by Gore Vidal
"Neither revenge nor reward, only the not-knowing in the grave which is the same for all . . ."
"And without those inhuman laws, what societies we might build! Take the morality of Christ. Begin there, or even earlier with Plato or earlier yet with Zoroaster . . . take the best ideas of the best men and should there be any disagreement as to what is best, use life as the definition, life as the measure: what contributes most to the living is the best."
"But the living is soon done and the sooner done the better. I envy those who have already gone . . ."
"If they listen to you, Cave, it will be like the unlocking of a prison. At first they may go wild but then, on their own, they will find ways to life. Fear and punishment in death has seldom stopped the murderer's hand. The only two things which hold him from his purpose are, at the worst, fear of reprisal from society and, at the best, a feeling for life, a love for all that lives . . . and not the wide-smiling idiot's love but a sense of the community of the living, of life's marvelous regency . . . even the most ignorant has felt this. Life is all while death is only the irrelevant shadow at the end, the counterpart to that instant before the seed lives."
Yes, I believed all that, all that and more too, and I felt Cave was the same as I; by removing fear with that magic of his, he would fulfill certain hopes of my own and (I flatter myself perhaps) of the long line of others, nobler than I, who had been equally engaged in attempting to use life more fully.
And so that evening it welled up suddenly: the hidden conviction behind a desultory life broke through that chill hard surface of disappointment and disgust which had formed a brittle carapace about my heart. I had, after all, my truth too, and Cave had got to it, broken the shell . . . and for that I shall remain grateful . . . until we are at last the same, both taken by dust.
Excitedly, we talked . . . I talked mostly, I think. Cave was the theme and I the counterpoint or so I thought. He had stated it and I built on it, built outward from what I conceived to be the luminosity of his vision. Our dialogue was one of communion, I believed and he believed too. Only Iris guessed, even then, that it was not. She saw the difference; she was conscious of the division which that moment had, unknown to either of us, separated me from Cave. Each time I said "life," he said "death." In true amity but false concord war began. Iris, more practical than we, deflated our visions by pulling the dialogue gently back to reality, to ways and dull means.
It was agreed that we had agreed on fundamentals, that the end of fear was desirable; that superstition should be exorcised from human affairs; that the ethical systems expressed by the major religious figures from Zoroaster to Mohammed all contained useful and applicable ideas of societal behavior which need not be entirely discarded.
At Iris's suggestion, we left the problem of Christianity itself completely alone. Cave's truth was sufficient cause for battle. There was no reason, she felt, for antagonizing the ultimate enemy at the very beginning.
"Let them attack you, John. You must be above quarreling; you must act as if they are too much in error even to notice."
"I reckon I am above it," said Cave and he sounded almost cheerful for the first time since my arrival. "I want no trouble, but if trouble comes I don't intend to back down. I'll just go on saying what I know."
At midnight, Cave excused himself and went to bed. Iris and I sat silently before the last red embers on the hearth. I sensed that something had gone wrong but I could not tell then what it was.
When she spoke, her manner was abrupt: "Do you really want to go on with this?"
"What an odd time to ask me that. Of course I do. Tonight's the first time I really saw what it was Cave meant, what it was I'd always felt but never before known, consciously, that is. I couldn't be more enthusiastic."
"I hope you don't change."
"Why so glum? What are you trying to say? After all you got me into this."
"I know I did and I think I was right. It's only that this evening I felt . . . well, I don't know. Perhaps I'm getting a bit on edge." She smiled and, through all the youth and health, I saw that she was anxious and ill-at-ease.
"That business about the accident?"
"Mainly, yes. The lawyers say that now that the old man's all right he'll try to collect damages. He'll sue Cave."
"Nasty publicity."
"The worst. It's upset John terribly . . . he almost feels it's an omen."
"I thought we were dispensing with all that, with miracles and omens." I smiled but she did not.
"Speak for yourself." She got up and pushed at the coals with the fire shovel. "Paul says he'll handle everything but I don't see how. There's no way he can stop a lawsuit." But I was tired of this one problem which was, all things considered, out of our hands in any case. I asked her about herself and Cave.
"Is it wise my being up here with John, alone? No, I'm afraid not but that's the way it is." Her voice was hard and her back which was turned to me grew stiff, her movements with the fire shovel angry and abrupt.
"People will use it against both of you. It may hurt him, and all of us."
She turned suddenly, her face flushed. "I can't help it, Gene. I swear I can't. I've tried to keep away. I almost flew East with Clarissa but when he asked me to join him here, I did. I couldn't leave him."
"Will marriage be a part of the new order?"
"Don't joke." She sat down angrily in a noise of skirts crumpling. "Cave must never marry. Besides it's . . . it isn't like that."
"Really? I must confess I . . ."
"Thought we were having an affair? Well, it's not true."
The rigidity left her as suddenly as it had possessed her. She grew visibly passive, even helpless, in the worn upholstered chair, her eyes on me, the anger gone and only weakness left. "What can I do?" It was a cry from the heart . . . all the more touching because, obviously, she had not intended to tell me this. She'd turned to me because there was no one else to whom she could talk.
"You . . . love him?" That word which whenever I spoke it in those days always stuck in my throat like a diminutive sob.
"More, more," she said distractedly. "But I can't do anything or be anything. He's complete. He doesn't need anyone. He doesn't want me except as . . . a companion, and advisor like you or Paul . . . it's all the same to him."
"I don't see that it's hopeless."
"Hopeless!" The word shot from her like a desperate deed. She buried her face in her hands but she did not weep. I sat awkwardly, inadequately watching her. The noise of a clock alone separated us: its dry ticking kept the silence from falling in about our heads.
Finally, she dropped her hands and turned toward me with her usual grace. "You musn't take me too seriously," she said. "Or I mustn't take myself too seriously which is more to the point. Cave doesn't really need me or anyone and we . . . I, perhaps you, certainly others, need him. It's best no one try to claim him all as a woman would do, as I might, given the chance." She rose. "It's late and you must be tired. Don't ever mention to anyone what I've told you tonight . . . especially to John. If he knew the way I felt. . . ." She left it at that. I gave my promise and we went to our rooms.
I stayed two days at the farm, listening to Cave who continually referred to the accident: he was almost petulant, as though the whole business were an irrelevant, gratuitous trick played on him by a malicious old man.
His days were spent reading his mail (there was quite a bit of it even then), composing answers which Iris typed out for him, and walking in the wooded hills which surrounded the farm on two sides.
The weather was sharp and bright and the wind, when it blew, tasted of ice from the glaciers in the vivid mountains: winter was nearly with us and red leaves decorated the wind, so many ribbons for so much summer color. Only the firs remained unchanged, warm and dark in the bright chill days. Cave and I would walk together while Iris remained indoors, working. He was a good walker, calm, unhurried, sure-footed, and he knew all the trails beneath the yellow and red leaves fallen.
Iris, too, seemed uninterested in any formalizing of Cave's thought though she saw its necessity and wished me well, suggesting that I not ever intimate derivation since, in fact, there had been none: what he was, he had become on his own, uninstructed.
During our walks, I got to know Cave as well as I was ever to know him. He was indifferent, I think, to everyone. He gave one his private time in precise ratio to one's belief in him and importance to his work. With groups, with the masses, he was another creature: warm, intoxicating, human, yet transcendent . . . a part of each human being who beheld him at such times, the longed-for complement to the common soul. Yet though I found him, as a human being, without much warmth or intellectual interest I nevertheless identified him with the release I'd known in his presence and, for this new certainty of life's value and of death's irrelevance, I loved him. On the third day I made up my mind to go back East and do the necessary writing in New York, away from Paul's hectic influence and Cave's advice. Cave asked me to stay with him for the rest of the week but I could see that Iris regarded me now as a potential danger, a keeper of secrets who might, despite promises, prove to be disloyal; and so, to set her mind at ease as well as to suit my own new plans, I told her after lunch on the third day, when we were for a moment alone in the study, that I had said nothing to Cave, that I was ready to go back that evening if she would drive me to Spokane.
"You're a good friend," she said. "I made a fool of myself the other night. I wish you'd forget it . . . forget everything I said."
"I'll never mention it. Now, the problem is how I can leave here gracefully. Cave just asked me this morning to stay on and . . ."
But I was given a perfect means of escape. Cave came running into the room, his eyes shining. "Paul! I've just talked to Paul in L.A. It's all over! No heirs, nothing, no lawsuit. No damages to pay."
"What's happened?" Iris stopped him in his excitement.
"The old man's dead!"
"Oh Lord!" Iris went gray. "That means a manslaughter charge!"
"No, no . . . not because of the accident. He was in another accident. A truck hit him the day after he left the hospital. Yesterday. He was killed instantly . . . lucky devil: and of course we're in luck too."
"Did they find who hit him?" I asked, suddenly suspicious. Iris looked at me fiercely. She had got it too.
"No. Paul said it was a hit-and-run. He said this time the police didn't find who did it. Paul said his analyst calls it 'a will to disaster' . . . he wanted to be run over. Of course that's hardly a disaster but the analyst thinks the old way."
I left that afternoon for New York, leaving Cave jubilantly making plans for the New Year: everything was again possible. Neither Iris nor I mentioned what we both knew . . . each of us, in our different way, accommodating the first of many crimes, as we drove across the smoky hills to Spokane.
Six
1
"The tone, dear Gene, has all the unction, all the earnest turgidity of a theologian. You are perfect." Clarissa beamed at me wickedly over lunch in the Plaza Hotel. We sat at a table beside a great plate-glass window through which we could see the frosted bleak expanse of Central Park, dingy in city snow, ringed by buildings like so many mountain peaks, monotonous in their sharp symmetry. The sky was sullen, gray with more snow to fall. The year was nearly over.
"I thought it really quite to the point," I said loftily but with an anxious look at the thin black volume between us which was that day to be published. The hasty work of one hectic month released in record time by a connection of Paul Himmell's.
"It's pure nonsense, your historical part. I know, though I confess I was never one for the philosophers in those days . . . dreary egotistical men, worse than the actors and not half so lovely. Waiter, I will have a melon: out of season I hope. I suggest you have it too. It's light."
I ordered pot-de-crême, the heaviest dessert on the menu.
"I've made you angry," Clarissa pretended contrition. "I was only trying to compliment you. What I meant was that the sort of thing you're doing I think is nonsense only because action is what counts, action on any level . . . not theorizing."
"There's a certain action to thinking, you know, even to writing about the thoughts of others."
"Oh, darling, don't sound so stuffy. Your dessert, by the way, poisons the liver. Oh, isn't that Bishop Winston over there by the door, in tweed? In mufti, eh, Bishop?"
The Bishop, who was passing our table in the company of a handsomely pale youth whose contemplation of orders shone in his face like some cherished sin, stopped and, with a smile, shook Clarissa's hand.
"Ah, how are you? I missed you the other night at Agnes's. She told me you've been engaged in social work."
"A euphemism, Bishop." Clarissa introduced me and the prelate moved on to his table, a robust gray-haired man with good coloring and a look of ease.
"Catholic?"
"No, Episcopal. I like them the best, I think. They adore society and good works . . . spiritual Whigs you might call them, a civilizing influence. Best of all, so few of them believe in God, unlike the Catholics or those terrible Calvinist peasants who are forever saving themselves and damning others."
"I think, Clarissa, you're much too hard on the Episcopalians. I'm sure they must believe what they preach. At least the clergy do."
"Well, we shall probably never know. Social work! I knew Agnes would come up with something altogether wrong. Still, I'm just as glad it's not out yet. Not until the big debut tomorrow afternoon. I hope you've made arrangements to be near a television set. No? Then come to my place and we'll see it together. Cave's asked us both to the station, by the way, but I think it better if we not distract him."
"Iris came East with him?"
"Indeed she did. They both arrived last night. I thought you'd talked to her."
"No. I haven't been in touch with either of them since I got back to New York. Paul's the only one I ever see."
"He keeps the whole thing going, I must say. One of those born organizers. Now! what about you and Iris?"
This came so suddenly, without preparation, that it took me a suspiciously long time to answer, weakly: "I don't know what you mean. What about Iris and me?"
"Darling, I know everything." She looked at me in her eager, predatory way: I was secretly pleased that, in this particular case at least, she knew nothing.
"Then tell me."
"You're in love with her and she's classically involved with Cave."
"Classical seems to be the wrong word. Nothing has happened and nothing will happen."
"I suppose she told you this herself."
I was trapped for a moment. Clarissa, even in error, was shrewd and if one was not on guard she would quickly cease to be in error, at one's expense.
"No, not exactly; but Paul who does, I think, know everything about our affairs assures me that nothing has happened, that Cave is not interested in women."
"In men?"
"I thought you were all-knowing. No, not in men nor in wild animals nor, does it seem, from the evidence Paul's collected, in anything except John Cave. Sex does not happen for him."
"Oh," said Clarissa, exhaling slowly, significantly, inscrutably. She abandoned her first line of attack to ask: "But you are crazy about Iris, aren't you? That's what I'd intended, you know, when I brought you two together."
"I thought it was to bring me into Cave's orbit."
"That, too,
but somehow I saw you and Iris . . . well, you're obviously going to give me no satisfaction so I shall be forced to investigate on my own."
"Not to sound too auctorial, too worried, do you think it will get Cave across? the introduction here?"
"I see no reason why not. Look at the enormous success of those books with titles like 'Eternal Bliss Can Be Yours for the Asking' or 'Happiness at Your Beck-and-Call.'"
"I'm a little more ambitious."
"Not in the least. But the end served is the same. You got down the main line of Cave's thinking, if it can be called thinking. And your book, along with his presence, should have an extraordinary effect."
"Do you really think so? I've begun to doubt."
"Indeed I do. They are waiting . . . all those sad millions who want to believe will find him exactly right for their purposes. He exists only to be believed in. He's a natural idol . . . did you know that when Constantine moved his court to the East, his heirs were trained by Eastern courtiers to behave like idols and when his son came in triumph back to Rome (what a day that was! hot, but exciting) he rode for hours through the crowded streets without once moving a finger or changing expression, a perfectly trained god. We were all so impressed . . ."
I cut this short. "Has it occurred to you that they might not want to believe anything, just like you and me."
"Nonsense . . . and it's rude to interrupt, dear, even a garrulous relic like myself . . . yet after all, in a way, we do believe what Cave says. Death is there and he makes it seem perfectly all right, oblivion and the rest of it. And dying does rather upset a lot of people. Have you noticed one thing that the devoutly superstitious can never understand is the fact that though we do not accept the fairy tale of reward or punishment beyond the grave we still are reluctant to 'pass on' as the nuts say? As though the prospect of nothing isn't really, in a way, without friend Cave to push one into acceptance, perfectly ghastly, much worse than toasting on a grid like that poor saint up north. But now I must fly. Come to the apartment at seven and I'll give you dinner. He's on at eight. Afterwards they'll all join us." Clarissa flew.