Fools

by Joan Silber

  “You might have thought this woman joining herself with an ordinary barkeep did not have an idea in her head. Betsy had plenty of ideas, but she chose to abandon them. She wanted to live out of a lesser part of herself, whereas I was trying for better. I seemed a prig to her when I said it, but that is the flame I have lived by.”

  He did sound priggish there, but Marcus was basically with him.

  The humiliated author wanted to get out of town so badly he managed, by scrimping and selling off whatever he owned and probably more borrowing, to get hold finally of a cheap boat ticket to Europe. “In Paris I was able to connect with fellow radicals. But I found this final separation from Betsy very painful—I was often in sorry shape those first months and spoke of little else but my loss. I might have thought Paris, City of Love, would lend an ear, but people showed great impatience and lack of interest. Who was I to them? My French was terrible, their English was often not very good. They had their own concerns. A number of them ventured forth to help comrades menaced by brutal police in Fascist Italy, and not all those who crossed the border returned. I understood that my own wounded heart was a weak topic in light of this bloodshed.

  “My sojourn here has had its interruptions and hardships, but Paris has given me sustenance and joy, in the form of my dear wife and companion, Josette LeBlanc, and it blesses me now in my current satisfying life.”

  This was not the book’s ending—there was another chapter, about old Villagers he ran into on the Boul’ Mich’—this was just a brief, sunny summary, a golden flash-forward. He couldn’t resist a surge of sentiment. And if that bumbling young putz could find lasting happiness, anyone could.

  Nico would’ve liked such a book. Marcus had in fact picked it up half imitating Nico—Nico was a great collector of vintage postcards, moldy collections of obscure essays, photos of union picnics. The tinted and dusty surfaces of submerged characters called to him. Marcus wondered how many years he would spend acting out Nico’s old habits, just to keep him around.

  And what did the author ever think he was doing, with his champagne cocktails and necklaces for Betsy? What kind of anarchist thinks money buys love? But a lover tries anything, that’s how it is. Gandhi’s alleged lover, Hermann Kallenbach, had donated all the land for a communal farm and training center that Gandhi set up in South Africa. Not that anyone thought Gandhi had given his body for cash.

  In India, not so long ago, Marcus had been like Kallenbach—he’d tried to court someone with money. In Mumbai, of all places. He hadn’t even meant to go to India, but he’d been having trouble at work (lost a case it hurt to lose) and wanted to go somewhere far, far away. Someone must’ve told him India was wonderful. Which it was, in many ways. Fabulous elaborate temples, Bollywood billboards, women in glorious saris, flowers like Technicolor props. His modest hotel was right on the road that ran along the sea, with lovely breakfasts on the porch, and at first he thought, It’s not bad here at all. He wrote postcards showing the colonial Gothic hulk of the Victoria Terminus and he raved about the sunset at Chowpatty Beach. Nothing too terrible on the streets, not for a New Yorker. It took another day for him to meet what was waiting—the beggar with no legs pushing himself on a board with wheels, the tiny begging children leading tinier children, the skeletal old woman with hands like claws holding an infant up to a car window to beg. An Indian at his hotel tried to tell him that the beggars worked for gangsters and staged their plight. “Not getting fat at it, are they?” Marcus said.

  He heard himself tell all sorts of fellow travelers that he couldn’t understand why there hadn’t been a revolt of the masses in India. Indians he met offered explanations—the caste system, fatalism, colonialism, corrupt leaders—or laughed at the silliness of the question. Marcus came to think that the question was a religious one: What the fuck is the matter with people? This isn’t going away, is it?

  And for all his burning thought, Marcus was in collusion. He gave coins now and then, but mostly not. He’d become someone who was afraid of poor people. Him! It shocked him each time someone took hold of his arm or followed him for blocks. A perfectly nice Australian woman he often spoke to at breakfast said, “You can’t save everyone.” Marcus thought that was so not the point.

  On a particularly hot day, Marcus took himself to a Gandhi museum (his book said there was one in almost every city), and it was the first consoling thing he’d done. The museum was just somebody’s house where Gandhi had stayed on visits to Bombay, crammed now with exhibits, plus a plaque where he used to pitch a tent on the terrace. Marcus listened to Gandhi’s voice in Hindi, telling people to purify themselves while he fasted for Hindu-Muslim unity, a recording made two weeks before he was shot. When I leave this museum, Marcus thought, I’ll give most of the rupees in my wallet to the first beggar I meet.

  Another tourist, looking at a copy of Gandhi’s passport, said, “They’ve forgotten him, even if he’s a hero. Nobody wants to do what he did.”

  “I know,” Marcus said. “How did that happen?” The man was American, about Marcus’s age. Not bad-looking, with a very short haircut and sly, half-squinting eyes.

  “He was a fluke,” the man said. “One of a kind.”

  “History doesn’t have flukes,” Marcus said. Not that he believed that—maybe history had nothing but flukes—but he seemed to want to keep talking to the guy. “And he wasn’t alone, it wasn’t just him.”

  “He started it,” the man said. “The British just thought he was a crazy fool.”

  They moved past oddly pretty dioramas in black frames, with finely molded mini-figures depicting the life of Gandhi, from the child stealing a piece of gold and repenting to his father, to the body in a sandalwood pyre (Lead me from the Unreal to the Real), in twenty-eight tableaux, and when the guy looked ready to leave, Marcus said, “Want to join me for coffee? Or something cold?”

  So no lucky pauper of Mumbai was blessed with the contents of Marcus’s wallet as he left the museum. He could not have said where he passed the first beggar or whether none went by at all, since he was caught up in conversation and gave no attention to anything else. His new friend was a doctor, it turned out, from D.C. but moving soon to New York, which was certainly a very good piece of news. The man was an oncologist, which Marcus thought could not be a happy profession, and yet he seemed far less depressed than anyone Marcus knew, and they had the happiest, most sociable of afternoons. They drank exquisitely cold Kingfisher beers and sat for a long time in an air-conditioned café talking about how good it was to be away from work, although they loved their work. “I could’ve picked something easier, but I didn’t,” the man said. He was going back home the next morning.

  And was there anything wrong with Marcus insisting on taking him out for a glorious, expensive dinner? Nothing wrong at all, except that Marcus was not even remotely a man who liked to go on such outings—but he had seen, by then, the need to be (for this person) someone with a bolder style and a sexy streak of extravagance, someone who did not take everything seriously. Who wants to sleep with a hangdog?

  And the evening had gone very well. After the Cochin oysters with cucumber and lime granita, and the pork chop pistou with Kashmiri apple curry, and the coconut sago crepes, in a restaurant with a reflecting pool with marigolds floating in it, Marcus had gone back to the man’s hotel room and they had had a night of tremendous mutual understanding. How subtle, how intelligent the man’s senses were. Just after dawn Marcus rose from bed with him and said, before he took himself out the door, “This was very lucky for me.”

  And Nico, for it was Nico, said, “Don’t think we can’t continue on another continent.”

  Five days later, when Marcus himself was at the airport, he remembered that he hadn’t ever gotten around to giving the next destitute street person he met most of the cash in his wallet. He had only a clump of leftover rupees he was about to try to change—maybe thirteen dollars in American money—and he left these in the tip saucer of the men’s room attendant at the airport
. Much more than the man would expect to get from anybody, and Marcus felt quite good about it, at first.

  In his law firm Marcus had the reputation of being testy and driven but good at what he did. When he came back from India, a secretary said, “I hope you had time to chill,” and Marcus decided it was time to stop being a pain to everyone, and (he’d thought about it before) he got himself into this semi-Catholic the-Desert-Fathers-started-it Christian meditation, which it turned out he liked. Nico, whom he was seeing long-distance at the time, thought it was a little weird (it wasn’t regular prayer? what was it? no drugs involved? why not?) but Marcus didn’t mind being teased. Not by Nico, not then.

  Marcus could remember those long train rides to Washington on Friday nights, when Nico lived there. The darkened railroad car was full of people sleeping, and Marcus had loved the stillness, the mystery of the train moving through the night, and his own anticipation, his sleepless joy.

  Six months later, when they were moving together into a very nice house in Brooklyn, Nico was driven crazy—stark raving out of his mind with vexation—from lying contractors, bad wiring, plumbers who never showed up. Marcus said, “It’ll get done, houses always get done.”

  Nico said, “It’s the meditation, isn’t it? It’s done you good. Listen to you.”

  “What?” Marcus said. “Oh, no, it isn’t that. It’s India.” What he meant was that his instinct to complain had been damaged by the trip, his perspective altered by the memory of encampments at night in the streets, kids curled up together on the pavement. Comparatively speaking, he and Nico had no fucking problems.

  Did that mean he was calmer? Maybe. Nico said there were people, after trips like that, who clung even harder to what they had, for fear of losing it and becoming God-knew-what. Why wasn’t Marcus afraid?

  “The house isn’t everything,” Marcus said.

  “Don’t annoy me,” Nico said.

  When he and Nico were first together they’d had an argument about religion. Not a serious argument. Marcus believed in Something Divine (he’d been raised Catholic) and Nico thought it was all horseshit. Marcus also said Jesus was a Communist, which Nico was willing to go with. Those were the more crucial sympathies, their views on justice and profits. They couldn’t have stayed together for more than an hour otherwise.

  Around Zuccotti Park, when Marcus had marched one night with the Occupy Wall Streeters, there was a kid dressed as Jesus (robe, beard, halo) with the sign YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS. Marcus himself carried a poster that said IF A LAWYER MARCHES, YOU KNOW IT’S SERIOUS. Marcus thought now that the anarchists in Village Days and Nights would’ve been very cheered to see all of it.

  Someone had taken a nice photo of Marcus walking with his sign. He looked skinny but determined, chin up, sunglasses on. Did he look handsome? Did Nico still have his copy?

  On Sunday morning, in Casey and Carol’s kitchen, they all sat around reading newspapers on their laptops and iPads and they didn’t speak much. They had known one another a very long time. Casey and Marcus had stayed friends all through college, and when Carol came on the scene, a few years later, Marcus had been really very pleased with Casey’s choice. Nico had found them a dowdy but endearing couple. (Could’ve been worse.)

  Nico had his snobberies. He was the world’s best-dressed oncologist, with his pristine striped shirt and handsome tie peeping out from his lab coat. Did it make his patients (none of them in good shape) think he knew what he was doing? Once, when Marcus cut his finger in the kitchen, Nico had bandaged it, and Marcus had found himself oddly moved by the sureness of his hands.

  “No one is predicting improvement in the job figures,” Carol said, looking up from a Sunday Review page. “They’ve stopped pretending to be upbeat.”

  “In that memoir I was reading,” Marcus said, “the guy hardly mentions the Depression. Doesn’t bother with it. Can you believe that?”

  “He got obsessed with his own story,” Carol said. “People do.”

  “Anarchists aren’t supposed to be surprised if world markets self-destruct,” Casey said.

  “Well, he didn’t own much,” Marcus said.

  “Not like us,” Carol said.

  Marcus was Googling Norman F. Remsen, who had no listing except one for the book, used, for $3.45, on Amazon. Marcus decided to look up Gandhi’s sex life, while he was at it. The writer of the most recent biography was quoted as saying he personally thought Gandhi and Kallenbach had been celibate soul mates, attracted maybe but loyal to their vows of continence.

  Marcus noticed he was thinking of swiping Village Days and Nights from the house (Casey wouldn’t care) and taking it to Nico. He’d just call Nico up and say, I found this thing, wait till you see. Oh! He wanted to give Nico a present! Was that not the stupidest thing in the world?

  Carol, who was now scarfing down a bowl of cereal, said, “You look better today.”

  “It’s the mountain air,” Marcus said. “The stars at night.”

  He had not even really noticed the stars at night, but he liked the idea of them. Had they been out when he and Casey were playing midnight Frisbee? He couldn’t remember.

  “Yes, I can see you’re awed by it all,” Casey said.

  “Awe is so overrated.”

  The real lover of nature had been Nico, unlikely though that seemed to everyone. He used to drag Marcus on walks through Prospect Park at excessively early hours of the morning to check out the new bird arrivals with his binoculars. In spring there were warblers of many obscure kinds. Marcus could never get over the sight of the ever-chic Nico peering through those clunky lenses into the sycamores and oaks and the leaf-strewn dirt. How intent he was then, how solemn with interest. One bleak day in late February, when Marcus had refused to get up and go all the way to Central Park for new sightings, Nico came home thrilled about seeing the first spring migrant, the American woodcock. There were many jokes about the name (who else would be hanging out in the Ramble?) and photos on his cell phone of some splotchy brownish bird with a long beak doing a turkey trot. “I’m a happy man,” Nico said, and he was, glowing and grinning. It made Marcus think about what happiness was. For how long had Nico seen that bird—maybe ninety seconds? Of course, now it was enshrined forever in the memory of his iPhone, kept like any bit of joy in the brain. Not the real bird, but something.

  Nico, who was nothing if not generous, had bought Marcus his own pair of binoculars, an allegedly very good kind. Marcus had taken them with him when he packed all his stuff, but what did he need them for? They seemed to be especially painful to look at because he had never used them. He really did not want to dwell on any of this. They were in a cardboard box pushed to the back of a closet, and there was no need to picture them.

  He’d thought he was better. Why wasn’t he better? Why couldn’t he leave himself alone? He was worse than the memoir writer annoying everyone in Paris. What was so irresistible about freshening his own mortal agony every fucking second?

  In these first months of this stage of his life, he had no choice but to marshal what powers he had to keep himself from slipping full-time into being a sorry specimen. A person who meditated was supposed to have some sense that the mind could occasionally control itself. In India, he’d heard about holy men standing on one leg for years, lying on beds of cacti, going naked in Himalayan snow. Marcus hadn’t seen any of that and was just as glad he hadn’t. But sadhus could do those things and more. No wonder Westerners hardly understood Gandhi.

  What he remembered best about India was sitting in the café in Mumbai with Nico. This was before it was entirely clear something was about to happen, when a shimmering prospect just hovered in the air. Nico had laughed at an ordinary crack Marcus made about his job—he said Housing Court had a sitcom in every chamber—and Marcus saw the gathered lines around Nico’s eyes, the flash in them, the beam of his teeth. These commonplace signs of another human spirit embodied in a highly specific physical form seemed just so, so remarkable to him. Marcus found
himself telling his only good landlord joke (what do landlords use for birth control? their personalities)—Marcus never told jokes!—and they were very jolly together, the two of them.

  Earlier in the day—only hours before—Marcus had not been in a good mood at all. He was burdened by what he saw in India, by the case he’d lost at home (rent strikers evicted by well-connected sleazeball), and by existential exhaustion. When he turned the corner to walk toward the Gandhi museum, he was thinking, It’s too hot, what an insane country, I have to get out of here, and Where else is anything ever better?

  At least it was cool inside, all polished wood and things behind glass. How weird Gandhi looked in some of those pictures, wizened, ghost-eyed, half naked. The Desert Fathers, fasting in their cells, had nothing on him. There was a photo from the Salt March, Gandhi on the road with a stream of white-clad followers behind him, ready to harvest salt illegally from the sea. The freaked-out British ended up putting sixty thousand people in prison when salt defiance spread over India. Mounted cops (Marcus read) charged one group and they saved themselves by lying flat on the ground. Whose idea was that? What Marcus wanted to know was: How long had those people trained themselves to do such a thing? When had they decided to be better than they ever thought they wanted to be?

  Marcus had gotten lost twice before finding the museum, people were hard to understand and gave bad directions. Why should he find himself consoled there? But he did. He remembered very clearly now that he did.

  Going Too Far

  When I was a boy, my father was always leaving us and coming back and disappearing again. When he was home, he managed to gamble away all the cash in the house, no matter where my mother hid it. Florida had a lot of temptations for a guy who couldn’t resist a bet. He did have moments of being jolly, of acting as if he got a big kick out of everything about us. He bought me a bike when he was flush, a Raleigh English racer, black with silver, very cool—“Here, Gerard, knock yourself out,” he said—and he sold it three months later. My mother threw him out for good when I started junior high. I wanted him back and I didn’t.