The Abyss of Human Illusion (3 page)

— XV —

T
he man was sexually and emotionally attracted to young mothers and had spent his adult life pursuing and, when he could, seducing them; he’d left a lot of wreckage behind. He met a woman, the mother of two boys, seven and five, a woman who was the wife of a casual friend. They “ran off together,” as they used to say, leaving the two boys with their father, who was, not surprisingly, angry, bewildered, and, for the moment, heartbroken. The new couple soon had a child of their own, but the fact that the young woman was now the mother of her seducer’s child ruined everything for him, and he left one day in their old Ford station wagon, a sun-faded lime-green monster that might well have served as a sad counter for their dead amour.

He took $147.34, all the money that was in the coffee can in the refrigerator of the wretched St. Louis apartment in which they lived, all the money that they had. Nobody who had known them in New York ever discovered why they had moved to St. Louis, and when the young woman returned, bitter and humiliated, to her husband and two older children, she never told them, except for some vague references to “teaching jobs.” Her husband, perhaps understandably, treated the new child as if he were a demanding visitor who would soon miraculously disappear. As for his wife, he thought of her as a stupid maid whom he occasionally and quite gently, he thought, raped.

— XVI —

I
n the winter of that year, after his post-basic training leave, he took a train to San Antonio, to report for duty at Fort Sam Houston; he would be there for three months, at the Medical Field Service School, for advanced training. On the train, he discovered that the club car was painted a pale rose; its armchairs were a soft feathery blue. A girl came in and he and she began to talk. It was very late and they were alone in the car and quite comfortable together. The train drove through the darkness, and the promise of kisses lay in every dim corner.

After a time, the girl closed her eyes to the night rushing by outside the windows, the silent night in which black demons and black wolves ran silently through the black countryside. The train crashed on through the darkness.

He leaned toward her and kissed her cheek, then her ear, then put his lips in a light spidery touch on her neck, first at her hairline, then down to the collar of her dress. How sweet she smelled.

“It feels like a spider,” she said, “so soft and light. You’d better catch it.” He took a long time finding that spider; for the little monster roamed everywhere under her clothes, everywhere.

The next morning, at sunrise, the train pulled into Dallas and she got off. He waved to her from his coach window, but she pretended not to see him. The sky was turning rose and blue.

— XVII —

H
e wasn’t intrinsically contemptible, yet there was no way, it seemed, that he could avoid being thought of with contempt, at least not by those who got to know him, men and women alike. There was a sweetness about him, an attractive innocence, when he forgot what he thought he was supposed to be; what, it sometimes appeared, he had been mysteriously instructed to be. But these instances of candor were few and short-lived.

Most of the time he was at his worst, and this worst always manifested itself in the same way: he flagrantly and openly and with a kind of nauseating pride—real or constructed—insisted on boasting of his flaws and faults as if they were virtues.

To note a pedestrian example of his irritating pretensions: he rarely combed or brushed his hair and, even more rarely, shampooed it; so that it was a greasy, matted tangle that smelled of rancid and sour fat. This aberration, which he would, of course, call attention to, would too, without fail, prompt him to remark that this was the way of Greek warriors, the way that Odysseus and Achilles dressed their hair. He used the word, “dressed.” It was this sort of thing, this sort of foolish affectation that made him an object of contempt, sometimes seasoned with a vague pity.

When he died, rather suddenly, of a heart attack, nobody really cared, although there were the usual insincere obsequies. But someone said, in a fair imitation of his voice, “Death is a
groove,
man!”

— XVIII —

S
he was an old woman now, as he was an old man, and seeing her made him realize just
how
old he really, as they say, was. He thought of her as she looked, God,
forty-five
years ago?, as she looked on the night that he and she had surrendered to their desire for each other, a surrender nicely camouflaged by and blamed on their having had “too much to drink.” But he knew the truth and so did she. From that moment on, he relegated their lapse to the simplest of reasons, lust and its gratification, and that was, as they say, that. She soon married a friend of his and had two children, and he remained, surprising himself, a bachelor.

They sat in the booth of the diner in the old neighborhood, a renovated and renamed diner, but the same old place, and talked over coffee. They had just come back from the cemetery where she’d buried her husband and were on the way to her elder daughter’s house where the mourners would be fed, in time-honored fashion. He had suggested coffee first and here they were.

She seemed smaller than ever, her face thin and lined, her hair gray with a subtle wash of old-lady pale blue in it. Her breasts were virtually nonexistent, but her legs were still good, especially in the sheer black stockings she’d worn for the funeral. So you’re what, he said, sixty what? You know how old I am, she said, sixty-eight, eight years younger than you. You know that and you’ve always known that. That’s right, he said. Eight years. So we were twenty-three and thirty-one, he said. What do you mean? she said, When? Oh. Right, he said. You’ve been thinking of
that
all these years? she said, laughing. Not
all
the time, he said, Jesus! He put on an amused face, but he was blushing, and realized that he probably looked like a complete idiot. But once in a while, he said, and thought: more than you know. He felt absolutely, sickeningly empty.

— XIX —

S
he is standing at the sink in a gloomy kitchen, the palegray light from the sole window its only illumination. She’s wearing white rayon underpants and a matching brassiere, white cotton socks and slippers whose fluffy, artificial blue fur has been worn to the nap. She’s washing her lunch dishes—a sandwich plate, a cup and saucer, and a table knife. She looks up and to her right, for she feels as if someone is looking at her.

The window looks out on a gray courtyard, its concrete darkening with beginning rain. She stands on her toes and looks out into the courtyard, for she feels that someone, certainly, is looking at her. She puts the saucer on the drainboard, and dries her hands, then folds her arms protectively across her breasts, and looks with what might be longing at her bathrobe, draped over the back of a kitchen chair, wanting to snatch the robe up and put it on now, quickly, before something happens. She finds it impossible to move, to take the step toward the chair.

She leans against the sink, her thighs clamped together, and looks at the kitchen doorway, into the living room. Her body is rigid and she is flushed. Someone is looking at her from the courtyard or the living room. She looks at her robe again, and almost takes a step toward the kitchen chair, but does not. She is a week or so into her thirty-ninth year, and knows that she is not bad-looking, and knows that men do look at her, they do. Someone is looking at her now. She knows that this is really not so.

She puts on her robe, wishing, perhaps, that someone would look at her, that someone in the courtyard, in the living room, some nameless phantom were waiting for her, someone to whom she could abandon herself, some beast, some animal, some sex fiend, for whom she could throw herself away, for whom she could recklessly damn herself to pleasure and hell.

— XX —

H
e died in a monstrous blooming rose of blood and fire outside of Munsan-ni, under a mortar attack. A week earlier, Chinese rounds had tracked a squad across a valley floor with relentless, elegant, fussy precision, killing two and wounding two.

Before his orders had been cut for Fort Ord and FECOM, he was stationed for a brief time at Fort Meade, Maryland. A friend of his, in the Marines at Camp Lejeune, thought it might be a good idea if they met maybe in Baltimore for a weekend of disorderly drunkenness, etc. He said
O.K.
, and they agreed to meet at a bar on Charles Street that they both knew. He got out to the highway on a post bus to hitchhike, in clean and starched Class
-A
khakis. What a soldier, standing tall!

After ten minutes, a powder-blue Cadillac Coupe deVille rocketed to a halt just past him, and then backed up, white-walls screaming, and he got in. The driver was going to Wilmington, and he’d take him right into fuckin’ Baltimore. He was a man of maybe fifty, sunburned and sweaty and absolutely drunk in that placid way that alcoholics know how to polish to perfection. On the seat, between his legs, was a quart of Gordon’s gin, from which he drank regularly. He’d occasionally light a Pall Mall, at which times he’d steer with one knee, smiling childishly. He maintained an average speed of about eighty-five to ninety miles an hour, looking at the road, or so it seemed, but now and again. At one point, the car hit a patch of gravelly sand and sailed through the summer air, quite beautifully, for some twenty yards, while the driver hooted with pleasure at, perhaps, the sight of death, grinning on the hood. But the Caddy landed gently and on they went, spared for something or other. We know why the soldier was spared, of course.

Incidentally, the driver offered the soldier a drink and a cigarette only after their unexpected flight: maybe he thought they were now true comrades.

— XXI —

I
t became clear to Larry and Martha that she didn’t, much of the time, really hear what he said to her, even though she responded in what he had thought, for some years, to be a cogent and rational way, if sometimes tangentially or abstractly. Martha absorbed Larry’s words, in some curious way, their rhythms, grammatical structures, and syntagmatic relationships, but the content of these words—assuming that there was, on occasion, “useful” content—were, to Martha, empty of meaning or even allusions to cognate meanings. She made courageous stabs at what he said, tried hard to
listen,
but her guesses—for that’s what they came to—were, unsurprisingly, most often startlingly wrong. So Martha constructed for their marriage an improvisatory fantasia: what Larry
said
became what Larry did not say, which, in turn, became what he really said—the latter Martha’s total invention. So their domestic intercourse proceeded, a strange path discoverable only as it was traveled.

That Larry came to accept and then believe that what he had not said was what he had
said,
and that the converse was also the case, is perhaps, surprising, but only if it is not known that Larry never remembered just what he
had
said. He was easily convinced that opinions that he did not hold were dear beliefs, and so on. As words left his mouth, they disappeared into oblivion, or, in this case, into Martha’s linguistic workshop. So their marriage moved along, a series of deft disguises, masquerades, and incredible stories, a kind of anthology of make-believe. Both of them came to embrace the world that their conversations created as if it was life itself—it was, in a way, of course, and no worse, really, than that loved by couples who pride themselves on the honesty and candor that most often leads to misery. Their marriage was, as Larry would put it, “swell,” which Martha would call “deeply respectful of each other’s feelings.”

— XXII —

I
t was a little vanity case, its cloth covering worn and faded with years and use. It had also been subjected to the moisture of the various bathrooms in which she’d kept it since well before they were married. It sported a small, blurred, essentially useless mirror on the inside of its lid, and in its compartments were lipsticks, tweezers, nail files, emery boards, mascara, cuticle scissors, and the like.

On its outer lid there was an inept cartoonish drawing of a little girl in pigtails and a tulip-patterned dress, and a little boy in shorts, holding hands. They wore imbecilic and oddly sinister smiles. Above these figures, in a semicircle, were the words, HANDLOME IL AL HANDLOME DOEL. He read these words every day over the seven years that they’d been married, and in his self-centeredness, and supreme lack of curiosity, he had assumed that this message was some soppy maxim, an insufferable platitude in a bastard language whose phonemes were strangely close to English yet repulsively distant and vulgar.

After he discovered that his wife had been relentlessly unfaithful to him with God knows how many men, friends, acquaintances, pickups, the butcher, the baker—anyone in pants, as they say—and often in their bed—“their” took on a grim comic shimmer in his mind—they separated. Some months later, in a kind of sudden dazzle of lucidity, he read, he understood, he
saw
clearly the message on the vanity case—of course!
Handsome is as handsome does.
Of course! He stepped back as if slapped, for the obscurity of the message lay, all those years, in its candor. The message was, this he knew, a counter, a sign for his wife, somehow. He did not know how to put this, or think about this, but the plain message, which to him was unreadable, was
her
message. She had always been in plain sight, but he had failed to see her, he had dismissed her, he had not read or cared to read that which had been, always, before him.

— XXIII —

T
he elevator is huge, the size of a small apartment, and is filled with rows of desks, more, it would appear, than can fit into the space. On the rear wall of the elevator is a blackboard with chemical and mathematical symbols scattered across its surface. The door opens and he is on the sixth floor of the building in which he lived just after his divorce. This was his floor and he walks down the corridor, its walls now filthy, smeared with dirt and grease, the tiles underfoot pitted, scarred, and broken. He comes to his door and checks the apartment number, which is, rather strangely, he thinks, 6&6$6%. But he opens the door.

The apartment is the one he lived in when he was a little boy, complete with the faded brown studio couch, the Philco floor-model radio, and the hammered copper bas-relief reproduction of
The Last Supper,
with its Latin inscription across the upper border: AMEN DICO VOBIS QUIA UNUS VESTRUM ME TRADITURUS EST. He hears a noise in the kitchen and looks away from the vaguely glowing image on the wall to see his mother standing in the kitchen doorway.

She seems pleased to see him, even though he is clearly startled at her appearance, that of a young woman in a summer pinafore, her blond hair in a loose chignon. He is about to speak to her, when she says, “I hope you’re not hungry, I’m dead.” She is apologetic and he remembers that the reason he is here is to tell her why he wasn’t with her when she died. He knows that he won’t tell her the truth, but decides that a lie is all to the good in this situation, especially with the radio tuned to
The Make-Believe Ballroom.
She smiles at him and says that it’s all right, she knows that he wanted to be there, and “after all, who wants to travel in the bitter cold to Jersey City?!” She sits on the studio couch and motions for him to sit next to her. “I thought I’d ask you over so that we can listen to the
Lux Radio Theater
,” she says. “Lana Turner is on tonight. They discovered her in a drugstore, you know.” The radio is playing Bix Beiderbecke’s “Margie,” and he starts to laugh.