by Gore Vidal
Puzzled, we both went onto the terrace and into the yellow afternoon. We walked slowly down the steps towards the rose arbors, a long series of trellis arches forming a tunnel of green, bright with new flowers and ending in a cement fountain of ugly tile with a bench beside it, shaded by elms.
We got to facts. By the time we had burrowed through the roses to the bench, we had exchanged those basic bits of information which usually make the rest fall (often incorrectly) into some pattern, a foundation for those various architectures people together are pleased to build to celebrate friendship or enmity or love or, on very special occasions, in the case of a grand affair, one of those fine palaces with rooms for all three, and much else besides.
Iris was from the Middle West, from a rich suburb of Detroit. This interested me in many ways, for there still existed in those days a real disaffection between East and Midwest and Far West which is hard to conceive nowadays in that gray homogeneity which currently passes for a civilized nation. I was an Easterner, a New Yorker from the valley with Southern roots, and I felt instinctively that the outlanders were perhaps not entirely civilized. Needless to say, at the time, I would indignantly have denied this prejudice had someone attributed it to me, for those were the days of tolerance in which all prejudice had been banished, from conversation at least . . . though of course to banish prejudice is a contradiction in terms since, by definition, prejudice means prejudgment, and though time and experience usually explode for us all the prejudgments of our first years, they exist, nevertheless, as part of our subconscious, a sabotaging, irrational force, causing us to commit strange crimes indeed, made so much worse because they are often secret even to ourselves. I was, then, prejudiced against the Midwesterner . . . against the Californians too. I felt that the former especially was curiously hostile to freedom, to the interplay of that rational Western culture which I had so lovingly embraced in my boyhood and grown up with, always conscious of my citizenship in the world, of my role as a humble but appreciative voice in the long conversation. I resented the automobile manufacturers who thought only of manufacturing objects, who distrusted ideas, who feared the fine with the primitive intensity of implacable ignorance. Could this cool girl be from Detroit? From that same rich suburb which had provided me with a number of handsome vital classmates at school? Boys who had combined physical vigor with a resistance to all ideas but those of their suburb which could only be described as heroic considering the power of New England schools to crack even the toughest prejudices, at least on the rational level. That these boys did not possess a rational level had often occurred to me, though I did, grudgingly, admire, even in my scorn, their grace and strength as well as their confidence in that assembly line which had provided their parents with large suburban homes and themselves with a classical New England education which, unlike the rest of us, they'd managed to resist . . . the whole main current of Western civilization eddying helplessly about these youths who stood, pleasantly firm, like so many rocks in a desperate channel.
Iris Mortimer was one of them. Having learned this there was nothing to do but find sufficient names between us to establish the beginnings of the rapport of class which, even in that late year of the mid-century, still existed: the dowdy aristocracy to which we belonged by virtue of financial security, at least in childhood, of education, of self-esteem and of houses where servants had been in some quantity before the second of the wars; all this we shared and of course those names in common of schoolmates, some from her region, others from mine, names which established us as being of an age. We avoided for some time any comment upon the names, withholding our true selves during the period of identification. I discovered too that she, like me, had remained unmarried, an exceptional state of affairs, for all the names we had mentioned represented two people now instead of one. Ours had been a reactionary generation which had attempted to combat the time of wars and disasters by a scrupulous observance of its grandparents' customs, a direct reaction to the linking generation whose lives had been so entertainingly ornamented with self-conscious, untidy alliances, well-fortified by suspect gin. The result was no doubt classic but, at the same time; it was a little shocking: their children were decorous, subdued; they married early, conceived glumly, surrendered to the will of their own children in the interests of enlightened psychology; their lives enriched by the best gin in the better suburbs, safe among their own kind. Yet, miraculously, I had escaped and so apparently had Iris. Both, simultaneously, were aware of this: that sort of swift, unstated communication which briefly makes human relationships seem more potential, more meaningful than actually they are: it is the promise perhaps of a perfect harmony never to be achieved in life's estate.
"You live here alone?" She indicated the wrong direction though taking in, correctly, the river on whose east bank I did live, a few miles to the north of Clarissa.
I nodded. "Entirely alone . . . in an old house."
She sighed. "No family?"
"None here. Not much anywhere else. A few in New Orleans, my family's original base." I waited for her to ask if I never got lonely living in a house on the river, remote from others; but she saw nothing extraordinary in this.
"It must be fine," she said slowly. She broke a leaf off a flowering bush whose branch, heavy with blooming, quivered above our heads as we sat on the garden bench and watched the dim flash of goldfish in the muddy waters of the pond.
"I like it," I said, a little disappointed that there was now no opportunity for me to construct one of my familiar defenses of a life alone: I had, in the five years since my days of travel had temporarily ended, many occasions on which to defend and glorify the solitary life I had chosen for myself beside this river. I had an ever-changing repertoire of feints and thrusts: for instance, with the hearty, I invariably questioned, gently of course, the virtue of a life in the city, confined to a small apartment with uninhibited babies and breathing daily large quantities of soot; or then I sometimes enjoyed assuming the prince of darkness pose, alone with his crimes in an ancient house, a figure which could, if necessary, be quickly altered to the more engaging one of remote observer of the ways of men, a stoic among his books, sustained by the recorded fragments of forgotten bloody days, evoking solemnly the pure essences of nobler times a chaste intelligence beyond the combat, a priest celebrating the cool memory of his race. My theater was extensive and I almost regretted that with Iris there was no need for even a brief curtain raiser, much less one of my exuberant galas.
Not accustomed to the neutral response, I stammered something about the pleasures of gardens; Iris's calm indifference saved me from what might have been a truly mawkish outburst calculated to interest her at any cost (mawkish because, I am confident, that none of our deepest wishes or deeds is, finally, when honestly declared, very wonderful or mysterious: simplicity not complexity is at the center of our being; fortunately the trembling "I" is seldom revealed, even to paid listeners, for, conscious of the appalling directness of our needs, we wisely disguise their nature with a legerdemain of peculiar cunning). Much of Iris's attraction for me . . . and at the beginning that attraction did exist . . . was that one did not need to discuss so many things: of course the better charades were not called into being which, creatively speaking, was a pity; but then it was a relief not to pretend and, better still, a relief not to begin the business of plumbing shallows under the illusion that a treasure chest of truth might be found on the mind's sea floor . . . a grim ritual which was popular in those years, especially in the suburbs and housing projects where the mental therapists were ubiquitous and busy.
With Iris, one did not suspend, even at a cocktail party, the usual artifices of society. All was understood, or seemed to be, which is exactly the same thing. We talked about ourselves as though of absent strangers. Then: "Have you known Clarissa long?" I asked.
She shook her head. "I met her only last winter."
"Then this is your first visit here? to the valley?"
"The first," she smile
d, "but it's a little like home, you know. I don't mean Detroit, but a memory of home, got from books."
I thought so too. Then she added that she did not read any longer and I was a little relieved; somehow with Iris one wanted not to talk about books or the past. So much of her charm was that she was entirely in the present. It was her gift, perhaps her finest quality, to invest the moment with a significance which in recollection did not exist except as a blurred impression of excitement. She created this merely by existing. I was never to learn the trick, for her conversation was not, in itself, interesting and her actions were usually calculable in advance, making all the more unusual her peculiar effect. She asked me politely about my work, giving me then the useful knowledge that, though she was interested in what I was doing, she was not much interested in the life of the Emperor Julian.
I made it short. "I want to do a biography of him. I've always liked history and so, when I settled down in the house, I chose Julian as my work."
"A life's work?"
"Hardly. But another few years. It's the reading which I most enjoy, and that's treacherous. There is so much of interest to read that it seems a waste of time and energy to write anything . . . especially if it's to be only a reflection of reflections."
"Then why do it?"
"Something to say, I suppose; or at least the desire to define and illuminate . . . from one's own point of view, of course."
"Then why . . . Julian?"
Something in the way she said the name convinced me she had forgotten who he was if she had ever known.
"The apostasy; the last stand of paganism against Christianity."
She looked truly interested, for the first time. "They killed him, didn't they?"
"No, he died in battle. Had he lived longer he might at least have kept the Empire divided between the old gods and the new messiah. Unfortunately his early death was their death, the end of the gods."
"Except they returned as saints."
"Yes, a few found a place in Christianity, assuming new names."
"Mother of God," she murmured thoughtfully.
"An unchristian concept, one would have thought," I added, though the beautiful illogic had been explained to me again and again by Catholics: how God could and could not at the same time possess a mother, that gleaming queen of heaven, entirely regnant in those days.
"I have often thought about these things," she said, diffidently. "I'm afraid I'm not much of a student but it fascinates me. I've been out in California for the past few years, working. I was on a fashion magazine." The note was exactly right: she knew precisely what that world meant and she was neither apologetic nor pleased. We both resisted the impulse to begin the names again, threading our way through the maze of fashion, through that frantic world of the peripheral arts.
"You kept away from Vedanta?" A group of transplanted English writers at this time had taken to oriental mysticism with great eagerness, an atonement no doubt for their careers as movie writers. Swamis and temples abounded among the billboards and orange trees; but since it was the way for some it was, for those few at least, honorable.
"I came close." She laughed. "But there was too much to read and even then I always felt that it didn't work for us, for Americans, I mean. It's probably quite logical and familiar to Asiatics, but we come from a different line, with a different history; their responses aren't ours. But I did feel it was possible for others, which is a great deal."
"Because so much is really not possible?"
"Exactly. But then I know very little about these things."
She was direct: no implication that what she did not know either did not exist or was not worth the knowing, the traditional response in the fashionable world.
"Are you working now?"
She shook her head. "No, I gave it up. The magazine sent somebody to take my place out there (I didn't have the 'personality' they wanted) and so I came on to New York where I've never really been, except for week ends from school. The magazine had some idea that I might work into the New York office, but I was through. I have worked."
"And had enough?"
"For that sort of thing, yes. So I've gone out a lot in New York, met many people; thought a little. . . ." She twisted the leaf that she still held in her fingers, her eyes vague as though focused on the leaf's faint shadow which fell in depth upon her dress, part upon her dress and more on a tree's branch ending finally in a tiny fragment of shadow on the ground, like the bottom step of a frail staircase of air.
"And here you are, at Clarissa's."
"What an extraordinary woman she is!" The eyes were turned upon me, hazel eyes, very clear, the whites luminous with youth.
"She collects people, but not according to any of the usual criteria. She makes them all fit, somehow, but what it is they fit, what design, no one knows. I don't know, that is."
"I suppose I was collected. Though it might have been the other way around, since I am sure she interests me more than I do her."
"There is no way of telling."
"Anyway, I'm pleased she asked me here."
We talked of Clarissa with some interest, getting nowhere. Clarissa was truly enigmatic. She had lived for twenty years on the Hudson. She was not married but it was thought she had been. She entertained with great skill. She was in demand in New York and also in Europe where she often traveled. But no one knew anything of her origin or of the source of her wealth and, oddly enough, although everyone observed her remarkable idée fixe, no one ever discussed it, as though in tactful obedience to some obscure sense of form. In the half-dozen years that I had known her not once had I discussed with anyone her eccentricity. We accepted in her presence the reality of her mania, and there it ended. Some were more interested by it than others. I was fascinated, and having suspended both belief and doubt found her richly knowing in matters which interested me. Her accounts of various meetings with Labianus in Antioch were quite brilliant, all told most literally, as though she had no faculty for invention which perhaps, terrifying thought, she truly lacked, in which case . . . but we chose not to speculate. Iris spoke of plans.
"I'm going back to California."
"Tired of New York?"
"No, hardly. But I met someone quite extraordinary out there, someone I think I should like to see again." Her candor made it perfectly clear that her interest was not romantic. "It's rather in line too with what we were talking about. I mean your Julian and all that. He's a kind of preacher."
"That doesn't sound promising." A goldfish made a popping sound as it captured a dragonfly on the pond's surface.
"But he isn't the usual sort of thing at all. He's completely different but I'm not sure just how."
"An evangelist?" In those days loud men and women were still able to collect enormous crowds by ranging up and down the country roaring about that salvation which might be found in the bosom of the Lamb.
"No, his own sort of thing entirely. A little like the Vedanta teachers, only he's American, and young."
"What does he teach?"
"I . . . I'm not sure. No, don't laugh. I only met him once. At a friend's house in Santa Monica. He talked very little but one had the feeling that, well, that it was something unusual."
"It must have been if you can't recall what he said." I revised my first estimate: it was romantic after all; a man who was young, fascinating . . . I was almost jealous as a matter of principle.
"I'm afraid I don't make much sense." She gestured and the leaf fell into its own shadow on the grass. "Perhaps it was the effect he had on the others that impressed me. They were clever people, worldly people yet they listened to him like children."
"What does he do? does he preach? work?"
"I don't know that either. I met him the night before I left California and I haven't seen anyone who was there that evening since."
"But now you think you want to go back to find out?"
"Yes. I've thought about him a great deal these last few weeks. You'd think one would
forget such a thing, but I haven't."
"What was his name?"
"Cave, I think. John Cave."
"A pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent." Yet even while I invoked irony, I felt with a certain chill in the heat that this was to be Clarissa's plot, and for many days afterwards that name echoed in my memory, long after I had temporarily forgotten Iris's own name, had forgotten, as one does, the whole day, the peony in the boxwood, the leaf's fall and the catch of the goldfish; instants which now live again in the act of recreation, details which were to fade into a yellow-green blur of June and of the girl beside me in a garden and of that name spoken in my hearing for the first time, becoming in my imagination like some bare monolith awaiting the sculptor's chisel.
Two
1
I did not see Iris again for some months. Nor, for that matter, did I see Clarissa who, the day after our lunch, disappeared on one of her mysterious trips . . . this time to London, I think, since she usually got there for the season. Clarissa's comings and goings doubtless followed some pattern though I could never make much sense of them. I was very disappointed not to see her before she left because I had wanted to ask her about Iris and also . . .
It has been a difficult day. Shortly after I wrote the lines above, this morning, I heard the sound of an American voice on the street-side of the hotel; the first American voice I've heard in some years for, excepting me, none has been allowed in Upper Egypt for twenty years. The division of the world has been quite thorough, religiously and politically, and had not some official long ago guessed my identity it is doubtful that I should have been granted asylum even in this remote region.
I tried to continue with my writing but it was impossible: I could recall nothing. My attention would not focus on the past, on those wraiths which have lately begun to assume again such startling reality as I go about the work of memory . . . but the past was lost to me this morning. The doors shut and I was marooned in the meager present.