool looked familiar, and he realized it was the one in the middle of Bosch's
The Garden of Earthly Delights,
ringed with tall grass and filled with naked women.

Mary was in the cafeteria of the Whitney Museum, telling Taylor her theory about
Runts of 61 Cygni C
.

“I see what you mean,” Taylor said. “I guess I always secretly wanted someone to be my runt.”

“You mean your wife. You wanted your wife to be your runt.”

Taylor looked ashamed, which was not surprising, considering the effort Mary was putting into making him feel bad. Had he been less sensitive, he would have been delighted that she was talking about sex at all, but he was sensitive enough to know by now that he didn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Two well-dressed, good-looking, bored, lonely, young, idle, single curators were sitting at the next table, saying things like “Neither of them has a wedding ring,” and theorizing about Taylor's name; background; income; abdominal, lateral, and gluteal muscles; “package”; and apartment, so it may have been unlucky for him that the first thing they overheard clearly was Mary's saying, “You wanted your wife to be your runt.” Then they listened extra hard and heard Taylor say:

“I still love her. I'd do anything to get her back.” I think he
was just trying out new ways to look better than Yigal, but the curators stubbed out their cigarettes and went back upstairs.

Mary said, “Then call her. You were unfaithful to her. It was indirect, because it was the make-believe runts, but you made her feel it, by bringing it up all the time—”

“You're right. I was horrible.” He covered his face with his hands.

“Maybe she forgives you, now that she's seen what life is like without you.”

“You're so sweet,” Taylor said. “You seemed so vulnerable at first, but you're so strong.”

This went on at length, but Taylor didn't seem to be making any progress, and after lunch they split up. Mary went back to his place to get warm. When he paused to remove a personal-ads tabloid from a box on the corner of Madison and Eightieth, thinking that he might want to experience oral sex at least once before he died, a taxi changing lanes while running a yellow light was nudged by a bus running the same yellow light while dodging a bicycle, and jumped the curb. He died instantly. Mary imagined that he had spent the night with his wife, and that she was responsible for their happiness, which was no less realistic than his imagining that she secretly longed to give him head. In the morning, she left him a congratulatory note and checked into a better hotel.

I REALIZE I HAVE BEEN NEGLECTING
the great works of Western literature, so in the spirit of Yigal's remark, “Idiots,” I will discourse on the subject of
Remembrance of Things Past
. Two facts about the work are well known: (1) the mature Marcel is thrown back into the past by the taste of muffins, and (2) the book contains secret references to Proust's homosexuality. For example, Albertine is really Albert.

Imagine my surprise, after passing the muffins around page 2, which apparently is as far as most people get, to discover that Albertine is a lesbian and that the volume titled
Cities of the Plain
(in French
Sodom and Gomorrah
) largely concerns the Baron de Charlus' relationship with his tailor. Marcel's first act when Albertine finally leaves him is to pay a tradesman for temporary use of his little daughter—is this, perhaps, a coded reference to pedophilia?

Still, I recommend
Remembrance of Things Past
. Marcel does not ask to be held to heroic standards, and there is nothing like the experience of reading a book that is truly long. Proust was a thorough psychologist, and I am sure he could have written a beautiful novel about Zohar's relationship with
his portable radio. His boring dinner parties take as long to read as they might have lasted in real life, and characters mentioned briefly can reappear months later, in different contexts, displaying qualities unsuspected previously and continuing for hundreds of pages before vanishing forever. When, in the final volume, the vast array of social climbers meets to find themselves old and out of style, the effect is breathtakingly lifelike. His translator, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, maintains a lovely prose style throughout.

It is said that, to foster concentration, Proust sealed his windows with foil and refused to leave his bed. I have no such requirements. Having been raised to evade chores through reading, and helped by natural introversion, I am disturbed by noise above a certain threshold of volume and by little else. If I write while playing a CD, I do not hear it. I forget pots of rice, and the pitas I remove from the toaster oven sizzle as I drop them in the sink.

Significantly, it is the word “Nell!” which I find easiest of all not to hear. “Nell,” in other words, is perceived on some level not as my name, but as something akin to the six-digit number my computer must send to the server at Tel Aviv University in order to enter and manipulate it.

When I was a child, I rushed to read
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,
impressed by the idea of a novel about the events of a single day. Unfortunately, unlike Proust, whose protagonist moves relentlessly forward after the muffins yank him violently into the past on page 2, Solzhenitsyn cheats. I.e., he allows Ivan to reminisce about other days.

I was much more impressed by
The Gulag Archipelago
. At times I envied the prisoners, who were given relative privacy and the chance to sleep eighteen hours a day. When one felt lonely, he would turn to his neighbor for a brief spell of chess
or chemistry, then fall cheerfully back into a doze. Their transfer to the labor camp horrified me, and many years later, when I began to work for a living, I developed a mental game which permitted me to stay with jobs I should have quit on the first day: the Gulag Archipelago Test. Standing in a student cafeteria, sweating profusely into plastic gloves while a supervisor yelled, “Tighten up on that line! You girls better tighten up!” I would ask myself, “Is this as bad as building a railroad in Siberia in January with no shoes?” The answer was always no, and I would go on working hard until I was fired.

After reading Solzhenitsyn I would sneak out into the snow barefoot, just to see how long I could take it—generally, not long at all. With boots on, the process was more gradual and bearable. The numbness in my legs, moving upward by shades and turning into a dullness and blissful lethargy that affected my entire body, always tempted me to lie down and rest in the soft, inviting snow, but I kept in mind what my mother always said: “Never lie down in the snow.” I would lie down for a few seconds, hurried and guilty, then jump up to run inside for hot cocoa.

Am I a masochist? I admit to an early habit of lying down in the sandy construction site near the cafeteria at the Girl Scout camp and pretending that I was in the middle of the Sahara, without water, unable to move, and soon to die; I still like indirect flights with long layovers, and last April, I resolved to tour the Great Sand Dunes National Monument in southern Colorado by flying into Kansas City. But even as a child, I was able to identify things I didn't like. I loathed 440-yard races, for example, and said frequently, “Running four-hundred-and-forty-yard races is an exercise in masochism.” (I am sure I am quoting myself accurately—my family is the sort where people look at broken glass on the floor and say, “I would
like to file a formal protest.” Now all children talk that way, having learned it from TV situation comedy writers.) Sometimes instead of finishing the race I would throw myself to the ground, making sure to skin my knees badly for authenticity. In other words, I do not think my masochistic behavior was inspired by masochism, but by a desire for significance, and where is the significance in running faster than a few other rural Virginia high school girls? Significance came from emulating Solzhenitsyn, or the Count of Monte Cristo, or the sailors in the books my dad was always lending me, who endured weeks on rafts by catching seagulls and sucking them dry, or the one who survived two weeks' confinement to the bowsprit by carefully rationing a single pint of rum. A girl who plunges toward a cinder track, scarring her hands and covering her knees with blood just to avoid thirty seconds of asthma and the shame of coming in third, is worth six of a girl who plods obediently around the track in 1:15, in my view, now and, apparently, then.

Likewise, I believe that my actions with regard to the Great Sand Dune were governed, not by masochism, but by a creative urge. Direct flights and clean, comfortable hotels make for pleasant vacations, but drab stories. Trailers packed with living beef forced me off roads all over the vast reaches of the Great Plains. The Rockies loomed before me, frightening monoliths of black ice. Climbing the Great Sand Dune, I paused for ten or fifteen breaths after every step, as though I were on the last approach to Everest without oxygen.

I carried only water, a peanut butter sandwich, and Little Debbie apple turnovers. The ascent took nearly two hours and began with a punishing barefoot run across the glacial stream which encircles the dune, carrying sand from downwind back to windward, preserving the position of the main
dune indefinitely. At the top, the wind was cold, the sand was unsteady, and I was met by an elderly couple with ski poles, but I didn't care, because what I had come for was the descent: 750 vertical feet of leaping and sliding through sand soft as puffy feathers, as if I were fifteen again (I used to leap down hills all the time), weightless and invulnerable.

Soon after, I was the only guest in the only hotel in still-frigid Pitkin, Colorado, where flocks of blackbirds sang pure, clear notes alternating with what seemed to be English, and a few days later, I was trapped in a snowdrift on a blind curve near the top of Monarch Pass. The masseur who rescued me laughed heartily when I said I regretted not driving over Red Mountain instead. “It's nothing but switchbacks,” he said. “There's a big monument to the snowplow drivers who have died.” I thanked him for saving my life. Only then began the true test of character: benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. (They call it “benign” when they don't think it started with a stroke.) After three thousand miles my eyeballs, grown used to the passing of scenery, now twitched uncontrollably from left to right at all times, and I was unable to walk. I could only drive. I hit the bottom somewhere east of Dodge City in an itchy bed in a thin-walled motel. The room was hot, and rolled like a daysailer in a nor'easter to the moans and erotic repartee of an ever-changing stream of whores.

For significance, offhand I would say it borrowed slightly more from
Lifepod
than from the Swedish movie about the North Pole expedition (I escaped alive). Missing was any trace of the Gulag Archipelago—my freedom was complete, almost too complete. Tales of imprisonment and slavery have faded from my inner life since I stopped attending school. Like most adults, I now embrace literature that celebrates futile journeys.

Accordingly, Mary set out the next morning to Brooklyn on the 7 train from Grand Central, then transferred to the G train.

The G moved slowly, wobbling and stopping at intervals, its flickering lights often failing completely. At first Mary only looked around at the weary faces of the people whose lives were spent on this forgotten train, which rolled shuttle-fashion from Brooklyn to Queens and back again, but after a while she thought, This can't be what Yigal comes here for, and she turned to look out the window. The tunnel walls crept by, opening here and there in a white niche for workmen to hide from the passing train, and every so often there was a glass-windowed office and a Christmas tree, gray as charcoal and draped with shreds of tinsel. She looked again at the other passengers, and then the lights went out. Outside, the walls had fallen away. Holding her hands around her eyes, she tried to let them adjust to the darkness, but they were too slow and the train heaved into motion again before she could see what was outside. She closed her eyes. The next time the train stopped, she was ready. They were in a mothballed station, sealed from above, with just the barest crack of daylight falling through a grating. The distant walls were very busy and irregular, as though something were piled against them, stacked up almost to the ceiling. She heard a door slam somewhere on the train, and as it began to move and the lights came up she saw someone walking, far away down the platform. She moved to the end of the car and tried the door. She stepped gingerly onto the metal plate over the coupler and leaned out over the swinging chain. When the train stopped she jumped to the rocks below. She could feel dense black dust on her palms as she crossed to the other side and walked down the tracks, looking for a ladder.

A man helped her up. “Thanks. Where am I?” she asked, wiping her hands on her pants.

The man turned on a flashlight and shone it in her face. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi. Don't mind me, I'm just browsing.”

“You're a silkie.”

“What?”

“I can tell you're a silkie, despite what you've done with your hair. I bet you had no idea that anyone, even another silkie, could pick you out in this light, but I can, even though you're the first silkie I ever saw.”

Mary laughed at him. He continued quickly: “‘The skin, hair, and fingernails all of the same tint, the openings of the ears and nostrils precisely the same size. It is said that he who created silkies saved himself three minutes' labor in this way, for to him no labor is too trivial to be saved'—you can deny it if you want, but I know you're a silkie.”

“I don't deny it. So there. How did you know?”

“You don't know where you are? Not at all?”

She shook her head.

“This station is part of the Institute of Demonology Libraries. Now do you get the connection?”

A little background information: By 1968, the height of the psychedelic drug craze, it was apparent to librarians of demonology that their collections, once merely misunderstood, were becoming dangerous. The attractions of rigorous study were outpaced for most students by drug-induced feelings of conviction, leading to widespread and deeply held Satanist beliefs. Orgies and human sacrifice ensued, and one by one the great demonology libraries were walled up—at Holy Cross, at Notre Dame—and their catalogs stricken from the record. The many branches of the
institute represent only a fraction of the great lost treasures of the Jesuits, etc.

“Are you saying silkies are minions of Satan?”

“Not necessarily, but unlike the other minions they're very well-documented, so I started doing my dissertation on them. I got this job conditionally and then never finished it.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. Actually, there is something I'm interested in. I used to have this little medallion . . .”

He led her toward a heap of boxes. “This is everything I have. Take a look. The collection's not cataloged—just organized by station. Everything at this branch was at Mary-mount.”

“Can I borrow your flashlight?” She opened a box and peered inside. “Is this one just bones?”

“I think so.”

She tried another box. It was full of coins, medals, statuettes, dice, spinning tops, bundles of sticks, packs of cards, and rotted kapok. “So you don't actually know what any of this is?”

“No.” He looked into the box. “Sometimes I take it out and play with it, though.”

She asked to see his collection of silkie material. He pulled out a box with a lid, then began removing folders from it. Mary picked each one up and put it down. “These are all in weird languages I can't read.”

“I know. That's the problem. It took me eight years at Columbia just to get started. If you can read four words in a row, you're practically an eminent scholar, and after you publish, you wait for years for someone to get curious enough to check your work.” He sighed. “I'll show you one of the places I learned to recognize silkies. It's written in heavily inflected early medieval Latin that was spoken in Spain and noted
down in Arabic characters, in shorthand. It's pretty typical of the silkie stuff—a little tract called ‘Women to Avoid.'”

He unrolled a crumbling scroll on his desk, held the flashlight over it, and began, “‘Women to Avoid. Of all the women, these women you must avoid. You must avoid the bear. Large, hairy, you must fear the bear. You must avoid the'—I forget what this is . . . I know—‘the squirrel.'”

“Skip to the silkies.”