Sleepless Nights (8 page)

A lot of bachelors are “queer” and many lay claim to a spurious bisexuality based upon instances minimal in number ... Alex is not queer. He is indolent, anxious, likes rich people and clever people of all sorts. He is a snob, a dandy, and a Marxist. Why should it be an objection that he is the things he has the talent to do rather than the summation of what he has finished? Remember his suffering, so like the suffering of achievement itself. Remember how terrible it is to be touched in youth by the wing of the Muse, the curse of it, lifelong.

A few facts. Alex worked at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote book reviews in his twenties, reviews in which many negatives caught the eye. He chose as his lifework a book about democratic architecture. He was from someplace, Akron, and he knew what it was like for Hart Crane to be writing letters back home to Ohio, to Cleveland and Chagrin Falls. For A.—University of Michigan and a bit of time here and there at Harvard and Columbia.

Absence of links and information. What does he live on? He lives on mimicry, mimicry of the style he would practice if he had more money.

Talent and style can set the teeth of the ungenerous on edge, and more people are scorned for rising above themselves than for living out their lives on a legacy. Alex seemed ahead of his time in one thing: a complicated and hesitant attitude to marriage. But he was not a pedant and so was able to combine the single state with long, difficult, confining periods of
more or less
living with one person, one who always assumed the claims of ownership that are the temptation of marriage. What he held in abeyance, what the legal bachelorhood represented, was his grail, his lingering, halfhearted vision of self-realization.

A good deal of Alexander’s life had been assigned to women. Much of his time had gone into lovemaking. Tonight, October, is our second meeting after a number of years. The last time, a month ago, he had told me that for a long period in his life he made love every night. He sighed, remembering his discipline and fortitude.

I said: Well, I read in the
Times
yesterday about an old couple in their seventies who do it every day. They spoke of being ashamed to admit it to the social worker.

Vehemence from him: I hate old couples.

I met Alex long ago when I first came to New York. He was very handsome and a little depressed by nature, but anxious to please and in this pleasantness somewhat impersonal. For that reason he was doomed to more fornication than he wished. His handsomeness, of course, played its part in the doom of pleasure. Brown, flattering, disingenuous eyes; dark hair that early flecked with gray; sunken, lucky shallows in a large, bony face; shadows of masochism and indolence. His last name is Anderson—some Norwegian there, perhaps; old square-faced ancestors, slow-tongued, patient, pastoral, nothing like him.

To get back to “long ago.” To yourself on winter nights freezing in a thin red coat, and then a little lamp and a glass of whiskey at the bedside. And the telephone ringing, always there monitoring, as if it were your mother and father with their outraged, punitive screams. You go like a thief to these assignations with someone who belongs to another, or at least does not belong to you, you go slipping into the dark, groping about, critically sighing. You go in like a thief and always leave or are left as the robbed, thinking to look for your fake diamond pin in its old box, check the liquor cabinet, open the window and demand from the fleeing one the return of your new radio.

I slept with Alex three times and remember each one perfectly. In all three he was agreeably intimidating, and intimidating in three ways. 1. The murmured bits of dialogue, snatched from the air, grammatical encrustations, drifting clauses, ellipses.
Isn’t this kind of evening the best of all
? Or,
Usually I
. On and on in whispers:
better than
and
women who
and
one time
—small, dark, drifting comparisons. 2. A seizure of spiritual discontent and a grave asceticism, mournfully impugning. 3. Regretfulness, kindness, charitable good humor, apologies for the lateness of the hour. Where is your little red coat? Can I take you to a cab? Or: You’ll never want to see me again...too late...too early... no cigarettes left.

I was honored when he allowed me to go to bed with him and dishonored when I felt my imaginative, anxious, exhausting efforts were not what he wanted. His handsomeness created anxiety in me; his snobbery was detailed and full of quirks, like that of people living in provincial capitals, or foreigners living in Florence or Cairo. Worst of all was my ambivalence over what I took to be the inauthenticity of his Marxism. In my heart I was weasel-like, hungry, hunting with blazing eyes for innocent contradictions, given to predatory chewings on the difference between theory and practice. That is what I had brought from home in Kentucky to New York, this large bounty of polemicism, stored away behind light, limp Southern hair and not-quite-blue eyes.

In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me—a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discolored blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicion and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet.

Some reason to doubt the truth of that. Still, reversals and peculiarities fall down upon those too proud of their erotic life. Even sacrifice may be a novelty. Alex’s vanity was, like that of the dubious Casanova at the falsifying moment of composition, trapped in the belief that he had a special power, or perhaps a special duty, to please women. Having more charm than money played its part. So love was a treadmill, like churchgoing, kept alive by respect for the community. Many have this evangelical view of lovemaking: There! I’ve done it once today and twice the day before yesterday.

Orgasms of twenty years ago leave no memory. Better to be handsome and leave, like Alex, the image of lean Egyptian features, a sloping skull, and conversations about the inability of the ruling class to
imagine
, to
experience
.

I am waiting; he is late. Changes, gaps—the embarrassments of the lifeline. The important women in Alex’s life have not been good-looking. He liked Yankee types, aggressively plain, prudent, mulish, in love with their fathers—the kind who do not spend too much of their principal and who, of course, have principles. Few women have their own money; thus his real loves were rare.

For this last woman, Sarah, Alex and his book on architecture were a sacred trust. And how he must have winced under the watchful care, the dowdy concern for this capital, the holding on to his literary investment as if it were a small tract of undeveloped land, in the family so to speak.

Something terrible had happened to him. I felt it as he came into the room. Yes, it was as if he had come down from a bitter defeat in the North. The snow had fallen on him; the ice had moved too close. No matter, romantic style, a sort of athleticism, does not slump and sag overnight, and so he brought a careful gift, chosen for himself and for me. Simple, inexpensive, flattering. A paperback:
Chapters of Erie
by Charles Francis and Henry Adams.

A slip of paper marked a page by Henry Adams on the New York gold conspiracy and he read out: “One of the earliest acts of the new rulers was precisely such as Balzac and Dumas might have predicted and delighted in. They established themselves in a palace...a huge building of white marble, not unlike a European palace, situated about two miles from the business quarter, and containing a large theater or opera-house...”

Another teacher of women. You haven’t read Gibbon? How is that possible, you with such fine legs?

Alex’s thin, flat hand pressed mine and the last strains of male coquetry played out with noticeable effort. Elizabeth, Elizabeth. You never gave me a chance.

Oh, indeed.

He was in a rout, mutiny in his camp. Not marrying, keeping his “studio” for the crippled book on architecture, for love affairs, for definition of self—all destroyed by a sudden delinquency. Sarah had left him.

And not only that, he went on. It was scarcely a few weeks before she was married. You can elope like a junior miss, no matter how old you are, if you are not in need of a divorce.

His long alliance, fifteen years, with the nervous, insistent, infatuated woman from Philadelphia—Sarah, who believed in the sacred book and in the hollows of his Oriental face, who was possessive, dominating, and in her plain, stubborn concentration, like the concentration of someone bending over a dangerous machine, perhaps a little mad. She came upon simplicities the way others came upon debts, naturally—and so baked tedious home-made bread, cooked dim soups from fresh vegetables, and stitched up her dresses out of Pakistani bedspreads. Still there was something cheerful and blinkered about these reductions. They were character, like her clear smile, clear teeth and the way she had of taking an editor aside and saying, Give him a deadline, do you hear? That will do it.

And how meek he looked decorated by the gray tufts. Yes, of course, he had begun at last to look like a family man, like one who is half of a couple and carries hidden from the world all the arguments behind the neat public smiles of appreciation, who falls in panic from the height of accepted marital discontent and yet is pleased to find a pillow as he lands. Monogamy drifted about him—the scent of a hot iron on a shirt collar. A bourgeois, thinking of retirement, of planting trees, of storm windows, of tiresome journeys by car that are pleasant to remember. Odd that all of this clung to him just when he was at last a true bachelor.

Disgusting, he said. Only those women with money can violate the laws of probability. And no matter what they do it will make sense. It is either a regression or a rebirth.

Sarah had taken a trip to Philadelphia, on the train. Her story was short indeed. That was the grandeur of it. On the train she met an old friend of her parents—the revered parents. She met the friend, elderly, rich, careful, widowed. And what a glance of patient conservatism the old friend must have cast upon her history, her sacrifices, her inclination for service.

The splendid old gentleman, trim from his long daily walks, spare from the salt-free cuisine of his Irish maid, sprang forth at her with the call of blood, leapt at her throat with memories of the pack and the clan. How I adored your mother. It’s a wonder there wasn’t a scandal... Your father was a national treasure... Dogs remembered, old partners in many teams of tennis doubles, people dressed in white with long, thin legs like wading birds.

Sarah turned her love and attention to the old man
immediately
. What style, Alex was shouting.
Immediately
... You ask how she took my surprise?... Pure sullenness...leaden sullenness...

And why not, Alex? It is well known that women carry poison in their pockets. Did you expect a gun? A woman with a gun would be just another policeman. We fall in love with the convicts, remember that. Policemen marry girls from the neighborhood; high school looms over their unions, the first uniform is her prom dress and his black bow tie and white shirt. But the girls are thinking of poison, thinking of poison as the lights go out on the dresser where the revolver has been placed with care for the night. The black shoes, the fine, thick serge of the coat, shoulders and thighs of stallions. And policemen are usually shot down by someone out of shape, thin, thin, nothing but living bones. Remember that.

I was wrong not to marry the person I loved, he said, voice fading.

Insurgencies, insolvencies. Living in his loved studio, among the rubbish of unvarying leisure, amidst the sinking silences of independence.

In a way, I said, you really were married to Sarah.

His voice rose again. No, no. You are not making sense. It is not the substance but the form that matters. The license, the will...the property rights, income tax...the cousins, the funerals...the photographs!

Photographs of marriage. Records of blood, decisions, sacraments observed. In my apartment, around us, in the old fading red-pine chest, in the mahogany desk, in the Swedish desk too, in the fumed oak blanket chest, in manila envelopes marked “trip to Europe” are my own photographs, three hundred or more, that bear witness to form; pictures in the drawer, in the old box, photographs that make one his own ancestor. Of others I have cared about, cared for years—not a trace, not a fingerprint. As it should be. Those who leave nothing behind cannot be missed for long.

Alex facing the blank, the liquid history quickly drying up: Christ! The letters, the packets of letters from boarding school, from the old uncle on the boat to Vera Cruz in the nineties. Those are the things that count.

Outside the sorrowing autumn night and the wind rustling the curtains within. Another drink and courteously the conversation shifted briefly, dipping to the side, turning for a rest from the blazing highway, all the way across the country, that represented the delinquency of Sarah.

He could look back to the forties, to the anti-Stalinist radicals. How happy he had been then; in the old
Partisan Review
days, the night when Koestler first met and insulted Sidney Hook; when Sartre and the French discovered Russia long after “we” had felt the misery of the trials, the pacts, the Soviet camps. Alex had lived in history; that is, he had lived through T. S. Eliot, Kafka, John Donne, Henry James; through Maritain, Gilson, and Alger Hiss.

But he could not give much to the side trip and so, turning back, his eyes rapidly blinking, his mood lowering to reflection, to a more becoming melancholy, he spoke of the sadness of living alone.