Time Travail (27 page)

Now another close-up: her hand on my shoulder
and then a super-macro shot of her diamond ring. It was like a
comically moralizing montage in an old silent film. The machine all
but supplied the curlicued subtitle: “Another Man’s Wife.”

Also, he said, he’d succeeded in greatly
extending the duration of the image without the need for a
corresponding energy-input. He was still working on a device to
store the image. Not the dead videotaped image. The real image.
There were snags.

But most of the preconditions now
existed
for
what he had in mind
, he
said.

Whatever he had in mind didn’t alarm me. Didn’t
interest me. I’d shaken it all off. The jerking dead hadn’t come
back since the first tenderness sessions. Past time-strata didn’t
erupt in the corridors either. How had it been possible to do
without a woman’s love for so long? Hadn’t that been the deep cause
of all my troubles?

Each time Hanna and Harvey came back from the
hospital the Volvo was loaded with junk, mainly discarded machines.
Harvey bent the salvaged items to his esoteric uses with Third
World ingenuity. It explained why his set-up had that amateurish
look. The very instruments of the attempted linkage with the past
already belonged to that past. He pointed at something and I said
it looked like one of those beauty-parlor helmets you used to see
women reading mags under while having a permanent wave. He said
that was exactly what it had been but wouldn’t stay that way much
longer. I knew he wanted me to ask about that so he could refuse to
answer. But I wasn’t interested. All I said was that it also looked
like the funny metal helmet they stick on your head when they shock
you out of existence in the electric chair. Then I went back to the
other house, my new center of gravity despite the little chasm
there.

That chasm wasn’t at all impassible. We
skirted it coming toward each other, smiling and pretending it
wasn’t there, pretending that insane scene in the other house had
never happened. This was hard to do because the climax of that
scene had been the embrace that had quickly developed into our
present position on her bed. I knew she longed to explore the
chasm. I understood it by her intense concerned glances at me when
she thought I wasn’t looking, also by the constant therapeutic
head-cradling act.

Sometimes I was irritated at being treated
like a borderline case. Then I’d realize that maybe I really was a
borderline case or worse. I saw the borderline as the threshold of
the dead room. I’d crossed it too often. So if you pursued the
metaphor logically didn’t that make of me a beyond-the-borderline
case?

Finally she asked the question that had
been gnawing at her. The moment and position were propitious. She
breathed a deep sigh and nuzzled in a touching ersatz of that
lovely post-coital tenderness of the fully gratified woman she
couldn’t possibly have been, given the limits she imposed on our
relationship.
“”
“Je-rr-y. Je-rr-y, hon-ey.”
A nose-kiss. Then: “What do those machines really
do, Je-rr-y? Don’t you want to tell me, my dar-ling?” How could I?
How could I tell her they were one-eyed scouts for a half-assed
time machine? Just pronouncing the term “time machine” would have
catalogued me definitively as a lunatic or a liar or both in her
mind. So I nuzzled back and said he’d told me they were
telluric-wave detectors, but maybe they weren’t. Like her, I said,
I was surprised that lenses were necessary for detecting invisible
waves.

Yes, dangerous. Very dangerous.

She went on exploring my unsettled mental
state the following day in the same circumstances. After the sigh
and nuzzle she asked me about that camera in the bathroom shower.
She asked the question in a tone of deep soothing readiness to
understand the wildest things I might say.

How could I give her the real reason: that
I’d been accessory to an attempt to install in her living room
machines I’d defined as deadly? I was ashamed to confess it, I
whispered. She coaxed and coaxed. She’d slap me, I said. Never,
never, my darling.

It was a kind of projective fetishism, I said
finally. I’d had no photo of her. So I took shots of her shower to
look at it and imagine her there gleaming, soaping her breasts.
Forgive me, I begged. It sounded unexpectedly pathological once it
came out. Her breathing quickened, she bit my arm and asked me to
say it again which I did with a bolder variation. She gathered my
head in.

Finally she did it once too often. I
recovered my head with a certain irritation and brought the thing
out into the open. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” She protested,
unconvincingly, at that term. Certainly not crazy, but maybe on the
verge. She relativized the state. She said it happened to everybody
sooner or later. She’d often been on that verge herself and even a
little beyond the verge once or twice.

She gave me her most recent experience, just
last Saturday. She’d gone to New York to see a friend (a
woman-friend) and on the subway all of a sudden she’d been
possessed by the notion that half of the passengers in the car were
members of the Golden Galaxy concentrating mentally on the other,
unconverted, half. Sometimes they staged InGatherings in the
subway.

But Jack wasn’t in the car. All the
passengers looked bored, unspiritual. At each station she got off
that car and ran to the next one. She forgot the real reason she
was in the subway. She overshot her station and got out of the
final car all the way out in the Bronx. All the passengers –
overwhelmingly ethnic toward the end – looked unspiritual. Jack
wasn’t in any of those cars.

“And then I almost got on another line. I was
about to take another line, all the lines, IRT, BMT, all over,
Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn and go on looking. But then I said,
“Whoa, Beth, whoa. You could spend your whole life on the subway
looking and you’d never find him.”

She wept a little alongside me. Her “whoa”
had sounded like “woe.”

She blew her nose and returned to my case.
She said it was a miracle I hadn’t had a nervous breakdown months
before, living in that horrible house, the dirt, the noise, the
roaches. “I was simply horrified at what I saw,” she said. Of
course she meant me to understand: horrified at the disorder of
that house. But maybe too she meant horrified at another kind of
disorder she’d seen there.

Horrified maybe but relieved in a way, I
guessed. All the things that had deeply troubled her about my
behavior now appeared in another, clinical, light. Morally it was
an improvement. The poem-box unopened for months and lied about, my
stealthy doings in her house, the muttering pacing of her living
room, my wet-stockinged stance in her shower with a camera, etc –
all that now had a reassuring pathological explanation.

She was the kind of woman who stepped back
only an instant from pathology in a loved one and then surged
forward to nurse it. So she nursed me. It was a reversal of our
former relationship. I had been pretty much in command before. Now
she took charge of me, still another woman taking charge of me. I
felt once again the great familiar relief at encouraged
irresponsibility.

Plumbing the murky depths of my mind wasn’t
her only curative approach. She took active measures to reduce the
infection. I was to avoid the other house as much as possible, she
decreed. She programmed my activities during her absence. She kept
me busy weeding her tulip strip, picking up seeds and fertilizer at
the garden center, shopping in the supermarket. My mouth watered at
the sight of that first shopping-list and the prospect of a
home-cooked meal after two years of restaurant fare, radiated pizza
and Hanna’s frigid noodles.

But it never got beyond the Ritz cracker and
skewered cheese-cube stage. She never invited me to stay for
dinner. As for sleeping in her bed, even relatively chastely, that
was out of the question. If she wanted to preserve me from
infection why didn’t she invite me to move in with her?

There were other even more peculiar things
about her behavior. One day I found a big brass bolt installed on
the inside of her front door. When I came in she locked the door
and shot the bolt. Before we went into a room she was careful to
draw the drapes or angle the Venetian blinds opaque.

Why did she do that? I whispered in my turn,
nuzzling her. We used to have our classroom sessions without a
locked and bolted door, I reminded her. She hadn’t bothered drawing
drapes either in the other rooms we happened to be in. Our
relationship hadn’t been the same then, she whispered. We hadn’t
been deep dear friends then as we were now.

Finally I thought I understood what it was
all about. She’d once said she was sure her husband would come back
one day. She didn’t want us to be surprised in inextricable
postures of (relative) intimacy. She could always leap up fully
clothed from the
cama de matrimonio
at a moment’s notice. How could she possibly get rid of a
second table setting at a moment’s notice?

As the days went by the oddities multiplied.
Our (slow) progress in intimacy upstairs was accompanied by the
progress of fearful precautions downstairs. She trained me to
vanish at a moment’s notice. That was at about the time she
sometimes consented to removing her blouse in her bedroom.

Suddenly in the midst of anything,
television, drinks, embraces, above all embraces, her body would
stiffen, her eyes would go fixed and distant and she’d tell me to
vanish. It was like one of those old-time school fire drills. In
twenty seconds I was to disappear upstairs leaving no trace of my
presence below. From the staircase I’d see her inventorying the
living room. She’d pat the imprint of my behind on the sofa out of
existence, grab the bottle of whisky and my glass and hustle them
into the kitchen. Then she’d face the front door, immobile,
expectant.

I had a painful insight one evening. All
those theatrics made the return of her husband imminent in her
mind. She’d often said that a woman could love two men
simultaneously. But not on the same level of intensity, apparently.
Her parasitic monk was younger, true, but no great shakes
culturally and intellectually, I was sure. I didn’t see him endowed
with wit and charm either. I tried to minimize her senseless
preference for the man who’d ditched her as another of her
deficiencies in taste, like the electric fireplace, her
gothic-lettered visiting cards, her “best-of” CDs.

Still, after that insight I couldn’t help
feeling a little wounded at being reduced to an instrument to make
her fantasies a bit less pathetic and impossible.

But after, when the alarm was over and we
were together on the bed, I took her head in my arms and rocked it
and kissed it repeatedly.

***

Fourteen

After a long respite Harvey returned to his
archeological fixation. I’d thought he’d forgotten about unearthing
the sites of Forest Hill shops forty years before. I reactivated
the research. This time I went to the local paper and on the
pretext that I was writing a history of the town was able to dig up
photographs of the Forest Hill of the war years. I pondered over
them and tried to regenerate the old beneath the new.

It began to monopolize my brain. I suffered
something like a relapse.

I did a little fieldwork. But most of the
archeological research was pursued mentally in bed, my own and
Beth’s. I couldn’t get rid of it even there. It was becoming
obsessive, trying to peel off the contemporary occupation layer to
reveal the underlying deposit of artifacts. She took my distraction
for sulking because of the limitations on intimacy she still
imposed. Lately I’d been getting urgent. I felt I owed it to her
and to my own virile image to be urgent. Not here, my sweetheart,
she would say. Where then? Not here, she would repeat, probably
referring to this life. I suggested the living room sofa or even
the cactus-patterned sofa in the Mexican nook. She found that
sordid. I suggested the museum room guarded by Uncle Sam. There was
a bed there. She reacted to that as though I’d proposed a church
altar with her pope in attendance.

Then I mentioned that unvisited room at the
end of the corridor that she’d referred to as “the guest-room.” No,
she said. Why not? Not there, she said. After a while she added:
“It’s full of junk anyway.”

We’d progressed in intimacy by then. It was
largely visual. Although I was generally able to sweet-whisper her
out of her bra she would gracefully pull out of attempted torso
caresses with a kiss and ask me to recite her son’s poems again, I
did it so wonderfully. I must have recited the BMT thing twenty
times.

She’d lie alongside me, head thrown back,
cupping her breasts out of modesty or shame and listen with
intensely closed eyes. Then of course I had him on those
photo-albums as well. When the alarm went off I had to sit
alongside her on the edge of the bed and pretend interest. With
that merciless feminine memory for long-ago trivia involving
loved-ones, she recalled the events surrounding this snapshot and
that one. He looks mad here because I wouldn’t buy him a third
ice-cream cone, chocolate and pistachio. Here, that was the day he
nearly fell in the river, I thought I’d die.

She went on and on and I would end by
stroking her downy neck-vertebras with my fingertips and follow
them down to the small of her back and the stubborn barrier of her
belt. She had a lovely back. Like her small intricate ears and
brief nose it hadn’t aged. If I kept it up she was sure to stop and
look up and say, bewildered, “Aren’t you interested, Jerry?” And I
would stop the sinuous exploration and say, miming candid surprise
at her question, “Yes, of course I am. Pistachio and strawberry,
you said. What river was that he fell into?”