Time Travail (18 page)

But April was four thousand dollars away.
Sometimes I had to get out of the house. The co-dwellers were
invisible but suffocating. I felt occasional nausea and attributed
it to intestinal flu picked up jogging in a snowstorm. For relief
(I told myself) I went over to the other house twice a week for
what Beth Anderson called our “talking sessions.” We’d created a
miniature classroom situation in her living room. It had developed
out of that unannounced Saturday morning visit of mine with Frost.
Every week I gave her something to work on and we’d discuss it over
drinks. She always dressed up for the occasion. I supplied the
liquor. It was my major expenditure. For a slight woman she could
put it away.

For the sake of variety the sessions
sometimes included music as well as literary appreciation. Between
chapters I exposed her to classical music, one movement at a time.
I’d glanced at her collection of records and tried to bridge the
gap with easy spectacular things like the Mahler First in Solti’s
1964 version. It lost out tremendously on her little stereo outfit.
“You should hear it on my machine,” I said after the final
movement. “Blasts the roof off the house with absolutely no
distortion.” At the expression on her face I added: “Never after
10:00 pm, of course.” I explained to her in some detail the unique
technical features of my audio system.

But mainly it was literature. I gave her
short accessible things: after Frost,
Winesburg, Ohio
. As a joke I said I’d chosen that book because
the author’s name was the same as hers. She wasn’t really an
Anderson, of course. Her maiden name was hard to pronounce. She
insisted on writing it out for me. It bristled with Z’s and Y’s.
She was proud of her pope. Her father had come from there. Oh yes,
I said, my mother too. We were practically
landsleute
I said. She didn’t understand the Yiddish word for
fellow-countrymen. Or was it German? She thought it was Polish. Do
you know Polish too? she asked.

I’d had worse students. At least she wasn’t
brand-new. She brought her experience to the texts. Sometimes
though this raised difficulties. Purely pedagogic difficulties, I
thought at first. She tended to read her own problems in the
stories. The warning signal was: “How true that is …” A musing
silence. Then: “It’s like once …” And then we were out of
turn-of-the-century Winesburg and into end-of-the-century Forest
Hill and her husband and her son.

Sometimes the confidences were a little
embarrassing. Once a scene of extramarital involvement in the book
brought up: “But she’s married!” With her mid-western nasalization
the word came out: “Mary-ed,” which made me think of my second
ex-wife. I had been Mary-ed once too. “I never understood how a
married woman could possibly do a thing like that. I was always
faithful to Jack.” Then, as though I doubted or had designs, almost
defiantly: “And I always will be faithful to him, no matter what. I
know we’ll be together again one day.”

As the literary sessions went on, the
anecdotes on her married life multiplied and seemed less and less
to be digressions from the text. B. Anderson’s stories ended by
blending in perfectly with S. Anderson’s. By the time – necessarily
very long – we finished
Winesburg, Ohio
she and her husband had somehow become characters
in that book of grotesques. It turned out he wasn’t a professional
photographer at all. He didn’t seem to have been a professional in
any field except evasion and fraud. In eighteen years of marriage
he’d briefly run through scores of fragmentary occupations:
car-washer, encyclopedia salesman, waiter, embalmer, diamond-pusher
over the phone, clerk, I can’t remember what else.

For her it wasn’t instability but a spiritual
quest. He was trying to find himself. She recounted her
exploitation with indulgent nostalgic tenderness. It was
outrageous, the way she wasn’t outraged about it.

For instance: how when he’d started
talking about moving out she’d advanced him out of her mother’s
inheritance enough money to buy a slum flat on
9
^th
Avenue in Manhattan for
meditation a couple of days a week. That way she had him the rest
of the week was the idea but soon he stopped returning to Forest
Hill. She couldn’t stand the idea of his living in a dirty slum. He
was so hopeless with things that she’d had to come over (with
take-away Chinese food) and clean up the flat and paint it for him
while he lay on a sofa. To protect him against drippings while she
was doing the ceiling she’d had to put a sheet over him.

“Meditating?” I asked.

“Why yes, he was,” she said. “Of course he
was meditating. I did my best not to disturb him.”

Then he disappeared. When she came back from
her summer holiday with her ill sister in Phoenix the flat had been
sold and he had disappeared. A spiritual crisis, she supposed.
She’d been worried sick.

“Did he ever give you back the money you
advanced for the flat?”

She blinked. She was visibly offended at the
implied blame of the man she loved. So I stopped asking questions
about him even when she told me the story of the junk-jewelry she
wore. The Golden Galaxy supposedly crafted them. They radiated
spiritual force. He mailed them to her at irregular intervals. She
sent the money to him at post-office addresses that changed quite
often. Once she went to the Akron, Ohio address he’d given and
stood in front of the post office all day for three days but didn’t
see him even though the money was waiting for him. She wept a
little telling the story.

“Did he get the money in the end?” I
asked.

She blinked and didn’t answer. Couldn’t she
see that, like her son, her husband was a villainous exploitive
shit? She wasn’t too bad at analyzing fictional stories but F minus
when it came to analyzing her own. I felt a certain pity but mainly
annoyance at the way she let herself be devoured. It was also
getting to be a bore. When alone with a woman in a room I wasn’t
accustomed to another man barging in as he did all the time.

Finally one evening she broke off in the
middle of a story-inspired confidence. Maybe my comments on Jack
had been becoming too critical or else she’d observed that I wasn’t
paying attention. I often had absences in that room and maybe my
gaze had wandered a little. She apologized. “I must bore you. I’m
always talking about myself. Not like you. You never do that.
You’re a real mystery man.” And waited, expectantly. “Oh
me
,” I replied disparagingly and laughed and
tried to steer her back to the story. She blinked and obeyed. I got
to know that rapid blinking. It was a sign of something wrong:
something I’d said or hadn’t said. Finally she stopped her personal
digressions.

Still, she couldn’t stay confined to the
printed page. “I admire her,” she exclaimed about a character one
evening. “Do you mind if I ask you? Who are the ten personalities
you most admire?” And without giving me a chance to say “Mozart,
ten times,” recited her list. Her pope, J. F. Kennedy and Martin
Luther King were well positioned. Then she returned to the fiction
for a second and repeated, “I really admire her. She’s so, oh,
human. What are the qualities you admire most in a human
being?”

Once again, before I could sidestep her
question, she gave me her list. “Sincerity” came first.
“Compassion” was a close second. I forget the others. I think they
were more of the inborn heart-virtues. They’d betrayed her. She
should have prized cerebral virtues like lucidity. When she asked
me about my own top ten I said that in principle I agreed with her
choice. She looked vaguely dissatisfied at my answer.

The paper characters were suffering
friends for her. She prescribed remedies for their loneliness and
despair. I’d listen to her for a while then try to return to what
the author had written. I thought I did it gently and jokingly but
she’d blink in confusion or hurt so I finally relaxed and allowed
her to play her games. She just wasn’t able to take fiction as
fiction. She said she felt like shaking the
Winesburg
characters to make them get out of themselves and
live.

“A good shaking and good advice, and, oh,
lots of love, of course,” she said as though she had the infallible
recipe for others. She delivered lectures to them on the best way
to solve their problems and asked me what I would say to
so-and-so.

I felt like telling her that her approach was
a heresy in terms of literary analysis. But I ended by playing her
game. I had no one else to talk to that winter. The thought occurs
to me now that maybe she hadn’t either. So I gave sound theoretical
advice.

Sometimes I was even tempted to give her
sound advice for herself, say in a detached voice so it wouldn’t
seem intrusive that maybe she ought to try to cut down on the
tranquilizers. You found them everywhere in that impeccably ordered
house, practically in every room, as though recourse had to be
instantaneous, the trip to the nearest pink-lit cabinet-chest
impossibly long.

Certain evenings we did no more than three
pages in as many hours. She couldn’t stay cooped up in fiction. She
had her own fictions. The stories were launching pads for wild
tangents to vaster things: other worlds and invisible presences. A
one-line description of a starry sky and she was off there herself,
into the possibility of other inhabited planets and visits from
them: all those unexplained UFOs. Her husband was back with us.

Clouds, birds, aircraft, alcohol and
hallucinations, I said, refuting him. I reminded her of the
distances involved, so immense that they congealed into a time
barrier. She nodded almost eagerly, like an attentive student when
I expressed my negative certitudes. “Oh I agree, I agree,” but she
ended by saying, more to herself than to me: “But there must
be
something
.”

The death of a character in a story was a
starting-point for conjectures about afterlife. When she asked me
what I thought, I arrayed the scientific reasons that militated
against that consolation (or horror). Again she nodded in apparent
agreement but came out with a terminal: “But don’t you think there
must be
something
?” Once
she ventured a timid reproach. “Gosh, you’re not a very encouraging
person.” I told her I was irrationally disturbed by the
irrational.

My remark didn’t discourage her. Over the
weeks I had to parry extrasensory perception, psychokinesis,
“attested-to” apparitions, out-of-body experiences, telepathy,
clairvoyance, the whole pathetic catalogue of yearning and
abdicated intelligence. She’d apparently visited her husband’s part
of the bookcase. Each time she carefully listened to my counter
arguments which systematically demolished her husband’s witless
utopias and nodded in unconvinced agreement.

Sometimes I got a little impatient with her
digressions until I remembered that after all this wasn’t a real
classroom, she wasn’t a real student and when you got down to it I
wasn’t a real teacher.

So to make up for my impatience I sometimes
played along, even initiated childish games myself when I’d drunk
enough. Once I asked her what country she’d like to live in if she
had the choice. It’s one way of measuring people, but did she have
to be measured? She said: right where she was, the good old USA,
but otherwise Switzerland because of the mountains, the cowbells
and the cleanliness. And you? I said Italy because of the cities
and the dirt. She said, of course Italy too. I guessed it was for
gondoliers and her pope again. He popped up everywhere.

Another time in all innocence I proposed:
“What would you do if you had a couple of hundred thousand
dollars?” At first I was prepared for things like Alpine travel,
horticultural splurges, a gold-plated Ouija board. Then I realized
that she didn’t go in for gifts to herself. She’d give the whole
sum to her husband in exchange for a truckload of mystical
machine-manufactured junk jewelry.

Her face remained perfectly immobile for long
seconds as in deep reflection and then disintegrated. Money
couldn’t buy what she wanted, she managed to bring out and then
apologized very briefly and definitively. She reached over and
refilled my glass with whisky as though I were the one who needed
fortifying.

I said I understood that. What I really
wanted couldn’t be bought with any amount of money either. She
didn’t take it up. She changed the subject like shutting a
door.

What annoyed me a little about the incident
was her quick apology, as though she regarded her loss of control
as some sort of violation of the rules of an imposed game, a
transgression of an implicit agreement between us to remain on the
safe surface of things. Somehow I must have conveyed the impression
that confidences were distasteful to me. I thought I concealed it
more expertly. Or maybe she imagined there was an implicit
obligation for reciprocity in confidences.

The incident was exceptional. It wasn’t hard
to make her laugh at classroom-style quips. I still got pleasure
out of making women laugh, particularly if they closed their eyes
and threw their heads back doing it as this one did. It’s like a
kind of surrender on their part. I could make most of the women I’d
known laugh at will at the beginning of our relationship if not at
the end.

Once she said I was funny for such a sad man.
She said I reminded her of her grandfather. He’d been like that,
funny and sad. I wasn’t pleased at the generation aspect of the
comparison. For maybe the past fifteen years half of the younger
women I found myself involved with stressed my resemblance to their
dead fathers. It was a role that had to be accepted as the price
for access. Apparently, as a grandfather figure, I had entered a
new and terminal phase in my relationship with younger women, even
with a woman like Beth Anderson, basically non-desirable except
maybe a little, very briefly, when offering her throat in laughter
or seen kneeling in a flower-bed in hot weather from the right
angle.