The Abyss of Human Illusion (6 page)

— XXXV —

H
e and his wife of a little more than a year decided to give a New Year’s Eve party for their closest friends, another recently married couple: it would just be the four of them. They were, then, surprised to find that their friends had brought along a man from the husband’s office, Zoltan, whom the husband described as his “partner.” He seemed a rather inconsequential figure, pale and faded. He sat on one end of the sofa and began to drink bourbon and water, steadily, and with a kind of sincere devotion to the whiskey. The hostess had what she would have called—had she been asked—a “bad feeling” about him.

It became clear to the host, despite the blurring of his thought by alcohol, that Zoltan had sexual designs on his coworker’s wife, who pretended to be blind to his unconcealed desire. That she permitted her skirt to ride up to her thighs testified to her awareness, even though she worked so as to seem blithely careless. It was, after all, New Year’s Eve, she might have said. Zoltan ogled her thighs with an ardor just slightly less pronounced than his love for his whiskey, but this was allowed to pass by all. Who can tell why? Relationships, as they now call them, faint, stumble, and collapse every day because of such social niceties: all Zoltans seem to know this, with the instinct of animals.

Sometime just before midnight, when the little party had become somewhat waywardly morose despite the good-times Ray Charles recording that nobody had the will to dance to, the doorbell rang, and the visiting wife, the guest, assuming the hostess’s duties, opened the door to Jake, an old friend of both husbands. He stood there smiling, a quart of Scotch in each hand, his coat flung carelessly over his shoulders. He put the Scotch on the floor and took his friend’s wife in his arms, then kissed her, as they say, passionately, his mouth open, as was hers. He had his hands as low on her waist as he, perhaps, dared, but his intentions were very clear. His candor seemed merely his attempt to disguise them with “honesty.”

Zoltan got up from the couch, and lurched toward the couple, patting, in some absurd gesture of comfort, his host’s shoulder on the way to the door. He pulled Jake away from his “partner’s” wife and then pushed his mouth into hers, lewdly, slobbering, grunting, rubbing his hands up and down her thighs. Her husband got up, very calmly, walked to the couple, and kicked his wife in her buttocks before pulling her around to face him; then he slapped her face and slapped her face again. The record had ended, and as if caught in the perfect web of the perfect cliché, the voices of people in the street were suddenly clear in their strained and vaguely hysterical revelry.

The husband yanked and pulled his wife over to the sofa and sat her down, then looked at his old friends, and sneered at them. “Here’s your fuckin’
friend!”
He opened the closet door and pulled out his overcoat and Zoltan’s, while Jake stood in the open doorway, in something more than shock—did he really
know
these people? The husband gave Zoltan his coat, put his on, and picked up one of the bottles of Scotch Jake had put on the floor what seemed like hours before. “I’m not interested in you people anymore,” he said. “I’ll call you soon, bitch,” he said to his wife. Then he pushed Zoltan out the door and followed him, leaving the door open: they began quarreling as they went down the stairs.

“Jesus,” his wife said. “Jesus.” She sat sprawled on the sofa, her legs apart; both men stared at her, embarrassed. The hostess gave her a glass of straight bourbon and roughly, angrily yanked her skirt down her thighs. “Keep your skirt down!” she said. “You
child
.”

— XXXVI —

T
he professor had made a small but firm reputation as a translator of late nineteenth-century French poets, the lesser lights, so to speak, most especially Laforgue and Corbiere, of the great Modernist explosions of the age. His translations were quietly celebrated as definitive “for our time.”

It may not be surprising to note that the professor, in his youth, had been an aspiring poet, but his talents were meager and so he moved resolutely, yet with a somewhat bohemian show of the devil-may-care, through his education, earning his PhD at the age of twenty-eight, and starting the nerve-wracking process of “getting settled,” i.e., being granted tenure. The professor did not quite think of himself as an academic, but as an artist, and perhaps, in his own vaguely deluded way, he was. He may have silently vowed the physician’s vow: first, do no harm.

He ultimately got tenure at a mediocre state university, where his colleagues in the comparative literature program were to grow jealous of his small fame (an article in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
had included his name and a few lines on his translations in an article on “poet professors” it was noted that his work was “dazzlingly eccentric,” yet “sound in its meticulous scholarship”).

His scholarly career had been “checkered,” for from an undergraduate interest in the “silver” or “drab” poets of the early English renaissance, he moved, unexpectedly, into an enthusiastic—or so it appeared—study of Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde,
The Yellow Book,
etc.; in short, the English Decadence. It was rather stale stuff, but the book he made of it—and which earned his tenure—caused a stir because of his carefully ingenious argument that a pornographic homosexual novel anonymously published, ca. 1895,
Teleny,
was written by Oscar Wilde. His comparison of the style with that of
Dorian Gray
was somewhat strained, but “unusual and “daring,” especially in the argument that conflated the protagonists of both novels as the same depraved dandy. But that was that—the English Decadence, the professor learned, led nowhere but to a lifetime in, let’s say, northern Iowa. That would never do.

And so he moved, with some flattery, here and there, some to-ing and fro-ing and faculty lunches and dinner parties, into the outer precincts of the romance languages department, and Vallejo became the center of his new book, a neohistorical study of the imagery in
Trilce,
that got him an offer from a very good private university, after which it was adiós to Vallejo, and the French poets were suddenly hauled from the wings, where they had, perhaps, been sitting for some time with Max Beerbohm and the Earl of Surrey.

In his new post, he modestly requested of the creative writing program if he might teach a course in literary translation, under its auspices of course, and his growing celebrity made this a cinch, especially since he offered to teach it in addition to his regular course load. So there he was, a writer, in effect, at last. He was very much “like” a writer, even, with his beret and faded denim shirts, his bicycle and worn corduroys. Well

He married a graduate student some two years later, a washed-out young woman of great sensitivity, who made a first–play splash with a little one-acter called
¡Ay Caramba!
“Its intermittent sizzle comes from its winningly disingenuous juxtaposition of Hebrew linguistics, Twelve-Step dogma, the
CIA
, and the ties between them,” asserted the
Village Voice,
with guarded enthusiasm. They are both middle-aged now, and the professor’s wife has all but given up writing and has begun showing her photographs at a “discriminating” gallery in town. The professor now teaches but one course a semester, a freshman seminar in the English Decadence, in which he assigns his own book, self-deprecatingly, to be sure. He loves the fact that his bluntly sexual chapter on
Teleny
makes his students look at him with a surprised respect. And, not to forget, he is writing poetry again, and publishing it in the literary magazine of the English department,
Redwood Review.

— XXXVII —

H
e’d finally got a job checking freight for the King Assembly Agency, working on a North River platform of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with whose checkers and car loaders the assembly agency worked in tandem.

The weather had grown increasingly colder as January progressed, and one morning, as he walked into the violent wind blowing up Fortieth Street from the river, he knew that this day, the first truly cold day on his new job, would be astonishingly cruel. And so it was.

His marriage had been steadily disintegrating, even though it was barely more than a year old. His wife looked at him, or so he thought, with a passive, almost friendly, benign contempt, although he had no idea why: perhaps he was wrong. He certainly could not have furnished any “proof” or examples of this contempt, but it was there, he knew. It was there. He believed that one day soon he’d be given a sign of some sort to prove, to his satisfaction, that his wife happily despised him, and always had, that their marriage was teetering on the edge of collapse, and that she was ready to take advantage of any catalyst to give it a careless push.

Al, the foreman, took a look at him in his absurdly inadequate clothing, and gave him a woollen watch cap to pull over his ears, his ears and his stupid head, the head of what Al had, on this bitter day, called, dismissively, a “college boy.” The cap kept his head from freezing, but did nothing for his body or his feet, numbed into two chunks of icy flesh from the frigid concrete floor of the platform. This was his true initiation into the world of brutally hard work, “honest,” as they say, work.

The sign would arrive and he would see it or feel it deeply; there would be no doubt of it. Then, only then, armed with this certainty, he could confront his wife and ask her to tell him the truth. The truth. Perhaps, he occasionally thought, she wasn’t aware of how she treated him, how she talked to him with equal measures of impatience and patronization, wasn’t aware of how she was to him. His candor would awaken her own, and perhaps
something
would be made clear between them, and “things” might then be brought cleanly to a conclusion, before both of them were drained of their youth and what was left of their honesty. It never occurred to him that if his wife consciously acted toward him in the manner he thought—he knew—she did, that she might like it, that she might like doing this to him, that she had married him so that he would always be near, waiting patiently to be insulted and demeaned.

On the following day he would wear long underwear, put a few sheets of newspaper between two sweaters, and don a scarf, the cap that Al had given him, heavy gloves, and two pairs of socks under his old low quarters. He would be a worker instead of a chump, sad in his chump’s ignorance.

On the evening of that first bleak and bitter day, when he took himself home, a core of terrible ice sat solid inside his body; all the way home on the subway, the bus, the three-block walk to the small apartment that he and his wife were slowly fading away in, he shook with the cold. A glass of straight bourbon couldn’t get him warm, nor could the spaghetti, of which he had seconds and then thirds. It did nothing. He trembled and shook at the table and while he watched television and, undressing for bed, shook even more fiercely as the cool air of the bedroom touched his bare flesh. And then he realized that
this
was the sign, this frozen center of his body, his pitiful, stupid body was her body, too: they were both dead or dying. His wife asked him, for the first time, what the matter was. She smiled as if vaguely annoyed by the intolerable ague that possessed him. Are you
sick?
she asked. Oh yes, he was indeed.

— XXXVIII —

H
e was a third-rate painter, who believed, because he had started painting as a ten-year-old in England, that he had been born a kind of prodigy, of the sort that simply could not blossom in the United States. When he came to America at fifteen, with his mother and father, he was enrolled in public high school, where his meager talents impressed his teachers, whose knowledge of painting had been gleaned from worn postcards from the Met and Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Frick, and so on. They knew that their pupil was—what
was
he?—he was far more talented and knowledgeable than anyone else in their classes or in the school, for that matter. All this praise and blather enforced his fantastic conception of himself. So his adolescence and young manhood passed, and at twenty-two or so he was turning out canvases that were banal parodies of de Kooning. In this, it must be said, he was not alone. He was quite insufferable in every way, suffused, as he was, with monstrous illusions of his restless and iconoclastic genius, although one had to know him for a time before these aberrations showed themselves plain.

It so happened that he met a beautiful and funny and intelligent girl at one of the scores of parties that tended to erupt, acne-like, in the downtown “scene” of the mid-fifties, those carnival days. To the astonishment of everyone, he and this girl began an affair, and, six months later, married. It seemed clear that she married him because of what she took to be his genius and because of her devotion to this genius; and he married her because she—only properly—flattered him and, well, she was beautiful. “See?” he seemed to say to his peers, all of them peering out enviously from behind their inert versions of “Bill” and “Franz” and “Jackson.” She was, as noted, intelligent and educated, but basically ignorant of art when she married the whiz. But. Ah, but.

But her marriage to him brought her, quite naturally, into contact with many artists on an almost daily basis—dinners, shows, openings, parties, weekends in the Hamptons before the sands had turned to gold dust, raucous and drunken Provincetown softball games, and so on. And these painters, as well as their wives and lovers, said enough, usually obliquely and glancingly, but enough, to let her know that they thought of her man as, well, not much of an artist, and a bit of a bore. Even more damaging to the connubial partnership, she began to:
1)
see the work of good, sometimes very good, painters who were her husband’s peers; and
2)
develop a critical eye, a set of aesthetic measures, a way of thinking about painting that was independent of her husband’s essentially envy-tainted remarks. And so she began to see clearly his work, and to battle with herself over what she thought to be her growing, silent betrayal of him. But he was, well, he was, really, not very good. Not very good at all.

Slowly, softly, and as they say, as quietly as the famous little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, she began to think of him differently and then to treat him differently; she moved from a kind of genial tolerance to vague patronizing denigrations to blunt contempt. After two years, she left him. He continued to paint, of course, but his anger and unhappiness did nothing for his work, which, in point of fact, got worse. This was the period in which he did a series of what he called “Suburb” paintings, about which even his friends were uncomfortably silent. Some of these daubs were hung on the walls of new restaurants in the newly named SoHo; later, he moved to England, where his career foundered and collapsed.