Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  After the sentences about kisses, it went on, “Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than for most women: fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.” It continued, evoking Eustacia Vye’s yearning to be loved, and ended, “she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.”

  The passage was like another of Vidia’s lessons in literature. The first time I read it, I thought only of Thomas Hardy; the second time, I thought only of Margaret in Argentina.

  A year went by, and no Vidia, or very little Vidia. But in friendship, time is meaningless and silences insignificant, because you are sure of each other. Not at all weakened by the insecurities of a love affair, you pick up where you left off. And I was also Boswell, listening to Dr. Johnson say, “Do not fancy that an intermission of writing is a decay of kindness. No man is always in a disposition to write, nor has any man at all times something to say.”

  He was away, then I was away. I saw Pat sometimes, and she apologized for Vidia’s absence, apologized for showing up alone; and I labored to reassure her that I liked seeing her, my old almost lover. She was more easily confused these days, got flustered over insignificant things she had forgotten, and she would struggle and sigh with something as small as extracting the right coins from her purse. The insomnia that had taken hold of her like a virus that would not let her sleep made her pale and gave her sunken eyes. Her face was lined and her hair had gone totally white. In her forties she became a little old lady and had all the fret and frailty of someone afflicted with a chronic illness. No matter how little her handbag or the parcel she was carrying—it could be as simple as a book—she looked overburdened, seeming to lug whatever thing was in her hand.

  She came to dinner on her own and seemed frailer for being alone.

  “Vidia’s away,” she said in a faltering voice. “He has taken one of those jobs in America at ... would it be called Wesleyan?”

  “Vidia? Teaching?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Her smile was a smile of pure worry. “He’s awfully good and the people were terribly nice to him. And you know he gets standing ovations when he speaks sometimes—he did in New Zealand that time. But”—she paused and turned her pale eyes away—“he does get ever so cross if the students don’t do their work.”

  I knew that “ever so cross.” It was purple, tight-faced rage.

  “Do you have his number? I have to go to the States in a few weeks.”

  It was the snowiest day I had ever known in New York, so snowy the city had shut down—stopped cold, brimming with drifts, no cars at all moving down Fifth Avenue, only people in the deep white street. Such conditions always made me think of Vidia’s saying, “I love dramatic weather.” He meant hail, high winds, monsoon rain, ice storms, snow like this.

  New York was transformed. It was muffled and made natural again, silenced, simplified, made safer even, for in the worst weather villains and muggers stay home in stinking rooms and lie snoring in bed. The soft white city was beautiful and wild, the blurred mist-shrouded skyscrapers like the north face of a mountain range of glaciated canyons and ledges, where icicles drooped like dragon fangs.

  Having just come from Vermont, I was dressed for this snow. I trudged to several appointments—though most businesses and offices were closed—and at noon called Vidia at Wesleyan.

  A woman answered the phone.

  “Vido, it’s for you.”

  Veedo?

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said in the old way when he recognized my voice. He was glad I had called, he said. He wanted to drive into New York. We could have dinner.

  “What sort of car do you have?”

  Always finding absurdity in technical description, he clearly enjoyed telling me it was a “subcompact,” and he repeated it twice, chuckling.

  “Will it make it through the snow?”

  “It will be fine.”

  He was never prouder of his punctuality: he made it from the snowdrifts of Middletown, Connecticut, to Manhattan at the appointed time, six o’clock.

  “Americans fuss so about the snow,” he said. “It stopped just after you rang. All the roads were sanded and plowed. The road crews are marvelous. People exaggerate the danger. I loved the drive.”

  “You drove the whole way?”

  “Of course.”

  Dressed warmly, he looked more Asiatic, not Indian at all but like one of those tiny, flint-eyed nomadic descendants of the Golden Horde you see hunkered on horses in central Asia. He was alone. His hair was long and, as always when he was tired, his eyes were more slanted and hooded.

  “I thought we might go to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central station,” he said. “I’m told it’s all right.”

  “But let’s have a drink first.”

  We were at my hotel on Central Park South, in my room. I had been drinking a beer when he arrived. I finished that one and was halfway through another. Vidia noticed.

  “It’s the heat,” he said, defending me. “You need that beer because you’re dehydrated from the central heating. They overdo it here. And American walls are so thin you can always hear someone chuntering.” And he laughed, because I was opening a third beer. “Are you going to drink another one, really?”

  I poured him a glass of wine. “How’s teaching?”

  The tables were turned. Twelve years before, I had been the teacher and he the writer. He had warned me against teaching jobs. It was acceptable to travel to Singapore, but teach there? As you know, I disapprove of the means ... A writer ought to have no job, no boss, no teacher, no students; ought to follow no one else’s routine; ought to have no masters, no servants. The essential point was that writing was not a job at all but, in his own phrase, a process of life.

  I knew from eight years of slogging in the tropics that it was not possible for me to teach and also to write well. Many people did it, and some succeeded, but even when the writing was fluent, something was missing, because colleges were so far from the world. Vidia himself had taught me this lesson—Vidia now a poorly paid writer in residence and teacher of creative writing in a snooty college. He had recently given an interview in the London Sunday Telegraph in which he had said, “I would take poison rather than do this for a living.”

  All this went through my mind because Vidia had not answered my question. He was frowning at his glass of wine.

  “I didn’t know that writing courses were a soft option!” he said in a voice of mock astonishment, slightly overdoing it out of anger.

  “Neither did I,” I said. “You’re a tough teacher, aren’t you?”

  “Not tough enough,” Vidia said. “The students take my course because they want A’s without having to work. They seldom do the assignment. They hardly write. They lie to me. I try to goad them into work and they glare at me. They are deeply offended. ‘But this is a writing course! This is supposed to be easy! You are making us work!’”

  He raised his hand in resignation, and sipped, and looked miserable. In the Telegraph piece, one of his students had described her reason for dropping out of his course: “He was simply the worst, most close-minded, inconsiderate, uninteresting and incompetent professor I have ever met.”

  “That’s supposed to be a good university,” I said.

  “They’re all corrupt. It’s all a con.” The students were lazy, the other teachers were inferior, the place was intolerable. His own mind was being damaged from being in close contact with people so inferior.

  “What about the weather?”

  “The weather is very nice,” he said. “Let’s not talk about the corruption. This wine is not bad. May I see the cork?”

  Twitching the cork with his thumb and forefinger, he uncovered the details of the vineyard. He revolved the cork again, and again twitched the dusty residue, like an archeologist with a helpful artifact.

  “California wine is vastly underrated,” he said, almos
t to himself, and then, “What brings you to New York?”

  “I was in Vermont, visiting Kipling’s house outside Brattleboro,” I said. “I want to write about him—his American wife, his American residence, the way it ended.”

  “And how did it end?”

  “In a huge kerfuffle. His drunken brother-in-law threatened to kill him. It was just bluster, but Kipling decided to bring a case against him. His brother-in-law was popular, a good old boy. Kipling was regarded as a snob and an interloper, a limey. It ended badly. Kipling went back to England and sulked.”

  “He was immensely famous,” Vidia said. “Immensely famous.”

  “I think it would make a terrific play—the arguments, the rivalries, the court hearing, all that. I have a transcript of the case. And he was writing The Jungle Book at the time—you know, the law of the jungle.”

  “It’s a lovely idea,” Vidia said. “Very attractive.” He brooded a bit. He sniffed the cork.

  “Shall we eat? There are some restaurants near here that aren’t bad. An Indian one near the Plaza.”

  “Let’s try the Oyster Bar, shall we?” he said with a note of insistence.

  We walked out of the hotel and the fifteen blocks to Grand Central station, all the while marveling at the silence. By now some streets had been cleared, and a few taxis moved slowly through the whiteness.

  “I have an idea for a play,” Vidia said. “Raleigh is sixty-four, in Guyana. He has been let out of the Tower so that he can find El Dorado and redeem himself. It is a risk, and now he has found himself at a dead end. But he can’t admit defeat. He is old and lost.”

  He told me the story of Raleigh on the Orinoco, the play he intended, as we kicked through the snow.

  In the light of a building entrance, a woman stood waiting in an area that had been shoveled. She wore a fur hat and a coat with a fur collar, so her foxlike face was framed by the soft pelts, the warmth of fur and skin. She turned away from us, not wishing to make eye contact, and just as we passed, an important-looking car swung to the curb and she rushed to it, seeming relieved.

  “Did you see that woman? Pretty, don’t you think?”

  When he did not answer me, I took his silence to mean that I had asked a silly question. But no, he was thinking.

  “All women are built differently.” He spoke slowly, as though delivering a piece of news.

  Closing his fingers, like a man plucking fruit, he made a scooping gesture with his hand. I took “built” to mean something more complex than their shape. He was suggesting contours, not an interior mechanism peculiar to each woman; he was implying something more urological.

  “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  It was pleasant to be in a big city with him. We were both free, the snowfall had given New York a holiday, emptied of people and most cars. So the city was ours.

  And after all these years I never took this friendship for granted. I felt lucky to know him, privileged to be with him, blessed for all his good advice, cautioned by his mistakes, stimulated by his intellect, enlightened by his work. I was aware of his contradictions. More than anything, I was inspired by the dignity of his struggle. Writing tormented him, he suffered through each book. And where were we now? I was thirty-six, he was forty-five, we were both working hard. I was writing a play and contemplating a trip to South America, and he was teaching—though he had said “Never be a teacher,” here he was, a creative-writing teacher in Connecticut. There could be only one reason: he needed the money. Our positions had been reversed so dramatically, I had to be careful not to wound his dignity by mentioning it or saying to him (as he had said to me so often), “You teachers make lots of money!”

  We walked along—he was thinking about Raleigh, I was thinking about Kipling—and we told each other that these were great ideas.

  The reassurance, the intellectual vigor of his friendship, made me happy. What perhaps mattered most was the trust, the mutual compassion, which was also forgiveness, and the fact that we understood one another. By now we knew each other well and had arrived at that point at which friends realize they cannot know each other any better, His friendship was a pleasure and a relief.

  I was still reflecting on “All women are built differently” when he said, “So you see, we are seriously talking about whether the president of the United States knows how to read a book!”

  “Jimmy Carter?” He must have been gabbling about Carter while I was thinking.

  “Yes. Does he know how to read? I have seen no indication of it.”

  “He talks about Dylan Thomas a little.”

  “Oh, God.”

  The philistinism of the U.S. government occupied us for the time it took to travel the short distance east from Fifth Avenue to Grand Central. We descended the stairs to the warmth and light of the Oyster Bar—not busy, another casualty of the blizzard.

  We ordered. We talked. We drank. We ate. Vidia kept returning to the subject of Wesleyan. It was corrupt, a con, a cheat, the soft option of writing courses, the laziness of students.

  “It’s crummy, man. Crummy. I should never have come.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I believed they were doing some good. And the pence, of course.” He made his rueful face. “But, you see, I have only myself to blame. I broke one of my rules.”

  From time to time he lifted his eyes to look behind me, at a table where some people were speaking excitedly. I thought he might go over and tell them to shut up or stop smoking. But he was considerate: just a glance and then we kept talking, now about New York writers and how they were self-regarding. Vidia saw New York writers as shallow, cliquey, and envious, uninterested in the world, needing local witnesses, frenzied, not even very bright.

  “I have my students reading Conrad. They don’t know him at all. They read—who? Kurt Vonnegut? But they respond to An Outpost of Progress’ and The Secret Agent. Some nice things in that.”

  “I used to teach it in Singapore. Winnie’s a good character.”

  “Of Winnie, Conrad says, ‘She felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.’”

  “I also used to have the students read your Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. I love that book.”

  “You’re so kind, Paul. You know, I am assigning my students your Family Arsenal, for its depiction of London and bombers—excuse me.”

  Interrupting himself as he looked up, he went to the table behind me while I held my breath and prayed that he would not make a scene.

  When I looked around, I saw three people sitting at a table, sharing a bottle of wine, not eating, but all of them smoking cigarettes. A man and two women, and one of the women was Margaret from Argentina.

  “Hello.”

  She smiled and raised her glass. She looked a bit tipsy and rumpled. I had last seen her on a hot day in London, wearing a summer dress. On this freezing night in New York she was blotchy from the cold air and wore a thick dress. Her hair was windblown and damp. Yet with all this dishevelment she was as pretty as ever—perhaps prettier, the way some women look when their clothes are slightly awry, a blouse untucked, a button undone.

  I got up to speak to her, and when I approached she introduced me to the others, her brother and sister-in-law. Vidia said nothing.

  “How about this snow?” I said.

  “Vidia adores it, but it makes life impossible,” Margaret said. “We live so far in Connecticut.”

  Vidia said, “Paul, this has been splendid, but I think we must be going. We do have a long way to go. Margaret?”

  “Just a minute.”

  “Shall I see to the bill?” Vidia said, a trifle wearily.

  “No. I’ll get it,” I said.

  “Oh, good.”

  Margaret frowned at him.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.

  Once again, Margaret and I were together, but unexpectedly. I gave the waitress my credit card.

  “It must have been quite a ride from Connecticut,” I said.

>   “I did the driving. Vidia hates to drive.”

  Really? But I said, “If I had known you were here, I would have asked you to join us.”

  “Vidia wanted to talk to you. You’re his friend. You never quarrel!”

  “That’s us. Dos amigos,”

  “Claro.” She laughed. “He has the students reading your book. I don’t know which one, I’m afraid.”

  “I used to tell my students to read Mr. Stone.”

  “It’s one of his books he doesn’t like.”

  This was news to me. “Which others doesn’t he like?”

  “Suffrage of Elvira. A Flag on the Island.”

  “I thought he liked those. And Mr. Stone’s a little masterpiece.”

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  Seeing Vidia hurrying towards us, I thought of asking him: What was it that he didn’t like about these novels of his? But it was late and they were leaving, and I was the wiser for seeing my friend’s friend materialize in this distant place.

  We said goodbye in the snow outside and I left wondering, but also feeling profoundly that some things do not stand much looking into.

  Later that year, in London, I visited him at his tiny apartment and we had tea. Pat was in the country, at Dairy Cottage. I did not mention New York, or Wesleyan.

  “I’m going to South America,” I said.

  “I am thinking of going to the Congo,” he said.

  “A travel book?”

  “Not exactly that. Call it travel with a theme.”

  I said, “I’m planning to leave my house in Medford, Massachusetts, and just take trains, heading south, until I get to Patagonia.”

  “It’s a delicious idea. I know you’ll do it well.”

  “I’ll be spending some time in Buenos Aires,” I said. He did not react, and so I went on, “I don’t know a soul there.”

  “Really.”

  “Or in Argentina, for that matter.”

  This seemed a natural inquiry, because Vidia had been to Argentina many times over the past seven years, had written about it extensively—about Borges and Evita and the culture of politics and terrorism. He had been fierce in some of his statements: “There is a certain ‘scum’ quality in Latin America. They imagine that if you kill the right people everything will work. Genocide is their history.” But he was frowning at me now, as if I had mentioned a place that was foreign to him.