And later. In Vernor's bed in those sheets smelling of our bodies; in Vernor's arms that didn't close about me, but held me loosely rocking as one might comfort a small child; I was trying not to cry for nothing's so banal as crying in a lover's arms, banal and futile; as Vernor said, with unnatural gentleness, "Didn't I warn you, girl, I'm not a man for any woman to count on? Eh?" and, more gently, "I wish I could love you the way you deserve, a girl like you, but I can't, you know I can't, I have never lied or misled you, Anellia, have I?" These earnest words like a pronouncement of death and yet I was pleading, "Vernor, I can I-love enough for us both. Give me a chance!" My absurd makeup had begun to melt on my sallow little face. My hair I'd shampooed that afternoon, brushed to a sheen, now disheveled as if I'd been wakened from sleep. And Vernor saying in that soft resolute voice, "Anellia, maybe you should go away now. Maybe this should end." I held myself very still, very still, not hearing.
To purify myself utterly, how? To become nothing, bare picked white bones. And then I will be free.
29
On June 12, 1963, three days after our evening at the Brass Rail, a young NAACP field secretary named Medgar Evers entered history; he was shot in the back by a white racist as he was about to enter his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Even Vernor Matheius who avoided the news like a bad smell could not avoid learning of this.
Fuck. Fuckers.
It was a sign of Vernor's debasement, that so common, you could say so clichéd a vulgarity sprang to his lips.
Beginning now to drink in the early afternoon. At midday. Waking late, groggy and still drunk from the night before; dragging himself to work at his desk, or try to work; beer, rot-gut wine, cheap jug wine; refused to leave his apartment, even to wash, put on fresh clothes. He was feverish, he had no appetite. Now the raw sewage was backing up on him. Stay away he warned me but I would not. I took advantage of his illness, his weakness; every day, twice daily, I climbed the outside stairs at the rear of Vernor Matheius's building where the door might be locked against me and no amount of pleading could induce Vernor to open it, or the door might be unlocked, might swing open when I pushed against it and an odor of defeat and fury would fill my nostrils so that my instinct was to flee even as, stubbornly, I would not. Why! Why d' you come here when I don't want you was Vernor's silent accusation. As I pleaded, in silence taking his hand and lifting it, the sweaty unwashed palm, to my cheek. I've told you: I can love enough for us both.
Through that long winter and into the spring there'd been a flu epidemic in upstate New York. Vernor had boasted of being immune to such weakness, but at last he succumbed; joking that he'd been poisoned at the Brass Rail. Within a week he'd lost so much weight I could see his breastbone sharp as the edge of a shovel outlined through his filthy shirt when he lay flat on his back; I saw that his cheekbones had grown sharper, his eyes were sunken and glowed meanly as the candlelit eyes of a deranged Hallowe'en pumpkin. I was frightened for him. I worried he would starve himself to death out of spite like those recluses we'd hear of sometimes in the countryside of my childhood, who hadn't enough to eat during the winter or were too poor or too proud or too stubborn or too deranged to ask neighbors for help. Of the martyred Medgar Evers whose assassin had not yet been named Vernor said That's what happens when you step into history: history grinds you flat beneath its boot heel. The remark seemed to give him pleasure.
There were times when he seemed delirious; there were times when he ranted, cursed; once when I let myself in, with a key I'd appropriated from him, I was shocked to see that he'd thrown books and papers onto the floor in disgust, he'd torn down the likenesses of Socrates and Descartes; in the smelly little bathroom, it looked as if he'd urinated onto the likeness of Wittgenstein with his enigmatic bamboo cane. Trying to lower his window shades he'd dislodged them from their rollers and they dangled in strips and shreds I could not repair, and so I removed them; there was broken glass underfoot, there were cigarette butts, ashes; the room stank of beer and cheap jug wine and of smoke and of scorched fabric; there were scattered burn marks in the bedclothes; I worried that Vernor would set fire to his bed, burn himself and his fellow tenants in the night.
Let me love you. Let my love heal you.
Vernor Matheius heard me perfectly well. He fell into a fit of coughing and lay his head on his arms, on the kitchen table.
On his ransacked desktop the portable typewriter had been shoved back against the wall. There were gouge marks in the wallpaper. A sheet of paper looked to have been torn out of the typewriter carriage, and on this paper there were numerous XXX's and a single legible paragraph—
Axiom: if (following LW) the propositional sign is assigned a protective "relation" to the world does it therefore follow that the use of the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written) is a projection of a possible situation? (See LW, 3.11)
I understood that "LW" was Ludwig Wittgenstein; the rest of the argument, which must have been part of the treatise Vernor was writing for his doctoral dissertation, was lost to me. Nor did I dare to ask Vernor about it since he'd have been furious to know I was looking through his papers. My task was to care for him, and this I did with energy, resolution, and good humor; I would not fall sick myself but would be his nurse, and he would see how I loved him, and did not judge him; for you don't judge the sick, you nurse them back to health; you nurse them back to sanity; you nurse them back to their true selves. I brought food to Vernor's apartment to prepare for him; on his sickest days he hadn't any appetite, food disgusted him and he could tolerate only soup; a thin broth of a soup in which I cooked sliced vegetables; I
hummed and smiled as I cooked in his tiny kitchen; it was an old European tale in which a love potion is mixed with a man's food; a maiden who adores him mixes her blood with his food, he eats it and falls in love with her forever; I smiled thinking I would secretly cut my finger on a paring knife and let a drop or two of my blood fall into Vernor's soup; so powerful was my fantasy, I would come to think I'd actually done such a bizarre thing; perhaps in fact I did it; but no crude wishful magic would work on a man like Vernor Matheius. I had to be content with being tolerated in his presence; I had to take pride in what he might eat that I'd prepared; I convinced him to eat a piece of whole-grain toast; I convinced him to drink a half-glass of orange juice; I sat close beside him at the little kitchen table and watched as he ate, close as an anxious mother; Vernor's face was drawn and haggard; he looked like a man suffering from grief; grief indistinguishable from rage; rage indistinguishable from grief; he wore a sweat-soaked undershirt, and sat slump-shouldered, his hard little muscles prominent in his upper arms; his jaws were covered in an ugly black stubble; fascinating to me, every harsh breath he drew; when I held him, to help him stand, or walk, I was disturbed to feel his erratic heartbeat; I was panicked thinking he might be seriously ill; if I suggested taking him to a doctor, or to the emergency room of the hospital a block away, he cursed me; he removed his glasses, drew his forearm roughly across his eyes, and cursed me. Sick to death, my guts are sick, fuck you leave me alone can't you see I don't want you, your cunt, the color of your skin repulse me.
I waited to become sick like Vernor. In his bathroom mirror my eyes shone with jaundice; the interior of my mouth was coated with something clammy and sickly sweet; Vernor's sickness eased into me like something clammy and sickly sweet; I did not resist, I entered into his delirium; if he didn't repel me, I lay beside him in his bed gripping his bony hand; it was a big hand, the knuckles prominent, though bony; I curved his fingers around mine so it seemed as if he was gripping my hand; as in the Brass Rail he'd boldly nudged his knuckles against my breast; my breathing quickened, or slowed, with Vernor's breathing; like carved funerary figures we lay together in a suspension that might have looked, from a distance, to a neutral observer, like peace, tranquility; the aftermath of love.
Why why are you doing this?
Because I am strong enough. Because I can love enough for both.
In
his soft, soiled underwear Vernor Matheius lay on his couch like a fallen prince amid soiled sheets; he smoked cigarettes I'd had to buy for him, despite my disapproval; he scattered ashes like seed everywhere. When one day in June, a hazy early-summer heat suffusing the apartment, he rose to stagger into the bathroom to shower, not wanting me to help him, I thought This is the turn, he will be himself again. (As if I weren't terrified of that self.) Six days and six nights had passed since the onset of Vernor's sickness; seven days and seven nights since the murder of Medgar Evers; and still Evers's murderer went unidentified; for Evers's murderer was ubiquitous in the South, and elsewhere; in that pattern of crazed accelerating cruelty and violence against civil rights activists that would culminate in April 1968 in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; in that future blowing toward us like a dark, ravening wind. When you step into history, history's boot steps on you. I did not think at the time If you fail to step into history, history erases you for at the time I was thinking only of Vernor Matheius and of his health; while he was in the bathroom showering I began hurriedly to clean the apartment; stripped the soiled bedclothes from the bed with the intention of taking them to a Laundromat; I'd taken a few of Vernor's things to a Laundromat near the hospital a few days before, and brought them back undetected; when Vernor finished his shower, I would add his towels; I would add as many of Vernor's clothes as he would allow. I found a broom in a kitchen closet and swept the littered floor; emptied dustpans of cigarette butts, ashes, crumpled papers and bits of dried food, dirt and hairs into a brimming wastebasket; collected the empty beer cans and wine jugs; trundled the trash downstairs to a Dumpster at the rear of the lot. As if I live here. I live here now, with Vernor Matheius in apartment 2D. Now that Vernor seemed to trust me, now I might stay with him through the night; I had the key to his apartment and could come and go as I wished; I wished I would encounter another tenant of the building so that I might have exchanged greetings in a neighborly fashion, another young woman, a young wife, or one of the foreign graduate students. The midday sun blazed overhead; my hair burst into flame; I was made to think of Nietzsche's mad prophet Zarathustra, and of Zarathustra's blazing noontide. What is wan? cries Zarathustra. A ball of wild snakes. Despite the heat of the sun I was energized, excited; I took happiness in such simple physical tasks as hauling trash, sweeping and cleaning floors. I saw the grinning teeth of those who despised me. Negro-lover! Nigger-lover! I laughed, and ran back upstairs where the door was opened, as I'd left it.
Vernor was still showering. I listened outside the bathroom door and heard his thin tuneless whistling beneath the sound of the shower and I thought He is himself again. I set about restoring order on his desk; that desk I'd so admired, now strewn with papers; except for the Olivetti portable everything had been knocked about; I thought I would rearrange scattered pages (from Vernor's treatise?) into their original neat stacks; but I failed to make sense of them, and gave up. I opened a filing cabinet drawer, curious about what was inside; these cabinets were made of metal painted a pale green, but badly scratched; Vernor had bought them, he'd boasted, for five dollars apiece at a fire-bankruptcy sale of office supplies; the drawer was crammed with manila folders containing typed papers and note cards; some of the folders were meticulously clean, and others were strangely soiled as if they'd been stepped on. You should not, should not be doing this, this is wrong a small frightened voice cautioned me but I saw no harm in glancing through the folders; a treasure trove of old, yellowing papers; neatly typed outlines of books of the Bible including such obscure books as Jeremiah, Hosea, Philippians, Thessalonians as well as most of the books of the New Testament; in a large and passionate hand not immediately recognizable as Vernor's were written in columns the names of magical-biblical figures—Moses, Jacob, Joshua, Elisha, Job, Jesus, Mark, Paul, Mary Magdalene—as if these names belonged to individuals known to Vernor Matheius. In other folders, farther back in the drawer, were more notes and outlines; theology, philosophy, ethics; most of these written in a bold, rapid hand, no more than a dozen lines to a page, as if thoughts had spilled out of Vernor's teeming mind onto the paper, scarcely contained in language. I smiled to see his college papers: neatly typed, held together with rust-stained paper clips; with such titles as "The 'Problem of Evil' in Milton's Paradise Lost" "The Concept of 'Virtue' in Epicureanism," "The Concept of 'Mind' in Bertrand Russell"; if there were red marks on these papers, the marks indicated enthusiasm, praise; Vernor Matheius's grades were uniformly A and A+. I tried to summon up a younger, vulnerable Vernor Matheius, an undergraduate hoping to impress his professors; how difficult to imagine arrogant Vernor Matheius perceiving himself in a position inferior to anyone. Then staring into another folder I'd carelessly opened, at what appeared to be razored-out pages from magazines and books; an essay on Plato's Laws removed from an issue of The Journal of Philosophical Inquiry, Fall 1961; a chapter from a study of Spinoza; a chapter from a study of Kant; several diagrammed pages from an essay on symbolic logic; had Vernor Matheius removed these from library materials? But Vernor wouldn't do such a thing. Not him. Pushed against the back of the drawer was a folder containing packets of much-folded letters and creased snapshots; some of these were in black and white, the rest in bright color; I found myself staring at brown-skinned strangers, a family; and there was a young, boyish Vernor Matheius in their midst; sixteen or seventeen, tall and lean and smiling; and in other snapshots he was perceptibly older, with a thin moustache, still tall and lean but without expression standing beside a much shorter, plump, happily smiling young woman with a baby in her arms and a boy of about two beside her clinging to her skirt; the young woman, I knew, was Vernor's wife, a good-looking woman in her mid-twenties with full fleshy lips and a wide pug nose; the little boy was cocoa-colored, with Vernor's beautiful long-lashed eyes and narrow face; the snapshot blazed with color, having been taken in a grassy outdoor setting, a wood frame cottage in the background; flowering fruit trees, dogwood and forsythia; there was a strange, stark, preacherly look to Vernor in his tight dark suit, long-sleeved white shirt and dark, tightly knotted tie; the very tie Vernor had worn with his new silk vest at the Brass Rail; his glasses weren't wire-rimmed and round but black plastic and oval; he stood slightly apart from his happily smiling little family and he was staring moodily at the camera and beyond the camera as if already Vernor Matheius was edging out of the frame, planning his escape. May 1959. So he's married, has been married. Has a family, young children. He lied.
I meant to replace the snapshots but my hand trembled. Several fell onto the floor. When I groped for them, my vision blurred. My love for Vernor Matheius was contracting like an outstretched hand contracting into a small, hard fist.
There was a sudden swift sound behind me: Vernor's bare feet slapping against the floor. I felt the angry vibrations of his footsteps before I turned to see him, partly dressed, in trousers and undershirt, rushing at me. He grabbed my arm, shoved me away from the opened filing cabinet; he slammed the drawer shut, and cursed me—"God damn you, Anellia! Get out of here!" His face was contorted in fury, and in chagrin; it was the chagrin I would remember; the lenses of his glasses were faintly clouded with steam from the bathroom; his skin had darkened ferociously with blood. To protect myself, I pushed at Vernor's hand; he pushed back at me, catching the side of my head with his fist; I felt the sharp, hard edge of the filing cabinet cutting into my thigh; blindly I half-crawled away, stumbling to my feet and ran for the door, which opened off the tiny kitchen; Vernor didn't pursue me, but cursed after me as I ran panting and sobbing on the stairs, sick with guilt, and fear of what Vernor might do to me. I ran down the outdoor stairs and heard his voice above me, a furious lowered voice like a wail of grief. I pressed my hands over my ears to stifle—Get out of here don't ever come back God damn you! Fuck you! fuck you white bitch!
30
By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.
Pascal
At the foot of the wooden stairs. My thoughts beat like moths against a screen. I sat hunched, hugging my knees; staring out at the rain. Vernor Matheius had driven me away as you'd drive away a dog yet there I sat huddled at the foot of the wooden stairs at 1183 Chambers as night came on.
How long I'd been there, I could not have said. Night now, and steadily raining. A steamy mist rose from the pavement. I was sick with grief and chagrin of my own; I'd run away from Vernor Matheius and wandered in the rain and at last returned, hair dripping in my face, my clothes soaked, I was stunned, I was sick, yet a part of my brain continued to operate as always What did you expect, wasn't it freedom from him you wanted. From a distance came the sonorous tolling of the bell tower of the Music School on its drumlin-hill; Chambers Street was on lower ground, in a virtual gulch; the air was heavier here, more viscous and oppressive; the mist rising from the pavement had become fog; my face and throat ached as if I'd been crying, but I didn't remember crying; tears are a child's desperate ploy, and futile. I thought I will never cry again, no one will ever have the power to hurt me again; and this would be so. I felt Vernor's hard fingers grabbing my arm, the hard blow of his fist against my head; I saw again the man's look of rage, disgust, yet guilt; something like shame; I'd peered too deeply into his soul for him to forgive me; I'd gone too far; he had loved me or had almost loved me or (I would tell myself) had begun to allow himself to consider that he might, in his way, love me; or that he might have begun to allow himself to consider that he might allow me to love him without irony; and I'd destroyed that, I'd destroyed my own meager hope of happiness, I'd destroyed the purity of my own love for him; I'd destroyed Anellia, who was such a fool. The idolator is always a fool. It was Anellia's wet hair dripping into her face, Anellia's lean arms, lean-muscled legs pressed tight against her shivering body; though the season was summer by the calendar, the air was cold; the rain was cold; Anellia whose soul quavered at the brink of extinction; about to be sucked into the void, which was Nothingness; the bliss of Nothingness; for what was there after all, as Vernor Matheius had once wittily declaimed, except atoms-and-the-void at the start of human time, which was the start of human thinking, and that effort of human futility to which the name Philosophy has been assigned. Yet I saw with a stab of certainty what I would do: I would return to my room and toss my costume-clothes into a heap, my cheaply glamorous secondhand things purchased with such misguided hope; I would cut these things into pieces with a scissors; as once I'd cut my long, bristling hair; to hurt oneself sometimes is a balm; to hurt oneself sometimes is the only way of healing; debridement was a term of Vernor Matheius's, and it would be a term of my own; even the silver belt I would tear at until its silver medallions broke apart and clattered to the floor; my heart beat hard with the certainty of all I would do, and would not regret doing; I would step into history, as Vernor had scorned; I would join demonstrators marching and chanting and waving handmade signs; I would join CORE, I would join SANE; I would find a way of bringing my intense inner life, my questing life, into balance with history; I would be fearless, or give that impression; I would be fearless, though frightened; I would march with Negroes and whites and confront the race-hatred of my race; I would expose my heart, as I would expose my body; I would make myself vulnerable, I would expiate my guilt; I would remake myself another time, empowered by loss, grief. No longer Anellia. Waiting to see who I might be, after Anellia.
I'll Take You There Page 21