Sleepless Nights (10 page)

Marie was timid and reserved. She had been to the best schools and yet was ill-educated because she read mostly polemical left-wing magazines, pamphlets, and appeals for funds. These rags comforted her in the cold just as they warmed the shallow bed for Lyle. A modest structuralism unites the obscure, worn-out, skin-and-bones ideologist I remember from the shabby, penurious back streets of home and the industrialist’s daughter who lived for a time on Central Park West.

Marie adored her parents and these lucky, conventional people seemed to accompany her wayward thoughts like agreeable escorts, one on each arm. On the coffee table in her bare apartment, there were sycophantic histories bound in leather about the founder of the family fortune. She knew every detail of her family’s sudden, clever leaps to prosperity; she was interested in their travels, in cottages in the British Isles where perhaps some unrecorded ancestor might have been born, in villages where there were simple folk with her own name.

In her white bedroom, next to the pure white bed that seemed to promise a rest under a mist of snowflakes, there was the wedding photograph of her parents, smiling down from a silver frame studded with amethysts. Mostly, Marie lived with her own curiously compelled deprivation, like a contemplative without the athletic vigor required for the consumption of cars, flowers and pictures, winter houses and summer houses, plates and tablecloths, batik and baskets, little things with their miracles of microscopic inlay or big, bold almost hideous wonders.

With Marie, the slumps and gaps, the holes and blanks were troubling, like a stutter. She gave away large sums of money, but in encounters with the working world she was meticulous and even stingy. A waiting hand received from her the boldest rebuke. Waiters, cab drivers, and delivery boys saw her nickels and dimes and watched her disappear like a ghost.

Somewhere in her life a talisman had appeared. It might have come to her in a dream, this talisman which was a word: Russia.

For a time she had a lover, Bernie. He was terrible to look at. Very short, and if not fat, with too many muscles and bulges. Bernie was put together like a pumpkin, or two pumpkins, one placed on top of the other. The top was his merry, jack-o’-lantern face with its broken teeth.

Bernie spoke of bad news in a happy, growling voice, cheerfully predicting the fall of things or the ominous rise of things if the fall did not take place. Calumnies, falsehoods in the press, prejudices rooted like carrots in history: all of this bubbled and flowed from him like the song of a boatman:

Often during his political singing of disasters Bernie smoked a cigar or nibbled from a packet of peanuts in his pocket. Bernie had the answer to every question except that of Marie. She had known so many kisses and compliments in youth. So, there was power in her thin wrists, in her long, slender fingers polished in an ivory color, power even in her slight, fastidious appetites so different from his own hungers.

Seeing Bernie come out of the bedroom, pulling at his shoelaces, was a shock. The bed was so white and small; the bottles and pencils, the pale-blue glass objects lined up by the window were not welcoming to a man’s presence. His blue workshirts, his large hands, the glee of his growlings filled the space in the apartment as if he had brought with him a lot of old trunks.

What was Marie thinking of? Coups d’état, crowds in the streets with fists held high, banners asking for bread and land, straggling armies from the north, guerrillas in the mountains?

Perhaps her dreams are of a more domestic shape. She is thinking of petitions, or contributions, of revolutionary schoolchildren with round, well-fed faces singing songs, of calisthenics in the squares, of collective farms, workers’ councils, housing developments, women doctors, and birth control.

Still, with a steadiness like nothing so much as that of a bird hovering outside the nest of its young, she maintained in balance her first flights. Faraway countries were caught in the arms of her timeless approbation.

Marie, I do not understand your fear of disillusion. Don’t you see that revision can enter the heart like a new love?

After such conversations she would send a clipping from the Communist press, explaining or denouncing criticism. At the top of the clipping in her neat handwriting: I thought this might interest you, dear friend. With love, Marie.

Her match with Bernie was a deprivation for him and he was discovered to have a mistress, a militant, sexy, talkative comrade. Marie was surprised and wounded and remembered that even her father had admired Bernie’s intelligence. She was left with her grave, immobile fervor.

In the sixties we saw Marie in Italy, in Florence, where she had been as a girl to meet the past without pain, to flower like a fuchsia or a gardenia in the mist of paintings and churches. But Marie had no interest at all in paintings, in the structure of churches, in the true difficulties of music and poetry. She did not know this, since she had been well brought up. A calm philistinism, courteous and unpolemical, was deeply rooted in her spirit and gave the clue—or part of it—to her wincing confusion about the claims of all those oddly named writers, poets, and painters imprisoned or killed. This was not callousness; it was blankness, a blankness without meanness such as one finds sometimes in priests and nuns.

In Florence there was a young Italian often in her apartment. He had thick wavy hair, bad teeth, an uningratiating manner, sometimes dignified, sometimes absent. His name was Benito and he had a sister named Edda.

Benito worked at a shoe store behind the Arno, and that had been the scene of their meeting. Sometimes on a slow day he stands at the window and his imperturbable face catches the eye. He may live far from the center, but one does not imagine that he would go home in the afternoon to eat or to sleep. Instead he is more likely to spend the time kicking a football in the park.

Benito brought with him wherever he went a large companion, a German shepherd. At Marie’s house most of his attention went to the dog, to giving it high-voiced instructions, to gazing into the animal’s excited eyes. While we talked English he talked to the dog.

Nothing new with Marie. The money holds, even grows, in the historical soil. Revelations of her college years, more than twenty years ago, hang on, subdued but flickering still. It is restful and yet puzzling. Nothing seems to happen. Armies gather with their unpleasant news, ossification sets in even though there is great activity everywhere. Sometimes she appears to be thinking there has been a miscalculation in the political universe. Dragons with seven heads and ten horns: were they not seen this year? A leopard came out of the sea and sank back down. But patience, patience.

L
AST YEAR
a large new office building began to go up on my small, narrow street in New York. It is an odd street, filled with old apartment houses of modest size which were built just after the turn of the century for the accommodation of artists. “Des Artistes,” as one of the buildings is named, were to work and live in the same quarters, to paint in their ateliers like Frenchmen with little pointed beards, and to eat in their dining rooms off the kitchen like Americans.

The large windows of the studio room were then covered with opaque glass, according with the theoretical beliefs of the time. The light was dimmed—to free the mind for the light of the imagination? A northern smoothness and easels upon which stood half-finished portraits waiting for the sitter or the model, a colorful old man or a loosely draped girl, or still lifes from the fruit bin.

I have seen several paintings done here in the house long ago in the grayed daylight. One took as its subject a picnic in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The women were wearing fashionable clothes of the 1920’s. All was sunlight, flowers and trees and dresses with mauve ribbons.

The thick glass is gone from most of the windows, but now a new building roars up across the street, arriving with a hideous grinding. Exquisite machinery stands about all day and night, and the steel skeleton with its artful modernity is more fit to decorate the city scene than the new building itself. The noise of construction will one day die down, and yet the light will never return to the artist-building. It is back in its glassy opacity. Perhaps some sort of preservation is taking place.

The Bois de Boulogne, the picnics, the apples and oranges on tables covered with paisley shawls, agreeable memories recorded in twilight: it is just as well the old painters have slipped away, leaving the space to be occupied by the brilliant electric glow of more recent tenants, the photographers.

It has happened that someone I do not know is staying in the apartment with me. One of those charitable actions insisted upon by a friend. The stranger, thin as the elegant crane outside the window, casts a shadow because she has arrived when I was thinking about the transformations of memory. She fills the space with both the old and the new twilight, the space reserved for thoughts of my mother. My mother, whom I lived very close to for more than thirty years, is this morning dimmer to me than this friend of a friend.

Louisa spends the entire day in a blue, limpid boredom. The caressing sting of it appears to be, for her, like the pleasure of lemon, or the coldness of salt water. A striking stasis can be seen in her eyes, nice, empty, withdrawn, and staring eyes—orbs in a porcelain head. At such moments she looks her best, very quiet, her face harmoniously fixed, as if for a camera to which these rooms are now appropriate. My brown, skinny cat stares at her, with a yellowish Oriental gaze much like her own. They often look deeply at each other, but it is a look without seeing, just like two mirrors exactly placed on opposite walls. This morning, her second here, she watched the cat fall asleep, his lids suddenly closing, tightly, quickly, strangely calling upon the operations of a mysterious brain. She said, They can sit for hours, years in front of the television set, but they don’t see it. I cannot understand how it is that nothing changes them.

Then she would take a cigarette out of the pocket of her smock, a bright piece of colored silk she put on in the morning and changed into immediately after returning from her excursions into the streets. She drew on cigarettes as if they were opium, an addition to the opium within her, the narcotic of her boredom, that large, friendly intimate, so dear and faithful. An immaculate drug the boredom seemed to be, with its hazy drift of dreams, its passivity pure and rich as cream.

After a dreamy day, Louisa went into her nights. Always she insisted they were full of agitation, restlessness, torment. She was forever like one watched over by wakefulness in her deepest sleep. She awoke with a tremor in her hands, declaring the pains, the indescribable, absorbing drama of sleeplessness. The tossing, the racing, the battles; the captures and escapes hidden behind her shaking eyelids. No one was more skillful than she in the confessions of an insomniac. These were redundant but stirring epics, profoundly felt and there to be pressed upon each morning, in the way one presses a bruise to experience over and over the pain of it.

Her hypnotic narration is like that of some folk poet, steeped, as they say, “in the oral tradition.” Finally, it goes, sleep came over me... At last... It was drawing near to four o’clock. The first color was in the sky... Only to wake up suddenly, completely.

Unsavory egotism? No, mere hope of definition, description, documentation. The chart of life must be brought up to date every morning: Patient slept fitfully, complained of the stitches in the incision. Alarming persistence of the very symptoms for which the operation was performed. Perhaps it is only the classical aching of the stump.

She will be leaving soon, the intruder, the dramatic star of ennui with catlike eyes. She has come with no more force than a hand offering a delivery at the door. All the time she has been in the house I was planning to think of my mother.
To think
, that is to wonder what I would be forgiven for remembering or imagining. What do those of my flesh and blood deem suitable, not a betrayal? Why didn’t you change your name? Then you could make up anything you like, without it seeming to be true when all of it is not. I do not know the answer.

My father, for instance. He is
out
, because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded. I will say, can say, he was very handsome, and indeed, when embalmed, with his hair parted on the wrong side, his profile reminded everyone of that of John Barrymore. He was not well educated, but very intelligent and read a great many true detective magazines and newspapers. He sang beautifully and knew all the verses of many, many songs. He worked as a laborer and as little as possible. As a plumber, as a seller of furnaces, as something in the health department at the courthouse, as something in the Democratic party machine. He was not defined by work but by the avoidance of it to leave time for other things; for gossip, for card-playing at the firehouse, for football games, for going to bed and creating children, for smoking cigarettes, for frying bacon, for going fishing. He was political, and he and I got up early in the morning to listen on the radio to the fall of Madrid, the signing of the Munich Pact. We held hands and wept.

Sometimes when I am up in Maine and the men come to fix things—handsome, attractive people that they are, coming to fix a pipe, to measure, to take apart a motor, to drag a car to the garage—often then I find myself falling into a flirtatiousness, a sort of love for their
look
, their sunburned faces, their fine oiled workshoes, their way at the wheel of a truck, their jokes about the bill, their ways with other men, down-town drinking coffee, or inside a house under construction, or at the ravaged shed of the boatbuilder, their strong fingers yellowed from nicotine.

Then I think of my father, of Papa, and wonder what it would be like to be married to such a man, to see him coming out of the shower, to sit at dinner at six o’clock, turn off the lights at nine, embrace, make love frequently in honor of a long day of working, get up at five, visit with the relations on Sunday, never leave town.