“Do you have any enemies?”
“I don’t know.”
“It looks like it.”
“Why?”
“Because it looks like somebody’s tried to hurt you.”
“Really.”
“We’ll have to go around to the front of the house to get in, they never did break the deadbolt on the back door.”
“I’ve got a key,” I said.
“Oh right, sure,” the detective said and another cop tried to lead C. Jane away, but she broke free. “No one’s keeping me out of my own home.” In the kitchen, a long black-handled carving knife had been stuck into the wall over the telephone; two fires had been set, one on the floor, the other on the gas stove, and the house had the sour reek of smoke; papers and broken glass and crockery covered the floor tiles; the television set was gone. In the dining room, the armoire doors hung open, armloads of old family crystal and china had been swept out onto the floor…but I saw that a portrait of me, a painting by Kurelek, had not been touched and I said warmly, “They’re not after me, otherwise they would have slashed that.”
“Don’t be so sure,” a cop said smugly. “It doesn’t look like you.”
“The red car’s been stolen,” another cop said. “It’s just been reported in a hit-and-run accident.”
We went into the living room with its twelve-foot high ceilings: the black sofa was hacked to pieces; an engraving by my old Paris friend, Bill Hayter, had been hammered off the wall and lay in a scorched heap; a tapestry I’d brought from Cairo, carrying it through the Black September war in 1970 when I was a war correspondent, was slashed open down the centre; the floor was littered with boxes, broken crockery, papers, broken frames, torn cloth, broken records and cassettes, a Chinese vase and ripped books; the lace curtains in the bay window (Lace curtain Irish, C. Jane had liked to call us, since she was Lithuanian) had been set afire, charred; and in the vestibule, a turquoise funerary piece that had once been in a pharaoh’s tomb, the pharaoh from the time of Moses, lay broken and beside it a Phoenician bronze bull that had been crushed under a heel, or at least there were well-worn black shoes left beside the bull, and I realized my leather cowboy boots were gone.
“The son-of-a-bitch,” I said, laughing grimly, “he’s not only cut and slashed his way through my house but he’s gone off in my goddamn boots and left me his lousy Goodwill shoes.”
“This is terrible,” C. Jane said. We shied away from the grand piano. A fire had been set under it. I could see the blackened veneer, the warped lid.
“It’s worse upstairs,” a cop said.
“Well, lead on, Macduff,” I said. The cop looked at me quizzically.
The second floor was worse; they had torched a vase of antique silk flowers and a Kashmir carpet on the landing; the word processor was stolen (a literary prize I’d never learned to use, didn’t want to use, and was secretly glad to see gone); my books were spilled on the floor, yanked out of their shelves (they’d tried to set a fire in the study by using two books: Child of the Holocaust by C. Jane’s cousin, Jack Kuper, and A Dreambook for Our Time by the Warsaw novelist, Tadeusz Konwicki); in the bedroom, they’d thrown a child’s pine pioneer chair through one of C. Jane’s large brush drawings of tangled lovers; Chinese porcelain figurines that my dead maiden aunts had brought from Shanghai in the late 1920s were smashed; and they had ransacked the bureau drawers for jewellery…all the silver and gold…rings, charms, bracelets…all were gone…all our bindings of love…
The third-floor studio walls were soot-blackened: dozens of C. Jane’s frames and drawings smashed; an enormous black and brown oil painting by one of her former lovers, Homage to John Kennedy on his Death, slashed; the sofa-bed springs had been pulled apart with a claw-hammer, the sofa pillows burned; plaster casts hacked open or broken; and the floor was slick with a sludge of burned, scorched, and then doused papers…they’d started a fire in an old Quebec armoire…acting like a fire box, it had funnelled flame to the ceiling and had burned through the roof of the house, the heat blowing out the windows…and all my papers, so assiduously kept over the years – letters, manuscripts, transcripts…twenty-five years of intimacies, words chosen with care, exactitude…a wet grimy ash.
“We had the water on her three minutes after the alarm,” the fire chief said. He was pleased, full of self-approval. “Thank you,” I said. He had a grey bristle moustache. C. Jane asked me if I thought he trimmed it in the morning with little silver scissors. “When we got here the whole house was full of black smoke…luckily the front door was open, luckily a woman across the road saw the smoke coming through the roof…”
“Who would want to hurt you?” the detective, a Sergeant Hamel, asked again.
“I don’t know. All I know is the Dom Perignon is gone.” C. Jane went downstairs from the studio and then came back. There were tears in her eyes. She does not cry easily. “It’s the piano,” she said. The piano had been given to her by her laconic father before he died of throat cancer, a cancer he’d contracted during the War when he’d enlisted as a boy, too young, having lied about his age, and he’d been gassed and buried alive for several hours in a rat-infested trench. A rat had gnawed on his left little finger. He’d told her two things: “Always listen to music no matter what, and never tell anyone you’re Jewish.” He’d given her the piano, a 1912 Mason & Risch, a mahogany grand with a beautiful fiddleback grain and carved legs.
The fire under the piano had burned down into the hardwood floor and then up an antique silk shawl draped from the lid. When the lid was lifted, the piano was a burned-out, warped, gutted box.
“It’s gone forever,” she said.
“No it’s not,” I said.
A standing whalebone shaman, a drummer figure who had the four eyes of the mystic, done by Ashevak, the finest of the Inuit carvers until he died in a house fire, was still on the piano but the drum was broken, the beater scorched black.
“Don’t you feel violated?” a newswoman friend, who’d come in from the lane, asked. “Don’t you feel raped?”
“No,” I said.
“You don’t?”
“No, and you’re a woman, you should know better. This is a house. No one’s entered my body, no one has penetrated me. This isn’t rape…”
“Yes, but…” She took off her glasses and then put them back on. She was offended, as if I had been difficult when all she had intended was sympathy. But I was being difficult, because I believe, especially in times when there are charred shadows on the walls, that exactness is one of the few ways I can make a stand in the ditch against sentimentality, self-pity, falseness.
“But the rage,” she said. “Someone attacked your place in a state of rage.”
“It looks that way.”
“How do you account for such rage?”
“I don’t know.”
“Any ideas?”
“Motiveless malignancy,” I said. Then a cop, who I noticed had cut his neck while shaving, took me by the arm, smiling a tight little angry smile. “We’ve got one of them,” he said.
“You have!”
The cops, while driving down a lane behind the El Mocambo club, had seen a shabbily dressed man sitting huddled in a doorway, and he was clutching two bottles of Dom Perignon. “We knew right away that something was sure wrong,” a cop said. They had handcuffed him. Strung out on crack, he said he would show them the house he had broken into that morning, and now he was in the back seat of the cruiser in my lane.
“I don’t know whether I want to see him,” I said.
“Oh, you can’t see him.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want an assault-and-battery charge on my hands, too.”
But I did not want to beat anyone. I felt only the torpor that comes with keeping an incredulous calm in the face of brutality. Rage, imprecations, threats were beside the point. I had seen in my life what skilled and sanctioned soldiers or thugs could do to a house in Belfast or on the West Bank or in Beirut. I felt curio
usly thankful that so much in our house had survived. But I knew some people, and particularly some cops, had their own expectations: I quickly learned that I was a suspect…because I was too detached, too self-contained. “He’s got to be in on it,” a cop, who smelled strongly of Old Spice cologne, told Sergeant Hamel, who said that he had tried to explain: “No, no. He’s a writer. That’s what writers do. They stand back and look at things.”
WHAT OLD PROFESSORS KNOW
The suspect was named Lugosi (“It looks like he’s a cousin of Bela Lugosi,” another detective insisted), a young man “of no fixed address.” Lugosi had fought in the cruiser, kicking out the rear window, punching, biting and spitting. He had fought at the station. He had seemed driven by rage. The officers had had to go to Mount Sinai Hospital for hepatitis shots.
Sergeant Hamel, ingratiating yet reflective – a cop who did not look at you with that wry solicitousness so close to a sneer that is the mark of the cop who knows we all have a criminal secret – opened the trunk of his cruiser. “They set seven fires,” he said. “Firebugs. The worst we’ve seen.” He reached into a bag and took out several small bronzes…funeral ornaments for a mummy’s breast from a pharaoh’s tomb, a Phoenician clown’s head…and then an alabaster fertility monkey from a scent dish…all things that I had bought years ago in a desert town outside Cairo from a disgruntled professor of archaeology who had stolen them from his museum.
“These yours?”
“Yes.”
“It’s terrible, things like this being broken.”
“Yes. Lasting this long, suddenly smashed.”
“I want you to think about your enemies.”
“I’m not sure I have any.”
“You’ve written a lot, some people are pretty crazy.”
“I’ll think about it.”
I did not think about it.
“We’ve got to go where there’s water,” I told C. Jane, and we went, and in the morning we woke up in the Hotel Admiral on the waterfront, and as we sat up, with the dawn flaring red across the water, we were suddenly flooded by light. “I had an old philosophy professor,” I said, “and he always talked with his eyes closed, but when he forgot where he was going he’d open his eyes and say, ‘Well, we’ll lick the lips and start afresh.’”
We went back to look at the house. Standing alone in the sooty squalor of the rooms, I knew we had lost things that connected us to the past, but they would be nothing compared to the loss of the future. I wanted to sit at the piano as I had on other dark and sombre days and play in a minor key. I wanted to shuffle on the black notes, singing, Rock me momma in your big brass bed, rock me momma like my back ain’t got no bone…but it was charred, and then the expert piano restorer, a man named Rob Lowrey, came into the house, shook hands, and then shook his head as he lifted the lid. “Burned to a crisp. It’ll cost more to fix it than it’s worth, it’ll cost $30,000 if we can do anything, and we can’t.” He hung his head. “The insurance will never pay for it.”
“I don’t care,” I said, “we’ll work out something.” Lowrey’s men carried the piano out of the house. “If we come back,” Lowrey said, “it’ll be in a year, and if we come back at all, it’ll be a miracle.”
“You bring the loaves,” I said, “and we’ll bring the fishes.”
EURYDICE DESCENDING
We lived in the hotel for over two months. It was small and elegant, charmingly run by young women, and one wall of our room was glass facing over the water, facing Ward’s Island and Hanlan’s Point. Every day we came back to the room after sifting through rubble and refuse in the house, and we sat and stared as the sun leaked out of the autumn sky, and then we dressed for supper…it was a determined elegance of spirit, a determined refusal to yield to the lethargy of dismay, regret, self-pity, or blame (all the questions asked by the police or insurance adjusters – even the simple question, Why? – contained a hint of blame, of accusation…and it was even suggested by a friend that we had asked for it: our house had been too open…and another friend wondered whether we wouldn’t at last learn that such expansiveness, such openness in a home, was a vanity, and vanity was always punished), but we did not blame ourselves. We ate well at a table beside the wide harbourfront window and watched the island airport lights flicker on the dark water. There was a pianist who played out in the lobby, out of our sight, and it was like listening to the ghost of our piano playing, our piano being rebuilt, and ironically, we knew that before our house could be rebuilt, it had to become the ghost of itself: walls washed down, the quarry-tile floors stripped, the broadloom ripped out, the hardwood floors sanded…as if a deep stain had to be eradicated, as if a cleansing had to be done (and all the while, we went through the dreary listing of each broken or missing thing…each thing the ghost of a moment from the past – like counting razor cuts on the skin that were so fine they could hardly be seen though the wounds were deep to the bone). Papers had been hosed down by the firemen and letters turned to sodden ash in my hands; rolled drawings were scorched funnels that fell apart…leaving only a drawn fingertip, a lip…all stacked in a hundred boxes piled in the basement… two lives, boxed and stacked, and then, a few days later, the police told us that they had arrested a second man, named Costa. In a determined gesture toward normalcy, we bought a new television set and put it in the kitchen, a dead grey eye but a promise of sound…
On a crisp December morning we woke and ate breakfast and watched the long, lean harbour police boat leave on patrol. The harbour was icing over but there were still geese on open patches of the gunmetal grey water. We drove to the house and discovered that the back door was open, the television set was gone, some jewellery trinkets and a fox fur jacket were gone. We had been robbed again (when a house has been hit, a cop on the phone said, the word goes out on the street: thieves know television sets will be replaced, and an empty house is a sitting duck). So we were being watched. We were a word on the street, a whisper of affliction on the air.
A detective came by to dust for fingerprints. He was wearing a narrow-brimmed hat, a brown suit with narrow lapels. He was lean and close-mouthed, gruff and meticulous. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “No.” Dust and fingerprints. For a moment, C. Jane said she thought she was losing her mind, except she couldn’t stop laughing quietly, and she mumbled to me, “Go ask Jack Webb if he thinks we’ll ever catch these guys.”
“No,” the detective said. “Not likely. You got the first guys but not these guys.”
I could see that this affliction was going to go on for a long time. I could hear the blind man talking to the butterflies. Dis-consolate, I went back to the hotel, and then down to the shore, to the breakwater in front of the hotel, and I sat watching single-engine planes drop out of the watery grey sky to the island airport. I’d finished a new poem, my dead mother following a dogwood trail:
until she reached brushes and eelgrass,
a cover of slate grey water.
She undressed and slid
down a stone shelf
into the shallows,
dragging shore-slime and fronds,
and splashed cold water over her belly and breasts,
staring at the sky
moth-eaten by light, pale stars.
She eased into the slough.
It had the feel of ointment
as she scissored down
to the braided roots on the bottom,
eyes closed, ears singing,
her drowning voice filling her lungs, swelling,
until the sound became a searing light
behind her eyes
that drove her crashing
into the air,
gulping down the dark
as she crawled ashore.
GUMBY GOES TO HEAVEN
We knew that this tawdry, soft mockery of our life was going to go on for at least a year: certainly, we would outlast it if only because we could still laugh, that raw laughter down the snout, the Haw of laughter at laughter itself – but I was now ful
l of a dark rankling alertness to all kinds of signs and signals of affliction: for instance, one day at Dundas and University Streets, I saw through the car window a tall memorial monument to the dead airmen of the War. I was suddenly enraged. I heard myself hissing the name of the very rich man who had paid for the monument. Hal Jackman…a local man known for his wealth, his collection of antique lead soldiers, and his sterling political connections, a man who had used his connections to erect a monument to his moneyed influence, and his trite taste. Children had nicknamed it Gumby Goes to Heaven, after the cartoon character, Gumby, who had been steamrollered flat by life. In every aesthetic sense, since it was safe, so conventional, so banal, the monument was a sculptural affront to all the men who’d fallen out of the sky on fire, the lost souls it presumed to celebrate. I could rebuild our house, and someday – if Rob Lowrey could work his miracle – I would play the blues on the piano, but I was going to have to confront that self-serving monument for as long as I lived in the city. It was a permanent offence, a tin-soldiering view of life and death.
LUCK BIRD IN A MONKEY PUZZLE TREE
Before Christmas, on a cold, clear day, we drove to the Old City Hall (a dank labyrinth of pea-green and pallid yellow courtrooms) for the preliminary hearing. We had not thought much about the two men who were doing dead time in the city jail (my own contact on the street, a musician – a black horn player I’d known for years – told me that six men had been in the house, that six men had been in C. Jane’s stolen car). We wondered about their faces and pondered the old question: was this a hired hit? And if so, who hated me so much? And if money for the moon plant and crack were the motive for the break-in, was the raging assault on the house a malignancy without malice?
All the Lonely People Page 2