by Lore Segal
“I’m Betterwheatling,” says Betterwheatling. “Young Lucinella and I have met.”
“And this is…?”
“Friendling,” says Friendling. “We all know each other, Lucinella.”
“Then would you tell me what my name is, in case I have to introduce myself to someone.”
“You are Lucinella,” says Friendling.
“I’m afraid I haven’t read your book,” young Lucinella is telling Betterwheatling.
“It’s a good book,” I say, “and a beautiful piece of scholarship.”
“Maurie thinks it’s worthless,” says Betterwheatling. “He wouldn’t publish my afterword in The Magazine.”
I see that Winterneet has brought his wife, the girl his mother picked for him, I’m sure, big, high-bosomed, high-shouldered, like one of the larger amphorae. He sits her down among the coats on my couch, and walks off.
I am the hostess and must go and talk to old Mrs. Winterneet. I can’t tell if she is petrified by all those years with Winterneet, or stoned. Across her forehead file sixty-six gray hairs like the exemplary letter S the teacher draws on the top line of a second-grader’s copy book, but I dare say she’s a sterling and loyal wife, which is nothing to be snide about. There’s much I could learn from Mrs. Winterneet if we could talk woman-to-woman, it’s just that I have trouble remembering to keep listening to her telling me how Winterneet drives her to town every second and fifteenth of the month so she can see her doctor on East Eighty-ninth Street, in an even voice, just loud enough to drown out what Maurie is telling Winterneet. Seeing old Lucinella passing, I pull her sleeve. I say, “You know Mrs. Winterneet, of course!” and rise, obliging her to take my seat. She glares at me. Let the old ladies chat.
I join Maurie and Winterneet and say, “by the way, Maurie, why wouldn’t you publish Betterwheatling’s afterword in The Magazine? I think it’s a beautiful book. The prose is so adroit—”
“I know,” says Maurie. “That’s why I published his foreword.”
“Oh. Come and help me talk to Meyers,” I say. Meyers is standing by the wall alone.
“I don’t talk to Meyers!” says Maurie. “He no longer sends his poems to The Magazine.”
I carry my drink across the room. Young Lucinella is telling Ulla she’s sorry she’s never read a word Ulla has written.
“Meyers!” I say. We sip our drinks. I don’t have the stamina to wait till Meyers thinks of something to say, so I say, “You’ve hurt Maurie’s feelings. Why don’t you send your poems to The Magazine?”
“Because I haven’t written any,” Meyers says.
We sip our drinks. “Let’s go and talk to Winterneet!” I say.
“The hell with Winterneet,” says Meyers, showing his teeth behind his great, sad mustache. He raises his chin and cries, “Winterneet voted against my Pulitzer!”
I’m getting high and trot right over to Winterneet, who’s putting his hand out to William, saying, “J. D. Winterneet. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“We have so!” William cries, and stamps his foot. “At Maurie’s on Thursday and again on Sunday, and at the Friendlings’ party you told me you liked my poem, and in May we spent a weekend together at the symposium!”
“But if you remember, after that,” says Winterneet, “at the Betterwheatlings’ in September, I didn’t know you again.”
William raises his chin and from his exposed throat silently howls.
“Winterneet,” I say, “how come you voted against Meyers’s Pulitzer?”
“But that was fifteen years ago!” says Winterneet. “Since then he has become the most accomplished and interesting poet of the decade.”
William says, “That’s what Betterwheatling says in his new book.”
“I have not read, nor do I intend to read, Betterwheatling’s new book,” says Winterneet.
“But Winterneet!” I say, “it’s a beautiful piece of scholarship, the prose is adroit, and I think Betterwheatling is the best critic we have.”
“I know he is!” wails Winterneet, “and he called me a dinosaur in the Sunday Times.” (“I never even read the Times,” young Lucinella mumbles at my back.) Winterneet unfolds a faded yellow clipping from his pocket, raises his chin, and reads: “J. D. Winterneet, that enormous walking fossil, the dinosaur of modern poetry.”
My eyes glittering in my head, I go to find Betterwheatling.
“Betterwheatling, why did you call Winterneet a dinosaur in the Sunday Times?”
“You think he minded?” cries Betterwheatling. “I meant extinct but great. I think I said ‘enormous.’ You know I gave him a whole chapter in my new book.”
And this is the moment when it hits me: I haven’t read Betterwheatling’s new book. Nor any of his other books either! As I stand in my amazement, staring into Betterwheatling’s face, I can tell, with the shock of a certitude, by the set of the line of Betterwheatling’s jaw, by the way his hair falls into his forehead, that Betterwheatling has never read a line I have written either and I flush with pain. I’ll never invite him to another party!
The trouble with cutting up your
friends is then you don’t have
them any more.
Betterwheatling
Midnight.
Enter Max Peters, the twelfth critic, whom I did not invite. Pavlovenka has brought him with her. She hugs me and whispers, “You don’t mind! He had nowhere to go tonight.”
“I never go to parties,” Max says, out of the left corner of his mouth.
“I can’t stand parties,” I lie out of the right corner of mine and step in front of him to block from his vision what’s going on right in my living room.
Max peers over my shoulder and spits.
I look over my shoulder too. And are these the friends I invited, six pages back, to come and talk with each other, and with me, because I liked them? What has changed my living room into this New Yorker cartoon full of chinless showoffs standing in groups or pairs? They turn their violent profiles on one another. Watch William’s jaw move up and down, explaining publishing to fat Maurie, who picks his nose and nibbles his finger. His hand’s shrunk to midget-size! Horrified, Winterneet looks into Ulla’s wide-open mouth and Meyers backs into the wall before young Lucinella advancing to tell him the list of books ancient and modern, in English and foreign tongues, which she has not read.
Stout little Pavlovenka giggles, and squeals, “Don’t you adore Max’s outfit!” She points to his tall conical hat and makes nice-nice to the black stuff of his voluminous cloak. There’s a rush of air past my cheek; Max has raised his arm and is pointing his bony forefinger between Betterwheatling’s eyes. He says, “I just sent off my review of your new book, which I used as a peg for a discussion of this curious yearning to corral a lot of free-ranging poets into a ten-year period that begins and ends with zero. You, Betterwheatling, are quite the most distinguished of our Cowboy Critics.”
Is Betterwheatling’s solid flesh really dissolving or does it merely seem to fade like the Cheshire cat, which used to blow my mind until our fourth-grade visit to the science exhibition. “Press button to make lightwaves coincide, crest with crest and trough with trough, so that they cancel themselves out,” read Miss Norris, our science teacher, from the card glued to the wall of the display case inside which a red rubber hot-water bottle was slowly, slowly disappearing. “How come?” we asked. “How come Ulla always gets to press the button?” “Don’t lean on the glass,” Miss Norris said. “Is it going to come back?” we asked her.
It is the power of the epigram, if it’s true, or mean enough, or bawdy, or rhymes or alliterates, to become a permanent attribute, and henceforward, if Betterwheatling comes back and we find ourselves face-to-face at parties, I will see him—through a secret smile—on horseback, lassoing maverick poets.
So much for Betterwheatling, whom I had rather a tendency to be in love with.
I move a little closer to Max Peters, to be on the safe side, and duck to avoid his rising arm. I
t’s William walking toward us with his hand out to shake Max’s forefinger.
“So, Max!” William says. “How’s excellence? How’s mediocrity these days?”
“Cruelly far apart as ever,” Max Peters says. “And you, William, have you discovered your place in the gap? Or are you still hoping to turn out to be Shakespeare?”
“Who says I’m not!” cries William. (Already his face pales.) “As a poet my powers are in their infancy.”
“And what you can’t bear is to grow up and be William.”
On the spot where my poor husband stood in his dear and aggravating flesh, tan shoes, slacks, polo shirt, stands another epigram. And it’s apt! Max, I never said that you were stupid, but what can William do with this piece of truth except add it to the arsenal of personal disasters he stores in his Underground, with which to prick himself on to despair on his off days; when he’s been successful in bed at night and written well all morning, he won’t believe, won’t remember what it was you said.
(You understand, of course, I say none of this out loud to Max. I’ve crept in under the destroyer’s shadow.)
Max is pointing where Bert’s footballer’s shoulders hulk flirtatiously over the furiously pretty girl.
“Poet from New Jersey!” Max spits.
Bert’s gone.
Max points at Zeus and Hera. “A couple of anachronisms!” he says, and they disappear. My party is thinning!
Frightened, I clutch Max’s cloak. “There’s Winterneet!” I whisper.
“Where?” I point. Max says, “I thought he died back in 1896. There’s old Lucinella. She died in 1968. And young Lucinella, who’s a dog.” I part the front edges of Max’s cloak and slip inside. Out of the darkness I prompt: “How about Ulla?”
“What about me?” asks Ulla.
“You’re a tart,” Max says.
“So old-fashioned!” says Ulla. It’s true. Max is a moral man.
He says, “You’re our West Side Alma Mahler. You once had the nation’s most valuable collection of near-geniuses under your belt.”
“Had!” cries Ulla and begins to fade.
“While your career,” he says, and points at Maurie, “depends on standing on your writers’ shoulders, alternatively with your foot on one or another of their necks.”
Ulla and Maurie have disappeared.
“Let me try one!” I say, and part the edges of Max’s cloak like the flaps of a tent. Disentangling my forefinger from the complication of the folds, I point at Meyers. It’s not at all a matter of dislike, or of any harm done me that I might be wishing to avenge; on the contrary, I’ve always had, and have at this moment, the warmest feeling toward him. I want to make it positively clear: this avidity which flushes my cheek, accelerates my pulse, and draws my breath in great, bowing strokes across my heart is motivated by no self-serving, no purpose whatsoever. It is the purest form of malice for malice’s sake with which I point my forefinger at Meyer’s trembling mustache and say, “You zombie, you!”
I saw Meyers’s rabbit eyes register surprise and terror before he disappeared.
But I’m unsatisfied. I botched that. What talentless abuse! It would take me weeks of revision to frame some triumphant nastiness. I am only an apprentice. Like everything else, it needs practice, practice, practice. “Pavlovenka, you middle-aged giggle!” I call out. Better, but still needs shaping, sharpening.
It’s not nice to stare, I know, but how fascinating to watch Pavlovenka’s lips struggling for some suitable expression. Anger never occurs to her, and once a mouth becomes conscious of itself, it is no longer capable of expressing nothing. Pavlovenka keeps uncertainly giggling. Meanwhile, the slopes, promontories, depressions by which we recognize that this is Pavlovenka’s face lose confidence in their definitions and relationships. Look how the eyes overgrow their boundaries, becoming two great black abysms that open into Pavlovenka’s Underground, which we have no business seeing. Max, that’s what I meant about telling truths in public. An instant has stripped away the character it took forty years to piece together. Why do you think she took up poetry? Yes, I’ve read it, Max, I know, she likes everything pretty. But, Max, there’s gallantry in refusing to let her disability handicap a naturally cheerful and affectionate disposition, blessed with a lot of useful energy. As a teacher of poetry workshops, she does her homework better than some I might mention, is generous to her students with time and attention; a tireless judge, according to her own best lights, of scholarships, grants, and prizes; a frequent and cheerful panelist on symposia; a loquacious radio and public-television interviewee; and an active member of PEN who writes letters to foreign powers urging the release of imprisoned intellectuals; and by keeping herself busy from the moment she becomes conscious in the morning and puts on those terrible striped stockings to distract the eye, and winds her braids tightly round her ears, she has (except for a nervous breakdown in her late thirties) kept herself from acknowledging, and believed that she had kept the world from suspecting, what I had to go and say out loud just now, in front of her oldest friends, who’ve known from the first five minutes they spent in her company that Pavlovenka is a fool and a bore.
There, in Pavlovenka’s stead, stands a stout little giggle, poor Cheshire pussy, poor Pavlovenka, whom I have known since that first time at Yaddo—how many years ago! I’ll miss her.
Why does Max look at me! Angels and ministers of grace! There is no one else left, except a crowd of aphorisms, shifting and rustling at my back.
Quickly I assume the expressive posture of female sculpture in periods when art is on the decline. Imagine me naked from the waist up (below is draped in a sheet). My stone feet are planted, knees loose, back arching away from Max’s slowly rising arm. I spread my fingers before my eyes to shield them against the imminence of a terrible enlightenment, and quickly, before Max opens his mouth, I begin to rattle off my sins, from the deepest treachery down to my least stupidity, dishonesty of mind, shabbiness of feeling (footnoting each with mitigating circumstances as well as evidence to the contrary), including evils I am not particularly prone to and have never committed but probably will (nothing human being alien to me). I mark off each item according to Jewish tradition with a thump of the fist on the breast. My exhausted conscience pauses for breath, and in that moment Max has pronounced my sentence. I hope it’s a good one—terse, witty, balanced. If one’s to be an epigram, it would be nice to have stylistic distinction. Because of the roar of my listening I never heard what it was he said. Now I know what a Cheshire cat feels like. The parts with least bulk are first to go. Already I can look right through my pinkie, though the palm is barely translucent. Knuckles and the thumb stay densest longest. Oh, Max! This isn’t anybody, this is different, this is ME disappearing—my childhood, Ulla at school, all those application forms to colleges, and going, and having gone, and Maurie publishing my poem; and the poem I was always going to write in my new notebook, fucking William and oh! Zeus! And reading Emma over and over! Melanctha! Lear. Bach. There go my toes. HELP ME!
The cock crows—or was that the doorbell ringing?
A beneficent breeze wafts through the smoke-filled room and animates the poor walking epigraMs. They quiver like so many compass needles toward the two who have newly entered.
George and Mary Friend don’t stand out at a party at first. Maybe their clothes are a little grayer, the color of their faces fresher, coming from out of town.
“Quick, Max, a boon,” I whisper. “Don’t tell George and Mary—what it was you said about me.”
Max laughs. “They know.”
“No, they don’t!” I cry. “They can’t, or in all the years we have been friends I would have intercepted a glance. There has never been a hint—”
“But, my dear Lucinella! Why would it occur to them to mention to you or out loud to each other what’s as plain as the nose in the middle of your face?”
“Dear god! Max! Are you telling me that everybody knows my nose!”
George and Mary, stop
ping to greet old friends, seem not to notice the predicament in which they find them. I would run to meet them but my feet are gone, my knees going. “Mary!” I cry. “Here I am! George!”
“Max Peters’s been on the rampage, I see,” says Mary. She takes my hand and chafes my absent fingers. “Shall I go spit in his eye for you?”
“Shush, dear,” says George.
“Look what he did to my party!”
“They’ll be all right,” says George. “As soon as they hit the cold air outside, they’ll start to reconstitute. By tomorrow morning they’ll be themselves again.”
“Tomorrow morning!” Mary says. “It took you a good month to recover from Winterneet’s review of your last book. Poor Winterneet!” she says. “He looks terrible.”
George says, “It gets harder as you get older.”
“Let’s go over and cheer him up,” I suggest.
“I’m not talking to Winterneet,” says George. “He thought my last book was worthless.”
“It wasn’t only Max,” I say. “Betterwheatling called Winterneet a dinosaur, and it was I who called Meyers a zombie and Pavlovenka a middle-aged giggle. I don’t know why I did, I’m not really vicious! I mean we’re all of us perfectly decent people.”
“Your error,” says George, “is in the colloquial use of ‘really’ and ‘perfectly’ in quasi-logical proposition.”
“George, don’t be pompous,” Mary says.
“No, go on!” I say. “That’s interesting!”
“Your viciousness to Meyers and Pavlovenka,” George says, “proves you to be ‘really,’ though by no means ‘perfectly,’ or even preponderantly, vicious. You are preponderantly, but by no means perfectly, decent.”
“Oh brother!” Mary says.
“He’s right. That’s true!” I say, conscious of a shy happiness in George and Mary’s protracted attention. Afraid I might begin to bore them, I make a quarter turn to give them a chance to decamp. I lower my eyes and see their feet planted: they’re not going anywhere; their toes point toward mine, which are beginning to return through every stage of transparence, via translucence, to their old solidity. The wholesome influence of a calm and sober friendship renatures me. I’m turning back into a person. I look over my shoulder to see who is behind me whom George and Mary would not rather be talking with and see Max Peters advancing and holler, “No, you don’t! These two you’re not going to get. Quick, George! Duck, Mary!” But Mary points a forefinger at the forefinger Max points at her, and says, “When you get nasty, Max, a tiny blob of spittle tends to form at the right corner of your mouth.”