She keeps up three or four projects at once. Dinners prepared by Nathaniel bake in the oven as she turns her brooding attention to a football-shaped piece of metal, perhaps a blimp or dirigible of some kind, meant to hang somehow in the air. Music from the radio: Bartók’s second string quartet—clangorous Magyar scraping and sawing, sul ponticello wiry screeching, a Mitteleuropean racket perfect for a sculptor’s studio—snarls its way out of the speakers into the air, keeping the blimp suspended. Around seven on the nights he is permitted to stay, they eat dinner, and one particular evening over lamb chops he asks her why she’s a Roman Catholic.
“Oh, that? I’m sick in love with the Virgin Mary,” she says unsmilingly. “She’s my girl. I’ve been in love with her since I was ten years old. She came to me in a dream and said my name out loud. She’s not an idea. She’s real. I saw her face on the wall inside a movie theater, just before the lights went down. She exists. I’ve danced for her. She’s a fact in my life.”
“A movie theater. Like Max Jacob.”
“Who?”
“Max Jacob. He was a French poet, pre–World War II. Jewish. He saw the face of Jesus on the wall of a movie theater, and when it happened a second time, he went to the Fathers of Zion, an order dedicated to converting the Jews. At his baptism, Picasso served as his godfather.”
After dinner, he washes up, reads, and she takes a long bath in the claw-footed bathtub before she goes out to drive for Queen City Cab. On those nights when she isn’t working, she emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and she lies down with him on the mattress where he has been reading Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body, a book whose ecstasies already seem dated and stale. Tonight, he puts the book aside. Together, naked under a comforter, they gaze up at the ceiling from which are suspended Jamie’s birds and blimps. Above the art and to the side, a ceiling fan rotates languidly.
“You know,” she says, “you’re kind of sweet, but I’ll never know why I got involved with you.”
“Because you thought I deserved it. You said so. You initiated this. Anyway, it’s not really involvement.”
“Oh, really? I have sucked your dick. That’s intimacy, isn’t it? Still, I guess you’re right. And I suppose I did start this, didn’t I? That’ll teach me. Why did I do that?” She drapes her left leg over him. Her thigh has a dancer’s taut muscular symmetry. “But you’re a delay. You’re just a man. You’re temporary.” She smiles at the ceiling. “You understand me. That’s the danger part. It’s like I’m Nixon, and you’re my Haldeman.”
“Don’t think so. You’re not Nixon. No woman can be Nixon. Not possible. He’s one of us.”
“Okay okay. But you know me and the sum of me and you seem to know what I want,” she says in a friendly growl. “You’re the first guy I’ve ever known who did. It’s unfair.”
“That’s right. I do know. You want to fly away.”
“Right. And I want another girl,” she says, “to fly away with me. Not you. I can’t fly away anywhere with you. With you, I’m grounded. Men are beasts of the ground.”
“Uh…you sure about that?”
“Absolutely. You’re all creatures of the mud. You can’t help it. I know this feels weird. That desire I’m supposed to have for you? I don’t have it. I sometimes wish it were there, but it isn’t.” She waits. “I sort of love you anyway, but a girl can’t go on doing charity work for a mud-beast forever.”
“See, the thing is,” he says, “you can treat me as hypothetical. That’s an adjective that guy Coolberg uses with me. Hypothetical this and hypothetical that. You haven’t met him, but—”
“Oh, yes, I have,” Jamie announces, her hand drifting down his chest. “He came a few days ago to the People’s Kitchen and struck up a conversation with me.”
“This was when?” Nathaniel has a sudden flushed sensation.
“Last week, I think. He asked me about working there, like he was planning on joining the collective. I couldn’t remember seeing him before. He’s friends with your other girlfriend, right? The real one? The one you’re cheating on, with me? Theresa? The straight girl with the great tits, the high IQ, and the ironic knowing smile?” There’s an accusatory pause. “Anyway, he asked me all sorts of questions about me. And you. Funny that I forgot to mention that I saw him. He seemed to know that you and I had this…well, I don’t know, okay, this hypothetical thing going. He was curious about everything. He’s a collector of facts, I guess. And so he told me a little bit about himself.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, you know.”
“Actually, no, I don’t.”
“Well, he said he grew up in Milwaukee, until his family moved to New York, an apartment on West End Avenue. Didn’t you live in Milwaukee, too? And New York? That’s quite a coincidence. Anyway, he said he has a sister who was in a car accident and is mute. That’s a shame—I felt bad for him. He said his father died when he was quite young, of a stroke—”
Nathaniel sits up quickly. He feels cold sweat breaking out on his forehead, and his chest heats up. “Wait! What? He said what?”
“You heard me.” She looks over at him. “What’s the matter?”
For a brief moment, Nathaniel looks down at his shape under the comforter, as if some part of him is no longer there. Where his right foot should be, nothing. Quickly he scrambles out of bed and rushes into Jamie’s bathroom. His stomach has been seized with a sudden twist of electric current. He is afraid that he may be having a heart attack. A metaphysical nausea instantly converts itself into physical nausea, and he leans over the toilet bowl, staring downward. The seizure feels like a heart attack located in his gut. Maybe, he thinks, a heart attack can strike anywhere in the body. You could have a heart attack in your brain.
Jamie appears in the bathroom doorway, as naked as he is. In the midst of his nausea, he admires her legs. They are solid; they will not disappear on her. They will continue to hold her up, and maybe she will hold him up. “Nathaniel,” she says, “what’s going on?” She approaches him and puts her arm around him as if to support him, to keep him from falling.
He glances down to see if his right foot still exists. It does. It has returned. This is crazy, he thinks.
“That’s not his life,” Nathaniel says. Anger arrives belatedly. “The stroke, the mute sister, Milwaukee, New York—that’s all mine. That’s not his. It’s my life.”
“He’s claiming your life?” Jamie asks. “That’s preposterous.”
“Okay, yeah, I know. But that’s what he’s doing.”
“Are you feeling sick? Are you okay?” In the mirror’s reflection, Jamie’s face shows high-level concern, her dazzling eyes signaling that she’s at home and the lights burn brightly. At this moment, when Nathaniel sees her face reversed in the mirror, he thinks that Jamie is the most beautiful woman he has ever looked upon, even though she is not beautiful. He is having another Gertrude Stein moment. She is beautiful although she is not beautiful.
“I have to go,” Nathaniel tells her. On her bathroom mirror she has stuck a little decal that says WATERFOUL OBSERVATION SITE. In the bathtub is her collection of yellow rubber ducks and ducklings and orange shampoo bottles. The bathroom smells of primal girl. One of her metal dirigibles hangs from the bathroom ceiling. Jamie’s little tchotchkes constitute a conspiracy of the hapless and lovable and airborne.
“Can’t this wait?”
“I mean, it won’t. No, it can’t wait,” he says, his verbal confusion adding to his rage. Something must be done. He feels like pulling down a few window shades and tearing them into small bitter pieces.
“Why did he do all that? Why does he want your life? Is he in love with you?”
Nathaniel says nothing.
“I bet he’s in love with you.” She stands behind him and reaches around him to lean her head against his shoulders. “I’m sort of worried about you.” She waits while Nathaniel notices that “sort of”—must everything she does be qualified?—and she touches him on the chest. �
��You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” Little whiffs of physical desire are making their way from her toward him, little fugitive hetero longings. In the mirror, her eyes bore into him and her brow is furrowed. Maybe his current psychic crisis energizes her. His sudden suffering makes her want to bed him down. But it’s his suffering she wants to have, to lay her hands on, not him.
“Oh, Jamie, not now,” he says. He turns around and kisses her, then breaks the embrace to put his clothes on.
The metallic bird hanging to the side of the door sways back and forth, given life by his rushed departure.
15
NO ONE ANSWERS at the Coolberg residence. Nor does he respond to pressed call buttons in the apartment building where, numerous times, Nathaniel has dropped him off. On the callboard are six names:
Wendego
Highsmith
Augenblick
H. Jones
Bürger-Wilson
Golyadkin
In Nathaniel’s current state, they all feel like bogus names invented by a mad postmaster. No Coolberg here. Is there a Coolberg anywhere? The name itself sounds fictional and implausible, a poor effort at whimsy.
He calls Coolberg’s number all night. No one answers.
At home the next morning, he stares at the telephone before calling his stepfather at his New York office on Water Street, near the East River with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. On warm days when the wind is right, his stepfather claims, he can get a whiff of the Fulton Fish Market. Nathaniel hates to disturb him, but he needs some advice from a fully qualified adult. His stepfather is a “semi-pro capitalist,” as he calls himself. An investor in start-up companies, he’s an easygoing, charming moneymaker unafflicted by true greed. He doesn’t mind being disturbed at work. He’s placid and detached, observing with disinterested attention the tidal flow of capital. All he wants is to get his hands in that water from time to time and scoop out a few cupfuls of cash. The system continues to function thanks to coolheaded minor players like him. The raptors come and go on huge reptilian wings. Nothing surprises this man; nothing shocks him. His worldliness is a perpetual relief from everyone else’s naïveté.
After chatting for a minute or so, his stepfather says, “So. Buddy boy. Something on your mind?” Nathaniel tells him that he has a problem. “Tell me,” his stepfather says quietly, and Nathaniel hears an audible creak as his stepfather leans back in his leather chair. All successful middle-aged males love to listen to stories and to give advice, Nathaniel has noticed. They feel that mere survival has given them the right to pontificate. It’s the Polonius syndrome; they all have it. But this one, this man, adores narratives; he is, by nature, an anecdotalist.
Nathaniel explains the intricacies concerning Coolberg to his stepfather, presenting the story as straightforwardly as possible. When he is finished, his stepfather clears his throat. He is going to respond to Nathaniel’s story with another story. It is his way.
During his junior year in college in Maine, his stepfather says, a particularly bad winter dropped itself down over the community: colossal snows, day after day of subzero temperatures, radiators clanking all day, students coughing and getting frostbite and pneumonia. “Imagine the silences. Everything muffled. You couldn’t even see outside,” he says. “The frost and snow blocked the windows.” No one could go anywhere. No one wanted to risk driving off the roads into a slow demise from disorientation and hypothermia. The roads were more or less impassable, but because most of the college faculty lived nearby, classes went on as scheduled. The sidewalks had snow piled on either side as high as your head—it was like walking through a tunnel just to get to calculus class. Old men died shoveling out their driveways. Their wives began talking to their cats on a daily, hourly basis. People had the feeling that the snows would never stop, that the flakes would continue to drift downward forever, lazily and implacably covering everything in a terrible white stupor.
“An old-fashioned winter. So we all burrowed in and found various occupations.” The college bookworms curled up with their books; the basketball players played endless rounds in the gym; the lovers stayed in their beds, making love nonstop in the hope of reviving spring. Some slept together naked with their doors open, on display—modesty, for some reason, having abandoned them, the terrible privacy of a perpetual snowstorm calling forth its opposite, prideful noisy exhibitionism and shamelessness more often associated with the exposed skin of the tropics than with New England. Such cohabitation wasn’t allowed in those days, but all the rules were being ignored. But for everyone else, those not completely erased by studiousness or by the fortunes visited by love, the snows became a spiritual and psychological problem—how to be distracted from the maddening iron chill, the accumulating white silences falling out of the sky?
Somehow, an idea was born, no one knew from where, one of those ideas that arises like bacteria spreading overnight in spoiled food. A bunch of guys formed a social club, the Merry Andrews. Six of them at first, then a dozen, then more, including a few women. They met surreptitiously. They called each other “Andrew” everybody was an Andrew. Everybody dressed in identical clothing as the snows fell hour by hour outside. Women became Andrews and were invited into the drunken meetings filled with absurdist bureaucratic business about whom to admit and what protocols to follow. “Hello, Andrew,” they said to each other. They affected the same speech patterns, they acquired identical tics during their encounters—the parties began in the afternoons and went through the nights into the following days until the beer and cigarettes inevitably ran out, when they would discuss the future: the future generally, and the future of the Andrews, and where to obtain more beer, more Scotch, more cigarettes, more drugs. All the Andrews seemed to get drunk at about the same time, and they all seemed to share the same tastes in the same songs, which they sang or played repetitively on their phonographs. They disappeared into each other; they vanished into a collectivity. Then the phenomenon spread to the college at large, at a slightly higher voltage. For two weeks, all the undergraduates called themselves “Andrew” in this epidemic folly, and a general breakdown in morals followed, as Andrews mated with other Andrews. The snow had induced this. The Southerners lost their drawls, the Midwesterners their flat vowels—everyone began to speak alike, except for the athletes, and the lovers, and the bookworms, who paid no attention.
“Then what happened?” Nathaniel asks.
“Then the sun came out,” his stepfather says, “and everything returned to normal. Individuals became themselves again.”
Nathaniel does not believe this story, but he appreciates his stepfather having taken the trouble to think it up and to tell it. The narrative seems like a mask covering over another actual story that his stepfather will never tell, so Nathaniel asks, “Did anyone kill anybody else?”
His stepfather, puzzled, says that of course no one killed anyone else. Why would he ask such a question? “Why do you ask? People like us don’t kill each other,” he says. “We don’t do that. But, now that I think about it,” he adds, as an afterthought, “two people, two of these Andrews, did try to kill themselves.”
“Each other?”
“No, themselves,” his stepfather insists. “You know, suicide.” He waits. “But they didn’t succeed.” Then he says something that sounds like his verdict on this particular history. “You know, few people really want to become individuals,” he says. “People claim that they do, but they don’t. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that’s not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.” He takes a deep breath. “So. Classes going well?”
“Oh, yeah, the classes are fine.”
“Good. Your mother’s good. She misses you. Your sister’s all right, too.”
That “all right” also has a touch of the disingenuous itself, Catherine’s condition being timeless and unreconciled to reality. Having refused to give up her lifelong mourning, she lives outside of Milwaukee in a
small group home with a view of Lake Michigan. There, minded by salaried employees, she passes a contemplative life colored by the narrow spectrum of apathy, except for episodes at the piano. She has been given antidepressants, sedatives, and stimulants, but still she does not speak. She reads, or seems to: she glares at the words and turns the pages with impatient finger flicks. Occasionally she peeps and squeaks. But when she sits down at the keyboard, she plays with a rather frightening virtuosity, though without any recognizable human feeling—the music emerges from the instrument with the dead expressionism of a player piano switched on in an empty room. Catherine’s face remains vacant no matter what musical notation passes in front of her or what her fingers find to do to occupy the time.
The subject of the job market removes Catherine from the conversation, and soon his stepfather tells Nathaniel that he has to go back to work. If this were a real crisis, the old man would stay on the line, but for him identity has nothing to do with money or with how the world actually works, and that is that.
“Thanks, Pop,” Nathaniel says. He puts down the phone and looks around at the comfortable dinginess of his apartment, now, thanks to the absence of valuables, unburglarizable. Outside the window, a cardinal chirps frantically as if affrighted. Nathaniel would like to snap off his imagination and its multiple narratives, but it’s stuck in the ON position, and if he didn’t live in his imagination half the time, he wouldn’t be himself, and he wouldn’t be bothered by Coolberg. Maybe he wouldn’t be bothered by anything, period. He would live on the Blessed Isles.
He leans forward to gaze out the window. He sees his own reflection in the glass. What good is an identity, anyway? his reflection asks him. For that matter, what good is a reflection? I lived in Wisconsin before I lived in New York, he tells the reflection, these were my parents, I broke my arm when I was twelve and Brian Hennerley tackled me when we were playing touch football, I first kissed a girl when I was fourteen, I remember she was ticklish…the rubble of the personal, the dust motes of the specific. Who cares who you are? the reflection asks, pointing at him. Every identity consists of a pile of moldering personal clichés given sentimental value by the fact that someone owns them. The fallacy of the unique! A rubbish heap of personal data, anybody’s autobiography. You can’t sell it or trade it. Besides, everyone has an autobiography, the principle of inflation thereby causing each one to be worthless.
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