The Abyss of Human Illusion (8 page)

— XLIII —

D
eny it to himself as he would, his work had begun to bore him. Well, he had been at it for fifty years, a little more, really, than fifty years, if he counted apprentice work; he had a shelf of books to attest to those wearying yet absorbing labors, to those thousands of hours, millions of words, and, he was chagrined to recognize, the slow but absolute fading away of what had at one time been a small but definite critical attention to his books. Fifty years. It was indeed wondrous, so he often thought, that he had managed to live at all, to walk and talk and eat and laugh, to love women, to father children—how had that happened?

Perhaps most unsettling—beyond the nagging sense that he had lived but in his spare time—his books, whenever he took one down at random, out of curiosity or to refresh his memory as to how he had managed a specific formal problem, invariably shocked him in that nothing in any of them seemed in the least familiar, but looked as if—read as if—written by a stranger who had secretly invaded his mind and absorbed large quantities of his memories. Worse still, every book—and there they were, with their familiar titles, with his name on jacket and case—every book seemed too good for his talents, such as they were, such as he considered them to be. Who had written this paragraph? these pages? these chapters?—some of which struck him as so artistically authoritative, so perfect, so sublime, that he felt as if he had plagiarized, word for word, the work of another, much better writer.

And so his current work, beyond its somewhat mischievous, even malign capacity to fill him with an ennui so profound as to exhaust him, appeared to him to cast a shadow on his earlier work, to demean it, sully it, in a sense to sabotage it. With every sentence he wrote, it seemed, an earlier sentence, a glittering and suave sentence, decayed a little. But this was all he knew how to do. He wasn’t much good for anything else, and what he did know how to do—even when, he smiled ruefully—even when he knew how to do it, proved nothing, changed nothing, and spoke to about as many people as one could fit into a small movie theater.

And so he continued to do it, correcting and revising each newly made page with a feeling of weird neutrality, with a feeling that he was simply passing the time: this or solitaire—all right, this. Surely, the other old writers he still knew felt precisely this way. Did they? He surely wouldn’t ask such an impertinent question.

He had recently received a letter from a dear friend, who, it so turned out, died soon after. He took the letter from his files one morning, before he started what he now thought of as “work,” scare quotes flaring, and found in it what he was sure he had read. The friend had confessed to him that his last book was, indeed, his
last
book, that he had given up or lost—it made little difference—the ability and the desire to write another word. His friend lamented the fix that he was in, but his frustration seemed forced, it seemed a position taken because of proprieties, the old truisms about art:
a writer who cannot write, how sad, how tragic.
It was a role his friend was playing. So it seemed, so it was.

He sat as his desk, and read the letter again. He wished, oh how he wished it wasn’t so, but he was choked with envy of his friend’s sterility: not to be able to write, not to want to write, to be, as they say, “written out,” or, more wonderfully, “burnt out”—lovely phrase! But it was a gift that had not been given him, and, he knew, despairing, that it would never be given him. He was doomed to blunder through the shadows of this pervasive twilight, until finally, perhaps, he would get said what could never be said.

— XLIV —

H
e’d stopped abusing alcohol years ago, although he disliked the word “abusing,” and used it only with people he didn’t know or didn’t care to know. He thought it a spurious word, a kind of self-help, onward-and-upward, simperingly Christian word that conjured up an image of a frenzied drunk assaulting a bottle of whiskey in a perverse madness. He hadn’t “abused” alcohol, but had spent almost four years sitting in a chair drinking jug wine around the clock and looking, variously, at the wall, the window blind, and the TV screen. Now he was sober and had been for more than five years. What he discovered was that being sober meant no more than
being sober:
he certainly was no more content, no more serene, nor had he found anything
wonderful
to fill his “leisure” hours, no God, in whatever costume. He went to work, came home, ate his frozen dinners, drank tomato juice with a lot of tabasco in it, and watched television. He smoked less, but that was because his salary was pitifully low at the prussianly anti-union retail outlet he worked at.

He lived alone, as might be surmised, his three failed marriages having taught him nothing about women or sex or give and take or, for that matter, anything at all. He had no children, thank God, and now, at sixty-eight, fantasies of erotic adventures in which the ex-wives lasciviously collaborated, or substituted for each other, or were blurred together with other insatiable women, real or invented, were his entertainment. Who performed what perversion and when, and how did she do it and where were they all when it happened? It was pitiable entertainment, of course, but he didn’t care one way or another; he was concentrated, obsessively, on his self, his actual body and flesh, and he accepted the knowledge that he was sick, not of any disease, but sick of himself, of his self. It surely must be a common ailment, so he thought. How to reach one’s late-sixties and not be self-loathing?

He had considered the possibility that he might actually be ill with some spectacular, malignant, fatal disease, lymphoma perhaps, or something even more devastating. Yet the thought of going to “see” his doctor filled him with a boredom and unease strong enough to bring on nausea. For a few years, soon after his last marriage had imploded in slow-motion misery, he’d gone regularly to his doctor, and to other doctors referred to, had tests and more tests, blood panels and urinalysis, examinations and biopsies, for a pain here, a twinge there, irregular bowel movements, fluttery heartbeats, shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping, weak urine flow, and on and on: he had become, that is, an official
patient,
whose responsible job it was to worry about his health and juggle doctors’ appointments and ask questions about his medications and their possible side effects (there was one drug that could, it was thrillingly advised, cause a fatal reaction after just one dose!). It was a job much more fulfilling than the one he made $12.43 an hour at, where nobody would look seriously into his face and suggest that he might have chronic prostatitis—or worse.

But one day he realized that no matter how militantly—or weirdly—obsessive he was or would be about his health, he was, at sixty-eight, good for (a nice phrase) maybe ten more years, if that, and then oblivion. It was the neurotic and worried people between thirty-five and forty-five who thought that diet and exercise and meditation and the avoidance of cigarette smoke and excessive alcohol use (alcohol
abuse!)
would keep them from death; and that industrious and puritanical attention to their aging bodies would take them into their happy nineties, their euphoric hundreds, into a deathlessness as groggily sweet as a California chardonnay. Their bodies would
repay
them for their scrupulous care.

He knew better than this, although he considered that he might well be wrong, but, sick of himself, bored with himself, there was no regimen of health to which he could subscribe without embarrassing himself deep within his psyche, or what was left of it. He of course, like any reasonable human being, considered suicide, for who would miss him? But he refused the idea when he thought that perhaps one day an actual terrible, serious, rampaging disease would enter him or awaken within his body where it had been dozing all these years, a disease that he and his doctors could “battle,” or, better, “bravely battle,” but to which he would at last grudgingly succumb. In the meantime, he decided to start drinking again, to
abuse
alcohol, and with abandon. Christ knows that he’d wanted a drink every hour of every day for years. If he was sick of himself and waiting for the possible declaration within his body of the presence of some malignant destroyer, why not wait drunk?

— XLV —

T
here once was a man who coveted his friend’s wife, and even though he was an Evangelical Christian, complete with closed eyes, raised arms, enraptured visage, and a well-burnished hatred of Satan, and in despite of the ninth commandment, his lust grew and flourished. So much so that he set about, with much sweaty praying in the night for his pal, God’s, personal assistance in his travails, seducing the woman. This was not as hard as he thought it might be, for she had a touch of the whore about her. And so he violated the sixth commandment: in for a nickel, in for a buck. After a time, the man had become thoroughly obsessed with the woman, mad for her, as they say, and wished no more than to be inside of her day and night. The woman’s husband was oblivious to this sexual carnival. He was the perfect cuckold; he no longer desired his wife, so believed her undesirable to others.

One day, the lovers “ran off” to live together, love together, hump each other crazy, and do this forever and ever, et cetera.For some reason, they headed in the man’s somewhat exhausted car, a nauseatingly green Ford Granada, to his home town, Lawton, Oklahoma. He had been born and raised in this burg, in which his parents and sister, washed in the blood of the lamb, still lived in a clapboard house, “the old homestead,” as the whole family liked to call it, smilingly: they might well have been the salt of the earth, or a pinch of it, anyway. The couple fucked their way, delirious and exhausted, through many motels, and on many occasions, pulled off the road to satisfy their enduring itch. They were, it goes without saying, seized by Paphian mania. The birds sang for them, and the sunshine glowed upon their stunned and unsated faces. There had never been a love like this in the history of the world, never.

When they reached Lawton, and the woman had been introduced to Dad, who did and liked as hobbies, and Mom, deeply involved in, and Sis, a member of the Something and the Whatever; and after the shock of this surprise visit to the old homestead, it became almost immediately clear to the folks at home that this somewhat desperate-looking woman of forty or so, in a too-tight sweater and dirty jeans, was not, she was most assuredly not the prodigal’s wife; and, soon after, they realized that, even more damning, she was someone
else’s
wife. These sinful revelations were squeezed out of the couple over two or three days, the family working as an inquisitorial team, their Christian smiles of love and understanding slowly fading, fading, fading into masks of righteous and gray anger:
sic transit gloria caritatis.
On the third day, the woman got up and sat on the back porch, smoking and looking out over the grim landscape, seemingly good for growing nothing but spite and hatred. She knew that she had already surrendered.

It will probably come as no surprise that the man, the seducer, the lover, he who would sacrifice all or at least some for his Helen, obeyed his family’s injunctions, their orders—given him with many tears and prayers by the bushel—to, well, ditch the whore tramp and beg Jesus to forgive him. The next afternoon, while his lover, who had slept on a mattress on the floor of a closet during their stay, was watching an old movie on
TV,
he came to her, falling to his knees in front of her, weeping and praying, and begged Jesus to forgive them both, and to wash them clean in his Sacred Blood that would always and as well as for all Eternity! She went upstairs, packed her nylon overnight bag, put her dirty clothes in a paper shopping bag, and sat on the floor: she was thirty-nine years old and had been—was it possible?—bewitched.

That night they left for New York, and although they stayed at many of the same motels while en route to Lawton, the chastised sinner slept in bathtubs or in the car, with a pillow, of course, under his noble head, lest Satan steal upon him in the reaches of the night with soft music, delicate perfumes, and filthy images of the recent past. He and the woman spoke to each other, but as if he were a chauffeur to a slightly demented and dying patient. She directed him to an apartment house in Kew Gardens, and he left her standing in front of it, not before hoping that Jesus might enter her heart with his and, and soon. Then he was off, and she looked after the car, hoping that God, any God at all, would see to it that he died in a crash on the way back home. She entered the lobby, and rang the bell of an old friend, long divorced, hoping that she was home and hospitable. Then she’d see about calling her husband to explain—explain? If he even knew she’d left.

— XLVI —

O
ne morning, working fitfully on a story that he knew was not going to be any good, and that each gluey additional phrase made more awkward and unwieldy, and, worse, egregiously literary and
important,
the old writer put his pen down and lit a cigarette, although he had just about completely given up smoking; he had no idea why—oh, to live longer and with zest and verve, and to make happy the health corps.

He was tired, very tired, and too old and immovably marginalized for the story to make any difference to his life: what he had come to, in his mid-seventies, he had come to. He was respected, yes, he had known and been friends with many famous writers and artists, right, he had won a prize here, an award there, sure, odds and ends of distracted attention on the part of the fame machine. His current publisher, a kind of career “literary person,” had started his self-important little house with a young woman of very substantial means and a deep love of literature, of course. Their office “suite” was in Yonkers, magically transmuted to Bronxville on their letterhead. Yonkers/Bronxville was less than an hour from the city, so they could keep up (as they said) with things, yet it was quiet and relaxed, removed from the publishing frenzy (as they said) of New York. So they said and said again while they published salutary but soporific books of what one and all agreed was true literary merit. The publisher had spent his life so far working as an editor at two or three of the big mills, and had been responsible for many books of literary merit by many a spear carrier, some of whom had made back their wishful-thinking advances. But now he was an
independent
publisher, backed by his partner’s and, it should be known, lover’s money. He had left his unhappy wife and spoiled, unhappy children, who were, of course, really bright, for her. She understood him and his needs and hopes. The song goes on.

The new house, eponymously Solomon & Sorel, published, it so turned out, the same sorts of books for which he had been responsible in the frenzied world of Publishing, Inc. They were respectable, they did no harm, they exhibited to a degree the shopworn tropes and humanistic razzmatazz beloved of reviewers (“as if we have lived with these confused characters through their so-human travails,” etc.), and they were much like the bunk published by the latest thirty-year-old genius with the fresh eye and astonishing grasp, the one who makes us look anew at literature, but they were, to the chagrin of S&S, destined for the great void. Perhaps soon they’d luck out, although this phrase in its vulgar candor, was not used.

The house—Solomon was the publisher, Sorel the wealthy lover named, in exchange for the rent, “editor-in-chief”—picked up on the old writer, who is as we know currently smoking; they told him that if he didn’t have a current publisher—this was but a courtesy comment—S&S would be honored to be his outlet; he was marvelously this and courageous that and unfairly the other thing and tra la la la la. S&S (known already, cruelly, as So-So House) offered him an advance that would, he calculated cynically, cover his rent for not quite two months, an amount so modest, as they had no shame in saying, that it seemed to be a kind of honorarium presented him for being alive.

So they would publish the novel that had been rejected thirty-seven times, and after the novel, a collection of his short stories: with four or five new ones added to the twenty or so he’d published in his lifetime, they’d have a very attractive book, their phrase. The writer agreed, although he knew that he had very little creative juice left. His good early work was all o.p., and when he looked at it, he couldn’t recognize any of it as his. His energy had been left in bars and beds, in quarrels and envies, in bitter disappointments. He was written out, and knew it.

Solomon, and Sorel, too, for that matter, presented, over lunch with him, their notions of the possibilities that these two new books would open—he might well, finally, be recognized for the
master
that he was. The old writer listened and smiled, the hot air blowing about him at the table. He knew that his novel would silently appear and slowly disappear; his stories would barely appear and quickly disappear, and Solomon and Sorel would soon discover that he was not quite pleasant enough, not nearly as enthusiastic as he, well, should have been, and then decide that their relationship with him was not all that it should be. So that would be that; the old writer could see all this with ferocious clarity.

But he wrote on, and would write on, bored with his work, bored with himself, bored with pure Solomon and breathless Sorel, bored with the very idea that any of this meant anything at all to anyone at all. Solomon had said that he was hopeful that his “Village novel,” as he called
Jaunty Jolly,
might be nominated for one of the more prestigious prizes, the PEN/Faulkner, perhaps? It was about time. Perhaps the NBA? Why not?

The old writer put the yellow legal pad he’d been writing on into a fresh file folder, on which he wrote
Stories.
He’d look at the story tomorrow, although he didn’t want to look at words any more, especially his own. But he would, he would. He should have stopped this foolishness years ago, but he didn’t know what else to do and he was not quite ready to disappear into dead silence. Not with the PEN/Faulkner waiting! He was almost amused.