“No,” I said. “We have to do this. Anyway, all the movies have started.”
“What’s the big deal with this party, Benjamin?” she asked me. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her dark glasses, but I knew they were trained on me. She wore a dark blue blouse, and her hair had been pinned back with a rainbow-colored barrette. The fingers of her hands, now on the table, had a long, aristocratic delicacy, but she bit her nails; the tips of her fingers had a raggedy appearance.
“Oh, interesting people will be there,” I said. “Other actors. And literary types, you know, and dancers. They’ll make you laugh.”
“No,” she said. “They’ll make you laugh.” She took a sip of her beer. She lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Dancers can’t converse anyway. They’re all autoerotic. If we go to this, I’m only doing it because of you. I want you to know that.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Listen, could you do me a favor?”
“Anything,” she nodded.
“Well, it’s one of those parties where the guests …”
“What?”
“It’s like this. Those people are clever. You know, it’s one of those uptown crowds. So what I’m asking is … do you think you could be clever tonight, please? As a favor to me? I know you can be like that. You can be funny; I know you, Giulietta. I’ve seen you sparkle. So could you be amusing? That’s really all I ask.”
This was years ago. Men were still asking women—or telling them—how to behave in public. I flinch, now, thinking about that request, but it didn’t seem like much of anything to me back then. Giulietta leaned back and took her hand away from mine. Then she cleared her throat.
“You are so funny.” She wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be evaluating me. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right.” She dug her right index fingernail into the wood of the table, as if making a calculation. “I can be clever if you want me to be.”
After buzzing us up, Freddy Avery met us at the door of his apartment with an expression of jovial melancholy. “Hey hey hey,” he said, ushering us in. “Ah. And this is Giulietta,” he continued, staring at her dark glasses and her rainbow barrette. “Howdy do. You look like that character in the movie where the flowers started singing. Wasn’t that sort of freaky and great?” He didn’t wait for our answer. “It was a special effect. Flowers don’t actually know how to sing. So it was sentimental. Well,” he said, “now that you’re both here, you brave kids should get something to drink. Help yourselves. Welcome, like I said.” Even Freddy’s bad grammar was between quotation marks.
Giulietta drifted away from me, and I found myself near the refrigerator listening to a tall, strikingly attractive brunette. She didn’t introduce herself. With a vaguely French accent, she launched into a little speech. “I have something you must explain,” she said. “I can’t make good sense of who I am now. And so, what am I? First I am a candidate for one me, and then I am another. I am blown about. Just a little leaf—that is my self. What do you think I will be?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I ask, ‘Who am I, Renée?’ I cannot sleep, wondering. Is life like this, in America? Full of such puzzles? Do you believe it is like this?”
I nodded. I said, “That’s a very good accent you have there.” She began to forage around in her purse as if she hadn’t heard me. I hurried toward the living room and found myself in a corner next to another guest, the famous Pulitzer prize–winning poet Burroughs Hammond, who was sitting in the only available chair. Freddy had befriended him, I had heard, at a literary gathering and had taught him how to modulate his voice during readings. At the present moment, Burroughs Hammond was gripping a bottle of ginger ale and was smoking an unfiltered mentholated cigarette. No one seemed to be engaging him in conversation. Apparently, he had intimidated the other guests, all of whom had wandered away from his corner.
I knew who he was. Everyone did. He was built like a linebacker—he had played high-school football in Ohio—but he had a perpetually oversensitive expression on his wide face. “The hothouse flower inside the Mack truck” was one phrase I had heard to describe him. He had survived bouts of alcoholism, two broken marriages, and losing custody of his children, and had finally moved to New York, where he had sobered up. His poems, some of which I knew by heart, typically dealt with the sudden explosion of the inner life in the midst of an almost fatal loneliness. I particularly liked the concluding lines of “Poem with Several Birds,” about a moment of resigned spiritual radiance.
Some god or other must be tracing, now,
its way, this way, and the blossoms
like the god are suspended in midair,
and seeing shivers in the face of all this brilliance.
I had repeated those lines to myself as I waited tables and took orders for salads. The fierce delicacy of Burroughs Hammond’s poetry! On those nights when I had despaired and had waited for a god, any one of them, to arrive, his poetry had kept me sane. So when I spotted him at Freddy Avery’s, I introduced myself and told him that I knew his poems and loved them. Gazing up at me through his thick horn-rim glasses, he asked politely what I did for a living. I said I waited tables, was an unemployed actor, and was working on a screenplay. He asked me what my screenplay was about and what it was called. I told him that it was a horror film and was entitled Planet of Bugs.
My screenplay had little chance of intriguing the poet, and at that moment I remembered something that Lorca had once said to Neruda. I thought it might get Burroughs Hammond’s attention. “ ‘The greatest poet of the age,’ ” I said, “to quote Lorca, ‘is Mickey Mouse.’ So my ambition is to get great poetry up on the screen, just as Walt Disney did. Comic poetry. And horror poetry, too. Horror has a kind of poetry up on the screen. But I think most poets just don’t get it. But you do. I mean, Yeats didn’t understand. He couldn’t even write a single play with actual human beings in it. His Irish peasants—! And T. S. Eliot’s plays! All those Christian zombies. Zombie poetry written for other zombies. They were both such rotten playwrights—they thought they knew the vernacular, but they didn’t. That’s a real failing. Their time is past. You’re a better poet, and when critics in the future start to evaluate—”
“You,” he said. He lifted his right arm and pointed at me. Suddenly I felt that I was in the presence of an Old Testament prophet who wasn’t kidding and had never been kidding about anything. “You are the scum of the earth,” he said calmly. I backed away from him. He continued to point at me. “You are the scum of the earth,” he repeated.
Everyone was looking at him, and when that job had been completed, everyone was looking at me. Some Charles Mingus riffs thudded out of the record player. Then the other guests started laughing at the show of my embarrassment. I glanced around to see if I could detect where Giulietta had gone to, because I needed to make a rapid escape from that party and I needed her to help me demonstrate a certain mindfulness. But she wasn’t anywhere now that I needed her, not in the living room, not in the kitchen, or the hallway, or the bathroom. After searching for her, I descended the stairs from the apartment as quickly as I could and found myself back out on the street.
Now, years later, I no longer remember which one of the nearby subway stops I found that night. I can remember the consoling smell of New York City air, the feeling that perhaps anonymity might provide me with some relief. I shouted at a light pole. I walked a few blocks, brushed against several pedestrians, descended another set of stairs, reached into my pocket, and pulled out a subway token. In my right hand, I discovered that I was still holding on to a plastic cup with beer in it.
Only one other man stood on the subway platform that night. The express came speeding through on the middle tracks. The trains were all spray-painted with graffiti in those days, and they’d rattle into the stations looking like giant multicolored mechanical caterpillars—amusement park rides scrawled over with beautifully creepy hieroglyphs preceded by a tornado-like racket and a blast of salty fetid air.
The other ma
n standing on the platform looked like the winos that Burroughs Hammond had written about in his fragmentary hymns to life following those nights he had spent in the drunk tank. No other life could be as precious to me / as this one, he had written. If only I could experience some kindly feeling for a stranger, I thought, possibly I might find myself redeemed by the fates who were quietly ordering my humiliations, one after the other.
Therefore, I did what you never do on a subway platform. I exchanged a glance with the other man.
He approached me. On his face there appeared for a moment an expression of the deepest lucidity. He raised his eyelids as if flabbergasted by my very existence. I noticed that he was wearing over his torn shirt a leather vest stained with dark red blotches—blood or wine, I suppose now. He wore no socks. For the second time that evening, someone pointed at me. “That’s a beer you have,” he said, his voice burbling up as if through clogged plumbing. “Is there extra?”
I handed over the plastic cup to him. He took a swig. Then, his eyes deep in mad concentration, he yanked down his trousers’ zipper and urinated into the beer. He handed the cup back to me.
I took the cup out of this poor madman’s grasp, put it down on the subway platform, and then I hauled back and slugged him in the face. He fell immediately. My knuckles stung. He began to crawl toward the subway tracks, and I heard distantly the local train rumbling toward the station, approaching us. With the studied calm of an accomplished actor who has had one or two early successes, I left that subway station and ascended the stairs two at a time to the street. Then, conscience-crippled and heartsick, I went back. I couldn’t see the man I had hit. Finally I returned to the street and flagged down a taxi and rode to my apartment.
For the next few days, I checked the newspapers for reports of an accidental death in the subway of a drunk who had crawled into the path of a train, and when I didn’t find any such story, I began to feel as if I had dreamed up the entire evening from start to finish, or, rather, that someone else had dreamed it up for me and put me as the lead actor into it—this cautionary tale whose moral was that I had no gift for the life I’d been leading. I took to bed the way you do when you have to think something out. My identity having overtaken me, I called in sick to the restaurant and didn’t manage to get to an audition I had scheduled. A lethargy thrummed through me, and I dreamed that someone pointed at my body stretched out on the floor and said, “It’s dead.” What frightened me was not my death, but that pronoun. “I” had become an “it.”
There’s no profit in dwelling on the foolishness of one’s youth. Everyone’s past is a mess. And I wouldn’t have thought of my days as an actor if it weren’t for my cousin Brantford’s having told me twenty years later over lunch in an expensive restaurant that he felt as if he had killed someone, and if my cousin and I hadn’t had a kind of solidarity. By that time, Giulietta and I had children of our own, two boys, Elijah and Jacob, and the guttering seediness that was the New York of the 1970s was distant history, and I only came to the city to visit my cousin and my aunt. By then, I was a visitor from Minnesota, where we had moved and where I was a partner in the firm of Wilwersheid and Lampe. I was no longer an inhabitant of New York. I had become a family man and a tourist.
Do I need to prove that I love my wife and children, or that my existence has become terribly precious to me? Once, back then in my twenties, all I wanted to do was to throw my life away. But then, somehow, usually by accident, you experience joy. And the problem with joy is that it binds you to life; it makes you greedy for more happiness. You experience avarice. You hope it will go on forever.
A day or so after having lunch with Brantford, I went up to visit Aunt Margaret. She had started to bend over from the osteoporosis that would cripple her, or maybe it was the calcium-reducing effects of her anti-depressant and the diet of kung pao chicken, vodka, and cigarettes that she lived on. She was terrifyingly lucid, as always. The vodka merely seemed to have sharpened her wits. She was so unblurred, I hoped she wasn’t about to go into one of her tailspins. Copies of Foreign Affairs lay around her apartment near the porcelain figurines. NPR drifted in from a radio on the windowsill. She had been reading Tacitus, she told me. “The Annals of Imperial Rome. Have you ever read it, Benjamin?”
“No,” I said. I sank back on the sofa, irritating one of the cats, who leapt up away from me before taking up a position on the windowsill.
“You should. I can’t read the Latin anymore, but I can read it in English. Frighteningly relevant. During the reign of Tiberius, Sejanus’s daughter is arrested and led away. ‘What did I do? Where are you taking me? I won’t do it again,’ this girl says. My God. Think of all the thousands who have said those very words in this century. I’ve said them myself. I used to say them to my father.”
“Your father?”
“Of course. He could be cruel. He would lead me away, and he punished me. He probably had his reasons. He knew me. Well, I was a terrible girl,” she said dreamily. “I was willful. Always getting into situations. I was … forward. There’s an antiquated adjective. Well. These days, if I were young again, I could come into my own, no one would even be paying the slightest attention to me. I’d go from boy to boy like a bee sampling flowers, but in those days, they called us ‘wild’ and they hid us away. Thank god for progress. Have you seen Brantford, by the way?”
I told her that I had had lunch with him and that he had said that he felt as if he had killed somebody.
“Really. I wonder what he’s thinking. He must be all worn out. Is he still drinking? Did he tell you about his girlfriend? That child of his?”
“What child? No, he didn’t tell me. Who’s this?”
“Funny that he didn’t tell you.” She stood up and went over to a miniature grandfather clock, only eight inches high, on the mantel. “Heavens,” she said, “where are my manners? I should offer you some tea. Or maybe a sandwich.” This customary politeness sounded odd coming from her.
“No, thank you.” I shook my head. “Aunt Margaret, what child are you talking about?”
“It’s not a baby, not yet. Don’t misunderstand me. They haven’t had a baby, those two. But Brantford’s found a girlfriend, and she might as well be a baby, she’s so young. Eighteen years old, for heaven’s sake. He discovered her in a department store, selling clothes behind the counter. Shirts and things. She’s another one of his strays. And of course he doesn’t have a dime to his name anymore, and he takes her everywhere on his credit cards when he’s not living off of her, and he still doesn’t have a clue what to do with himself. Animals all over the place, but no job. He spends all day teaching dogs how to walk and birds how to fly. I suppose it’s my fault. They’ll blame me. They blame me for everything.”
“What’s her name? This girl?” I asked. “He didn’t mention her to me.”
“Camille,” Aunt Margaret told me. “And of course she’s beautiful—they all are, at that age—but so what? A nineteenth-century name and a beautiful face and figure and no personality at all and no money. They think love is everything, and they get sentimental, but love really isn’t much. Just a little girl, this Camille. She likes the animals, of course, but she doesn’t know what she’s getting into with him.” She looked at me slyly. “Do you still envy him? You mustn’t envy or pity him, you know. And how is Giulietta?” Aunt Margaret had never approved of Giulietta and thought my marriage to her had been ill-advised. “And your darling children? Those boys? How are they, Benjamin?”
Aunt Margaret turned out to be wrong about Camille, who was not a sentimentalist after all. I met her for the first time at the memorial service five years after she and my cousin Brantford had become a couple. By then, she and Brantford had had a son, Robert, and my cousin had ended his life by stepping out into an intersection into the path of an oncoming taxi at the corner of Park Avenue and Eighty-second Street. If he couldn’t live in that neighborhood, he could at least die there. He suffered a ruptured spleen, and his heart stopped before they admitted
him to the ER. He had entered that intersection against a red light—it was unclear whether he had been careless or suicidal, but it was midday and my cousin was accustomed to city traffic. Well. You always want to reserve judgment, but the blood analysis showed that he had been sober. I wish he had been drunk. We could have blamed it on that, and it would have been a kind of consolation.
One witness reported that Brantford had rushed onto Park Avenue to rescue a dog that had been running south. Maybe that was it.
In the months before his death, he had found a job working in the produce department at a grocery. When he couldn’t manage the tasks that he considered beneath him—stacking the pears and lining up the tomatoes—he took a position as a clerk behind the counter at a pet food store on Avenue B. A name tag dangled from his shirt. He told me by telephone that he hated that anyone coming into the store could find out his first name and then use it. That offended him. But he loved that store and could have worked there forever if it hadn’t gone out of business. After that, he worked briefly at a collection agency making phone calls to deadbeats. He edited one issue of a humorous Web literary magazine entitled The Potboiler. What Brantford had expected from life and what it had actually given him must have been so distinct and so dissonant that he probably felt his dignity dropping away little by little until he simply wasn’t himself anymore. He didn’t seem to be anybody and he had no resources of humility to turn that nothingness into a refuge. He and Camille lived in a cluttered little walk-up in Brooklyn. I think he must have felt quietly panic-stricken, him and his animals. Time was going to run out on all of them. There would be no more fixes.
I wanted to help him—he was almost a model for me, but not quite—but I didn’t know how to exercise compassion with him, or how to express the pity that Aunt Margaret said I shouldn’t feel. I think my example sometimes goaded him into despair, as did his furred and feathered patients, who couldn’t stand life without him.
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